The Most Valuable Skills In an AI Era
What skills will remain most relevant in the future if AI threatens human jobs?
Today, I try to answer an important question: Given AI's potential to take jobs, what skills will be most relevant in the future job market?
In this essay, I argue that instead of trying to predict what jobs remain in a future with AI dominating the workplace, we should focus on cultivating timeless skills—thinking, communicating, leading, and authenticity—which will make you a powerhouse no matter what you do, where you go, or how you apply it.
Over the past three years, I have thought a fair bit about AI's potential impact on the job market.
I have written about:
Why I think AI taking our current 'job' paradigm could actually be a good thing
How we can create a cryptographic distribution system where AI income is distributed to everyone
How AI may affect the product pipeline and organizations generally
Recent releases—OpenAI-03-mini and the surprising DeepSeek R1 open-source reasoning model—provoked a return to evaluating how AI will impact our jobs. Thinking models demonstrate remarkable reasoning, mathematics, and coding capabilities1. The reveal of Deep Research and OpenAI Operators highlights the incoming agents that utilize these underlying models.
The accelerated growth of the model’s sophistication and implementation surfaces many questions about what jobs will remain. Trying to predict what jobs will remain—and betting your future on that guess—is a less-than-optimal solution.
It’s too hard to say.
I think that there are certain jobs that may stay around longer (like physical labor); however, all jobs are thrown into question in an AGI-future. Therefore, I think that gaining a specific skill set and being adaptable to change, is the best way forward. This way, regardless of what job route you take, you’ll be able to pivot as necessary if needed.
So, I'm not going to say, "Study this in school" or "Apply for this job" simply because I'm not sure what jobs will still exist in the job market in 10-15 years. I think the future job market will look a lot different than it does today. Maybe jobs are more 'human,' emphasizing connection and shared growth. However, speculating on this front is quite tricky.
Regardless of what jobs remain or emerge, one must ask oneself: What skills can I foster to ensure I'm relevant regardless of what's available?
That's the right question.
Whatever jobs exist in the future, there are fundamental skills that transcend nearly all jobs, which I believe to be indispensable and carry immense value.
Hone three skills and one virtue, and all else will fall into place: become an authentic thinker, communicator, and leader.
I will break down each by starting with the foundation that the rest will be built on—thinking.
Thinking
Thinking2 is the act of using one's mind to produce opinions and beliefs.
'Thinking' is an indispensable human trait. In fact, thinking seems core to consciousness. Even if AI can think faster and better than you, it's a fundamental muscle you can apply to anything gripping your interest. It allows you to expand awareness—for yourself and others—around a specific aspect of reality.
The process briefly and simply is something like:
Notice what interests you.
Uncover all associations emerging around specific ideas in those interest areas.
Determine what is right or wrong. What's worthy of integrating, what's better left behind.
Take that information and integrate it into your being, further expanding your scope of consciousness—making you more well-rounded, integrated, and whole.
Great thinkers can take any idea, question, or problem and bring forth a higher resolution breadth and depth of perspective around the given topic, increasing the progress toward an objective set out in relation to the original idea, question, or problem.
Take this essay, for example. I sat down with the question at the forefront: "What skill will remain most relevant in the future if AI threatens human jobs?" I leveraged my individual consciousness, with a target of responding to the question posed, leveraging everything available to me: previous knowledge, experiences, interests, intuitions, and emerging thought patterns from the intersection of each. Maybe I get feedback, and that feedback tests the hypotheses put forth, allowing me to think further and continue to expand my understanding of the present and ever-evolving world in which we find ourselves.
Though, "Amazing Thinker," likely won't play too well with prospective employers on a resume (it would with me).
So, how is thinking manifested practically?
Thinking is done through writing and speaking.
When you write, you are engaged with your thoughts.
The best writing is an exploration of ideas on the border of what's known and unknown; great thinkers come to the page with some question, prompt, or general intrigue, and typically have some information—anywhere from experience to academic research—and explore what they know at the border of what they don't.
