Which skills survive the AI era? Mostly human ones, says new jobs report
Generative AI has gone from novelty to daily tool in under three years, and business commentator Nicole Wills argues the bigger challenge is psychological, not technical. Drawing on Reid Hoffman, Alex Hormozi and the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs report, she notes five of the seven most future-proof skills are human ones: emotional intelligence, leadership, creative and analytical thinking, and talent management. Wills warns that fear, not the technology itself, is what paralyses organisations, and urges leaders to "teach, not terrorise."
By Nicole wills
Speed, resistance, new currencies and opportunities
Humans naturally resist change, it makes us feel unsafe and vulnerable. The pace of the AI and digital revolution is making us particularly wobbly.
Change always begins with initial resistance and then adoption, The Luddites, Taxi Drivers, Kodak.
The typewriter was met with an uproar about the “lost art of penmanship”. It took nearly 80 years before it was replaced by PCs. And, when the PC was introduced, typists had to learn “word processing skills”.
Some jobs were lost. And new ones were created: IT support, network admin, software trainers
Each advancement happens more quickly. The birth of the internet, the first PCs with dial-up modems, the reinvention of business models, cloud computing, SaaS and AI.
Here’s how fast things move now:
Typewriter - PC: 120 years
Dial-up - Wi-Fi: 15 years
ChatGPT - Everyday AI: ChatGPT was launched to the public in November 2022. In under 3 years - this is what we can do with Generative AI
Write books, emails, business plans (ChatGPT, Claude)
Create images from a sentence (Midjourney, DALL·E)
Generate videos from text (Runway, Sora)
Clone voices and faces (HeyGen, ElevenLabs)
Use mini task-specific agents (Auto-GPT)
Search smarter, beyond Google (Perplexity, Gemini)
Use AI inside Word and Excel (Microsoft Copilot)
Design like pros — no skills needed (Canva, Adobe Firefly)
Try AI devices that could replace smartphones (Humane AI Pin, Rabbit R1)
Learn with AI tutors personalised to each child
To be honest, I find this list quite intimidating and I inhabit this world. Yes, some jobs will be replaced and automated, but there will also be many jobs created by AI and digital opportunities.
A great example, cited by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) in a McKinsey video series, is the accounting profession. For many years, they had used manual journals and ledgers. When excel spreadsheets became an everyday thing, they feared that their skills were irrelevant. They learned the technology and benefits of automating, upskilled and became more valuable.
I’m not trivialising the human impact of the high-speed AI train. I’m suggesting that addressing psychological needs are equally as important as functional training and learning the tools.
I recently did a series of polls on LinkedIn to test how people feel about AI.
I’m suggesting that great leaders are clear about what cannot be changed or controlled. They lead with compassion and insight by reframing progress as a positive opportunity.
My Mantra: Don’t Terrorise. Teach.
Humans are still crucial
Every business in the world will be disrupted by AI – and that also means that every single employee has the potential to become more efficient and effective.
AI+Human is not about one or the other. AI provides faster validation and crucial data analysis, customer insight and content. But it will not quantify, understand or articulate the nuance in human behaviour and psychology behind decision making and measuring customer experience.
p>Leaders will still need to demonstrate human judgement, intuition, strategic courage, mentorship and communication skills. Alex Hormozi, an American entrepreneur, investor and author who scaled four companies to $120 million, distils success down to universal value. “The way to make more money is to solve bigger problems for more people. This is what the Industrial Revolution did at its advent.”
All businesses exist to solve problems, now the tools and scale are different.
Amongst the most valuable skills for future proofing your career are: emotional intelligence, talent management, AI mastery, creative thinking, analytical thinking, prompt engineering and leadership & social influence. Five out of these seven require human qualities.
Interestingly, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report for 2025, lists the following as jobs for which demand is also rising; farm workers, delivery services, building trade workers, food related trade workers, nursing and social workers.
Societal evolution
Baby boomers, the wealthiest generation so far: They had a fantastic formula. Get a good education. Great job. Benefits and holidays. For about 45 years. The gold watch, then a magical retirement on cruise ships.
Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) are the first generation poorer than their parents.
What was true then was that formal education was the key to success and determined the value of your time for which you exchanged money.
Now, the currency is time and attention, for which you exchange data and your intellectual property. Building and monetising attention from your audience becomes wealth creation.
So much of this points to an exciting future full of opportunities, but the education system still teaches the model of exchanging time for money. How do we prepare our kids for this future?
I asked my son’s school to provide details of how they include (or propose to include) teaching AI skills in their curriculum. It’s not an inexpensive private school. I was told “the department is very slow, but they’re introducing robotics in the next three years.” I then asked my son about his “computer studies” to which he answered, we are learning “Word and PowerPoint”. I’m gasping for breath. My 80-year old mother knew how to use those, and she died two years ago.
Maybe it’s up to us, as parents, to show our kids that knowledge is ubiquitous and mostly free – and their opportunities are endless. We have instant access to the smartest minds in the world.
Our kids are already digital natives but need to learn the technologies that now create wealth and success beyond Tik Tok, Roblox and Minecraft (is that still a thing?).
How do we invest? Codie Sanchez is the founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking, a financial advice business with over 2.5 million subscribers. Her advice: buy a baby boomer business – the less glamorous, the better. The opportunity is in digitising traditional businesses and industries. She also advises against buying property.
I’ll leave that one for the economists to answer? Entrepreneurs like Dan Martell, Alex Hormozi and Daniel Priestly say that the next three years provide the biggest opportunities for entrepreneurs and businesses to scale. There are so many business problems not yet identified which can be solved with software solutions.
Daniel Priestly, UK entrepreneur, posits that, “Wealth inequality is because of technology and technology adoption.” What we call the “digital divide” is a big threat to growth in developing countries. The faster the developing world gets access to digital technology and broadband internet the faster the likelihood of poverty alleviation. Developing countries could follow the trend seen in the Philippines
Scarcity in the industrial economy – technical skills and abundance of unskilled labour.
Scarcity in the digital economy – an abundance of information and scarcity of attention, trust, expertise and technical skills. Gary Vaynerchuk, American entrepreneur and Chairman of VaynerX says, “Attention is the only asset that leads to action. There’s nothing that happens on earth that doesn’t start with attention. You can’t just be good at one thing anymore; you have to be good at communicating it.”
He adds, “Every brand is a media company now – and so is every person.”
Mo Gawdat, former head of GoogleX says, “Is the real threat AI the technology – or the humans behind it?” In a recent episode of Digital Disruption, Gawdat suggests that the danger lies less in AI itself and more in how humans deploy it - driven by capitalism, greed, and power.
What I have learnt
New skills matter, we need to learn, every day. But, do not panic.
Anyone who says “I know AI” is wrong. Accept that we will never keep up with the pace of evolving technology. Choose what to learn and get good at that. Then choose the next thing.
Read more:
How to approach my business with a global view and seek global problems that can be solved from anywhere in the world. AI will help me multiply output, collaborating with human insight is the authenticity.
The types of people I hire, and how it’s non-negotiable to manage the psychological factors around change, empathy, ethics and interpersonal intelligence.
Most importantly, our kids’ education. How to give them the best possible advantage.
The economics of abundance is real. We must democratise access to tools and training
What I find fascinating, though, is that very few “thought leaders” are talking about the emotional and psychological impact of these changes, and their pace. It feels like we are solving half a problem.
My last thought: It seems to me that the most important skill we need to develop is a GEQ. A Giant Emotional Quotient.
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