Skills in the age of AI.

Work changes.

Today’s rituals become tomorrow's relics. Floppy discs evaporate into clouds. Memos morph into instant messages. Offices empty.

What’s next, I wonder?

How about a magical machine that thinks for you??

And in that case, what is left for you to do? If you have a multi-lingual, digital sidekick that can code, pass the bar, ace AP tests, and get into medical school, how do you spend your time? The bottle? Maybe. ChatGPT passed the theory portion of master sommelier exams but still sucks at blind tasting.

AI will rock our world.

Tom Wilson, CEO of Allstate, warns, “AI will rip through this economy like a tsunami.”

Goldman Sachs flags “significant disruption” ahead, particularly in the white-collar sector. AI could impact 300 million full-time jobs. Their report predicts upheaval: two-thirds of jobs are open to some degree of AI automation, while generative AI could substitute up to a quarter of our current work.?

Disruptive technologies change lives, habits, and skills.

It’s happened to you before.

When the family went to Disney World, a five-minute briefing on what to do when lost would occur next to the Mickey statue. “If we get separated, come back to Mickey. We will find you.” I am sure that speech doesn’t happen anymore. Because: cellphones.

Similarly, the lost skill of map reading, thank you, GPS.?

Hello, spellcheck, calculators, and social media. Goodbye, spelling, mental arithmetic, and social skills. Memory? —I think I outsourced that to Google a while ago. I’m a little fuzzy, TBH.

Perhaps technology’s greatest impact is not changing what we do; but changing what we spend our time doing.?

GPS allowed us to adventure more and get lost less. We still go places. We travel more. Maybe, as a society, we don’t spell as well, but the final product is more polished when we want it to be.?

We absorb technology, free up mental cycles, and do other things.

So, what do you do when faced with a humanity-altering technology?

I put the question of AI to Michael Brown. He is the VP of Global Talent Attraction for Snyk, a cloud-based developer security company that is knee-deep in this technology.

“In my world, AI tools have been around for longer than people realize. IBM has been using it to weed through resumes. We use it for everything from auto-scheduling to predictive modeling.”??

Despite this, Brown sees AI in its infancy and is working to get others on board. “It’s here. Some people got on the train early and are very comfortable with it. I’m trying to get others to use it... and demystify it for people.”

Based on conversations with Brown and others—and our own experiences at fassforward building generative AI into our work, I believe six core “skills” will help you thrive in the AI Tsunami.

1. Critical and strategic thinking.
2. Experience.
3. Communication.
4. Leadership.
5. Curiosity.
6. Prompt engineering.

Critical and strategic thinking.

Questioning is the path to progress.

In an AI-assisted future, the ability to ask smart questions—critical and strategic thinking—will be paramount. Those critical and strategic thinking skills contextualize the human-AI conversation with larger business goals.

Brian Danfield is Verizon’s Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics. His observation rings true: “Prompt engineering is cool and interesting, but you need to be good at knowing how to ask the right question. That’s always been important...? in the new world, it will be required.”

AI will give you smart, confident answers to your questions. But it will also go off the rails; when it does, it’s called hallucination. A chatbot confidently asserts that the Golden Gate Bridge was transported to Egypt or cites bogus case law. Leading researchers believe it’s not something that can be removed from an AI’s DNA. LLMs “do and will hallucinate.”?

Tech gets better; hallucinations reduce, but they will always be there.

Dealing with this is the other side of critical thinking, not just in asking the right questions of your AI partner, but a “spidey sense” that warns you of an answer more truthier than true.

Experience.

Fear not; your years haven’t been wasted. Experience will still count.

Ask AI to generate a list of OKRs for your business, and it will. Ask it to give you a compelling call to action for your sales pitch. It will.

But are they any good, or are they motherhood and apple pie?

Experience, says Martha Delehanty, Chief People Officer of Commvault, is key. “It’s diverse experience that counts. That lived experience informs what you know, and how to ask the right questions but, most importantly, the context for the answer. ”

AI will provide overly confident and startlingly irrelevant responses. What do we need? Wisdom. Expertise. Judgment. Savvy. Experienced professionals with broad multi-disciplinary backgrounds who use their contextual knowledge to work past the superfluous and mine accurate, applicable answers.?

Communication.

Early studies show that AI-assisted work significantly increases speed, task completion, and quality. If this holds true and becomes the norm, the overall volume and pace of work will inexorably increase.?

It’s up to us to steer that work.

The human-to-human interaction: decision-making, alignment, and coordination that seamlessly orchestrates people. This new era spotlights the art of communication. It's not just about talking; it's about cutting through the noise with clarity and impact. Think of it as storytelling with purpose—where data literacy meets the power to persuade and connect with diverse audiences.

“I think it’s a very specific kind of communication skill—the ability to be simple, clear, and direct.” according to Sean Barry, Allstate's Vice President of Talent Acquisition.