After all your thoughts are on a page, you can now uncover any potential inadequacies, faulty presumptions, irrational thought patterns, and incorrect information. It allows deconstruction, review, and internal debate about your own views, strengthening your thoughts and making you a better thinker on the topic at hand and generally speaking insofar as you update your internal model of thinking as you refine your ideas. You can step back and ask, “Do I really think that? Is that true?” Which provokes further investigation and enhances your thoughts. One of the many reasons I love writing.
Speaking is engaging with a similar process above but in spoken format. A particularly great thing about speaking is having conversations with others—a great enhancement to the thinking process.
If both are honest parties, aimed at the truth above all, the individuals involved engage with one another’s thoughts, both with their own version of what they approximate as truth for a given idea—even if only in the smallest of ways. This will help you view the world in some way previously not conceptualized—further strengthening your thoughts on an idea.
This isn’t about winning or being right. This is about finding where you are incorrect or misunderstand what is known and not known about a given idea. Other honest people help tether us more deeply to truth.
On the whole, thinking is not only writing and speaking to form higher resolution depth and breadth around a given idea, but it is also to consume new sources of information to battle test and improve your formulations.
How are these skills developed? Read books, write about things that interest you, and have conversations about shared interests with friends and family.
How does this remain relevant in the face of AI? No matter what jobs disappear and what new ones emerge, you will always be an asset to yourself, your family, and any potential employer if you are a strong thinker. Problem-solving is the process of thinking about a problem to uncover potential solutions. Become a good problem solver, and you'll be a blessing everywhere you go.
The tangible skills here are writing and speaking, which are the two primary ways we think.
Thinking forms the foundational skill, but to effectively utilize your thoughts, you must be able to articulate and act on the ideas. I will tackle these next two skills together: communicating and leading.
Communicating and Leading
Communicating is the act of exchanging information. It's the ability to listen to and provide information to another person or a group of people.
Being a good communicator is closely linked to thinking.
Once you become great at formulating thoughts, you now need to package those thoughts and effectively share them.
Being a good communicator is, in effect, a building block upon thinking. If you learn to write well, you are learning to put strings of words together that form interesting thought patterns about a given topic, which, when communicated well, is likely to interest groups of people who also think about similar ideas or are interested in similar ideas. When you communicate well via spoken word, you increase the probability that people will want to listen to you and engage in dialogue, as you will not only have interesting ideas but will have clear speech patterns that make it enjoyable and meaningful to engage with.
I chose to combine communicating and leading because of a piece I wrote before called Polished Rocks. The thesis of the piece was that as AI increasingly becomes more intelligent and capable of filling human job roles, the humans that remain will be the individuals who can clearly communicate what they need an AI to do. Further, being able to lead with direction and conviction toward your vision of the future becomes important as we all increasingly have 24/7 access to genius AI computer systems on an unimaginable magnitude.
Leading an AI will likely look different than leading a human, but the core remains: drive toward a 'why' you believe in, rely on the people you have working for you to help drive your why, and course-correct as you learn from error and re-evaluate and form new versions of the big picture.
If you think and communicate well, being able to lead is an emotional and psychological development in being able to confidently take those thoughts, communicate them, be receptive to feedback that comes to you, and create a space for the AI and human organization to deliver on your vision, as Simon Sinek put it, "Leadership requires two things: a vision of the world that does not yet exist and the ability to communicate it."
Everyone has access to immensely intelligent employees and will increasingly have this available to them. If you can develop a vision of the world by thinking, and learn to communicate toward that vision, you’ll be unstoppable in the workplace when you have AI at your ready all the time.
Simply:
1. Think through your ideas by writing and speaking.
2. Communicate those ideas with spoken and written words, battle testing and improving your thoughts.
3. Lead toward a vision of your future, continually iterating your ideas by going back to steps 1 and 2.
These three skills give someone an excellent base that—AI aside—will make them a more formidable and enjoyable person to be around.
