Staying current in a world that’s rapidly evolving isn’t easy. Just ask Google Cloud’s chief technology officer, Will Grannis, who says he’s been at it for a few decades.
Keeping up with the times amid the AI revolution doesn’t mean ditching what you’ve learned in the past, though. Grannis said a lot of the “core pillars” that prior generations learned are still relevant, even if the modality has shifted.
“You still have to understand, you know, how computers work, how data stores work,” the Google Cloud CTO told Business Insider in an interview. “Because that context will allow you to think about how you design something for efficiency and value.”
Grannis said that a traditional computer science degree or coding program is still useful, and job seekers should “lean into the education,” because relevant fundamentals remain.
The CTO’s comments come as once-stable career paths like software engineering have faced a reckoning in the wake of the AI revolution. AI tools like Copilot and Codex are now automating core parts of the job, spurring debate on whether skills like coding are still essential.
Holding onto the fundamentals doesn’t mean doing everything old school, though.
While Grannis said job seekers in the tech space should still be learning skills like coding, they should also be using modern tools to keep up with where the world is shifting toward. The tech exec said that job seekers should look “beyond the formal curriculum” and spend some time learning new tools and systems available.
“That’s what I’ve been doing my entire career,” Grannis, who studied at West Point and started his career as an Army captain, told BI. He said formal education wouldn’t have been enough for him to stay current with industry changes.
As an example, Grannis said he’s “enforcing” his global team to engage in “vibe coding” at a coming hackathon.
“We’re going to use AI to just generate code, to modify it, to steer it, to refine it,” Grannis said.
The CTO said that job seekers shouldn’t just get good at one part of the tool, like creating prompts. While Grannis said prompt engineering is important to learn, some might argue that it’s become boilerplate code that you can copy and paste. However, the AI revolution is moving toward agentic AI, and the data, tools, and systems that multi-agent systems need to function are also important to understand, Grannis said.
“You’re moving from like in the old days, we had to think about it at the application layer and just kind of stop there,” Grannis said.
Now, we’re entering the era of “context engineering,” he said. “So it’s not just about prompts, but what data, what tools, what systems does your AI, does your multi-agent system need in order to function correctly?”
That means job seekers need to be up to speed on context engineering and understand the full scope of the systems they work with.
The Google Cloud CTO’s advice echoes that of some other tech executives.
Google’s head of Research previously said that the basics are more important than ever in the age of AI because of the opportunity to build upon those foundational skills. Cisco EVP and chief customer experience officer told BI that traditional coding is still important to learn because it provides job seekers with “foundational elements that help train” for problem solving.
