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Four Human Skills Worth Keeping in Your AI Workflow

A thought experiment for recognising the value of your skills, and four responsibilities to keep human when AI does more of the work.

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In one line

Your existing skills have value even when you struggle to name them

Read time

2 min

Focus

AI

Operations

Imagine I take all your skills and put them in a little box. Fishing, fixing cars, management, whatever you're good at. Gone.

How much would you pay me to get them back?

I use this thought experiment because it's easy to say, “I don't have any skills. I don't know what sets me apart.” Having to put a price on getting them back makes that answer harder to believe. You have things people appreciate and are willing to pay for, even if you've stopped noticing them yourself.

If you're worried about AI replacing your work, start there. Then look at four parts of the work I think humans still need to drive.

Judgment

AI can get close to something you're good at. That doesn't remove your responsibility to judge what it's doing.

Knowing the work gives you a basis for deciding whether an answer makes sense. Keep that judgment involved when AI carries out a task. Producing an answer and understanding whether it's the right one are different responsibilities.

Ownership

Someone has to take the work to the finish line.

AI tasks have to be processed or scheduled in some way. A human still needs to drive that arrangement and take responsibility for the result. When a process runs, ownership shouldn't disappear into the software.

Communication

AI can be very communicative. It can also sound like a business executive stuffing too many keywords into a sentence.

The particular way you say something has value. Your phrasing, your mistakes, the bits that don't sound like polished corporate copy: those are part of how you communicate. I think they'll continue to matter as AI takes on more of the writing.

Follow-through

AI can execute a process efficiently. A project also involves calling people, doing tasks in the right sequence and following through on what needs to happen next.

Keep a person responsible for that follow-through. A completed process doesn't tell you that someone has taken ownership of the whole project.

Go back to the little box. Put a value on the skills you'd want returned, then consider where your judgment, ownership, communication and follow-through belong in the work you're giving to AI.

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