To stand out among the other great thinkers, communicators and leaders, there is one virtue that will make you irreplaceable, by definition: Authenticity
Authenticity
I've made the technical case for why authenticity will keep you relevant in an AI-dominated future (read here). Simply put, if Large Language Models are sophisticated machines with the ability to predict with a high probability of likelihood the next word in a sequence of words based on the training data and inputs, then LLMs will outcompete us to the extent that our thoughts and utterances mimic the thoughts of others.
Authentic thought patterns become paramount to set yourself apart from AI machines.
When humans are prompted with words, we respond with a sequence of words, as do LLMs. An inauthentic person might respond with something they've heard before on the news, something a friend told them once, or something they read before. An authentic person will say what they think and why, or more so, respond with the same responses but add their thoughts on top of that person's thoughts.
Here’s a good example:
If I asked, "What do you think about the current president of the United States?"
Someone inauthentic would likely parrot a pattern of ideas they've heard about him, for or against. This can be technically teased out as the definition of ideology, tangentially explored in Aligning AI With God.
"Not my president!" "He's Hitler!" "The World's Burning!!"
Or
"He's going to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" "He speaks the truth!" "Our Savior!" (Okay, I haven't heard anyone say that last one, but I think that drives the point home).
Someone authentic would have formed thoughts about him that are unique, exemplifying a pattern of thought related to their interests, experiences, and battle-tested thoughts.
Or maybe they chose to ignore and avoid the political cycle, and they might just say that.
An authentic thought would be to grab the thought of you and run with it, challenge it by writing, battle test it by speaking with people and being open-minded to their ideas (if they're also an honest party), and if it's something that you are deeply interested in and become passionate about, you can choose to lead people toward some shared vision of the future based on your thoughts (I guess in this case it would be, to become president? Look at you go).
This isn’t to say, “Don’t rely on past human ideas.” You absolutely should rely on past ingenuity. In fact, for things that don’t interest you, I would recommend stopping at previous human ingenuity to maximize your cognitive capacity toward developing thoughts on ideas that grip you.
Let's say you need to do your taxes; you don't need to go down the rabbit hole and explore everything about taxes (especially if you’re like me and are exhausted just by the thought of having to file my taxes). You can rely on what’s been established to optimize time spent on meaningful endeavors.
This frees up time to discover and develop authentic thoughts and interests.
How does one develop authenticity? Well, that's a piece in and of itself, which I have briefly touched on before.😊
In observation of the skills made available by artificial intelligence, as well as the approach companies like Klarna have taken to not hiring any more humans but to implement AI to improve the workforce, demonstrate that there is, at a minimum, some impact on the workforce. Even if you disagree that AI will take jobs and that, in the long-term, we will navigate through the AI-workplace revolution, the short-term will still cause pain and requires navigation.
It's not clear when and if AI start to materially take over human placements in the job market.
It's hard to say what kind of jobs they will take.
While there are certainly avenues of exploration in terms of specific jobs that won't be impacted by AI, I think the safest route is to develop the skills that remain applicable across every domain of interest.
Why is this the safest route?
Well, because if every single job we have currently conceptualized is replaced by AI, domain-specialized skills will become less sought after.
What will always remain relevant are the skills I've laid out here because even in a future where none of the current jobs exist, you will be someone who people can rely on for ideas, to communicate those ideas, and to lead them through the straight and narrow path into the future, and doing all of that in a way that cannot be mimicked by anyone because it's authentically you.
If these insights resonate with you, subscribe for more essays that blend technology, culture, and introspection.
What skills do you think will remain relevant in an AI-dominated future? What do you think about my hypothesis?
Until next time,
Take care of yourself, everyone!
Dom
Two great pieces to explain OpenAI's 03 and DeepSeek’s R1 by the Algorithmic Bridge.
I use the word thinking throughout and see it quite synonymously with what is referred to as "critical thinking." Critical thinking is iterative thought, the ability to iterate on your own thoughts by battle-testing and asking questions about your own thoughts. I think that a mere 'thought' is mostly useless if not undergone with a critical eye. Therefore, when I refer to thinking, I am using what most would call critical thinking, which, to me, is what thinking is and is the valuable sense of the trait.