But there’s more to managing the rhythm of business.?

The nuances of human interaction—reading between the lines, emotional intelligence, political astuteness—are the unsung heroes of the workplace. They shape the 'how' and 'when' of our conversations. The hidden skills of knowing when to speak up, when to stop talking, and understanding subtext.? Throw gravitas into that cocktail and mix in that special something we call 'executive presence.'?

These uniquely human skills are your ticket to standing out in an AI-dominated future.

Leadership.

Leadership skills are it.?

In a rapid-paced AI-augmented workplace, leaders face old and new challenges. They must inspire, manage, and motivate increasingly diverse and distributed teams. Teams that are navigating massive uncertainty and upheaval with process and technological change.?

Old leadership standards wither. Manual oversight of routine tasks becomes less important. Command and control (call it micromanagement) no longer works. Silos and fiefdoms become difficult to patrol in an interconnected, AI-driven workplace.

A human-AI workplace will require human-AI leadership. This includes a baseline level of literacy: understanding emerging AI capabilities and limits and navigating the ethical challenges the technology represents.

More important is flexibility and agility.?

Future leaders will encourage continuous learning, set the tone, and connect the dots for others. AI will give us back time, which leaders can redirect to more high-value work. Core work will change, and Leaders will focus on critical work. They will spend time clarifying the mission, setting standards, and ensuring mutual understanding of the work at hand.

This point is echoed by Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President, Modern Work & Business Applications at Microsoft. “As leaders, we have this awesome responsibility to make sure that our people are taking those time savings [gained through the use of AI] and applying them to the highest value work. The work that energizes our people, the work that really pushes the business forward.”

Curiosity.

This cat-killer, technically, isn't a skill; it’s a state of being.?

AI is an infant in the workplace. It needs innovation, exploration, and experimentation to feed its growth. Learning, stimulating AI’s use, encouraging creative problem-solving, and the development of novel applications.?

Million-dollar moonshots and individuals urged to explore.?

Howard Waterman serves on the board of advisors at AI2030, a global think tank on influencing the ethical and responsible progression of AI development and adoption.

“The curious will ask: How do we harness the transformative power of AI and responsive AI tools to accelerate innovation on a global scale?... The key will be educating ourselves on what is possible.”

This is discovery through a peculiar amalgam of curiosity and laziness. Curiosity brings a sense of wonder. The urge to learn and know. The impulse to turn over another rock or ask another question.? Laziness keeps curiosity grounded and out of the ivory tower. It’s knowing the long way around and looking for a shortcut. It’s making sure that the solution works and makes things easier or better.

Encouraging curiosity is a cure-all for cultures. It embraces change. It counters resistance, inertia, and fear of AI.

Prompt Engineering.

I refer to prompt engineering in the broadest sense—the technical ability to extract the best out of the AI tools at your disposal.?

This is the new power skill, especially with the advent of language models like GPT-4. Being adept at prompt engineering—crafting queries and instructions that generate the most useful and accurate responses from AI—is of a similar quality to writing great code, being a wiz with Excel, or putting together great PowerPoint. It will be a typical part of most professionals' day, and in any organization, each will have a varying ability to do it well.

The good news: You can learn prompt engineering in a weekend.

The bad news: the field can change over a weekend.

My bet is that prompt engineering will get simpler and more specialized over time. This has happened before. In 1995, websites were hand-coded in BBedit. Today, no-code, AI-powered tools like WebFlow and SquareSpace can produce high-grade websites in minutes. But what was one job—the now-defunct Webmaster—has spawned a host of specialties—SEO, UX, Analytics, Security, Social Media, and Content Management. I suspect prompt engineering will go the same way.

Now is the time to board that particular train.

...

If you have read this far... Thank you.

My New Year’s resolution is to grow the readership of this newsletter. Comment with your thoughts on this article and ideas on what you would like to see in future episodes; share the article with colleagues, and if you haven’t yet, please subscribe.

...

Gavin.

...

If you want to keep up on #leadership #storytelling and the #futureofwork, sign up for the bi-weekly newsletter, Forward Thinking.

Forward Thinking is regularly featured on LinkedIn's "Newsletters to Explore."

and "top 10 highlights."

#linkedin #newsletters https://lnkd.in/dR6Wc8xb

...

Shameless plug.

If you'd like to find out more about fassforward's work, helping organizations and teams transform through #leadership and #storytelling, visit fassforward.com

...

Shout out.

The incomparable Eugene Yoon does many of the illustrations for this newsletter and all the ones in this article. She is amazing.

...

Worth the time.

Martha Delehanty 's article on AI: An employer’s friend or enemy? (HR Executive)

Dina Genkina : AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead > Long live AI prompt engineering (IEEE Spectrum)

My previous articles on AI: AI 101, Parsnips, explanations, and AI and Inputs, outputs, and AI prompt engineering.