Investing in people for an AI-enabled future

At Maximus, our mission has always been to move people forward. That starts at home with our own employees, on our own teams, in our own hallways. Over the past two years, we've lived that commitment by investing in our people as part of our efforts to upskill them for the future of work.

Every organization I talk to is wrestling with a version of the same question: Do we invest in AI or in our people? I don’t think that’s the right question. It’s not an either-or. The real question is how you help people to grow alongside the technology instead of getting left behind it.

Our upskilling journey comes as technological advancements in artificial intelligence are rapidly reshaping the workforce. The organizations that will thrive are the ones that bring their people along for the journey, not for those that leave them behind. 

With that thought in mind, we didn't wait for AI to arrive and disrupt us. Instead, we leaned in and tried to get ahead of it through research, experimentation, and training. Turning AI's arrival into a real, tangible investment in the growth and futures of our employees.

We didn’t stop at technology. We looked at our own Human Resources function and asked whether it was structured to actually support this. It wasn’t, at least not fully. So we brought our Talent Acquisition team and our Learning and Organizational Development team together into one Total Talent Management organization. The old model treated “hiring someone” and “developing someone” as two separate jobs. We don’t believe that anymore. Whether someone is walking in the door for the first time or has been here for ten years and is ready for something new, it’s the same career journey, and we need to operate that way, too.

When employees grow, customers feel it. Government agencies and the citizens we serve don’t benefit from a workforce that’s stagnant; they benefit from one that’s building new skills in real time and delivering innovative solutions. Investing in our people isn’t separate from our mission; it is our mission.

Of course, none of this works if it’s a one-time event. No one’s career gets fixed by a single workshop or an AI training. So, we build this to be ongoing, not occasional. For example, we regularly review and improve our tuition reimbursement program so people can keep pursuing degrees and certifications that matter where they are headed. We built leadership training at every level of the company because a platform like Eightfold only works if managers champion their teams. And we’ve put together 55 learning playlists, mapped to the skills people need now and those they need next.

We’re not done. Frankly, we’re just getting started. I don’t say that as a platitude; I say it because AI is going to keep changing what “the future of work” even means, and we have to keep adapting alongside it.

What tells me we’re on the right track are the results from our annual Global Employee Engagement Survey. Our favorability index, which measures employee belonging, motivation, and intention to stay with the company for at least another year, reached 79% in 2025. That’s not a one-year spike. It’s the result of steady gains over several years and is a full nine points higher than a Professional Services Benchmark.

Everything that we’ve done or are doing isn’t because AI is the topic of the moment. It’s who we’ve tried to be all along; we’re just applying it to a new set of tools. The companies that will succeed over the next decade won’t be the ones that adopted AI the fastest. They will be the ones who made sure their people were ready to grow with it.