5 Human Skills AI Makes More Valuable and How to Build Them

Nate B. Jones (0:00)

You've been sold this picture on where AI is going, and the tide coming in, and every few months, the water takes another one of your skills off the beach, and things are sort of doom-filled. I think that picture is wrong, and I have receipts. It is tempting to say that the only people that can make AI product that matters are people who are geniuses and people who are on super teams. And that is the usual story we hear about Alexander Wang, Nat Friedman, and the team at Muse. But I'm here to tell you that the skills that they use to build Muse are absolutely skills that one, they talk about publicly, and two, skills that I have talked about in this video channel for the last year, and they are learnable and practicable by you. And I know that because I've had conversations with hundreds of you, and I've seen the skills in practice. And so we are going to talk about five skills that have increased in leverage in the age of AI in the last year, even as AI has gotten so much more capable. That's the opposite of the story that you're hearing. If you plan next year off of the I'm losing skills story, you're betting on the wrong horse. So let's fix that. If you're making plans for 2027, I would take another look at the projects you've already ruled out. The service you couldn't launch without hiring, the problem your team understood but never had time to fix, the idea that needed a technical person you couldn't afford, because those decisions were based on what the work required then. And a lot of those requirements have changed with AI, right? That's what we talk about on this channel. My bet for 2027 is that more of us will be able to carry a whole piece of work that used to require a bunch of people's help. And that means that we need to develop the skills that allow us to exercise that degree of practical power. I'm going to give you five takeaways, one for each skill, taste, agency, focus, resourcefulness, and follow through. For each, we'll connect what this year has taught us to something you can work on for the next year, and by the end, you're going to have a way to decide which of the projects that have been sitting in your backlog deserve a second look and what it would take to make something really useful. So take away one, taste. It gets defined away a lot, but it matters a ton. Taste is acting on something you care about. And by the way, not many people define it that way, right? A lot of people say it's the ability to recognize what good work looks like, what a situation calls for. And I think that's true, but there's more to it than that. When I wrote about taste in September of last year, one of the things I emphasized was that people early in their careers can have exceptional taste in a particular area.

They've been paying close attention because they're passionate. They've tried things, they've compared them, and they've developed a sense of what good looks like. Along the way, since then, I've met a lot of those people. Years of broad experience don't automatically mean you have good taste.

Last November, I also wrote about judgment, which I'm including with taste here. That included defending what you de-prioritize, deciding which actions ought to come first. This year, the opportunity to act on that understanding has grown. Think about a part of your work where you keep noticing the same problem again and again and again. Maybe new customers are getting confused at the same spot on the site, or the explanation makes sense to the team that wrote it, but you've had enough conversations with customers and you know it's not going to make sense to them. You can almost predict the question they're going to ask. That kind of attention is where taste starts.

You care enough to notice distinctions. Other people, they're just going to skip over.

Take the customer example. You might previously have written a memo explaining the problem, and you waited for another team to do something about it, and you're like, ah, throw it over the wall, right? Wedge will fall. Now, you might be able to use AI to build an interactive guide or a rough version of a better onboarding experience. You can do something about it. You have something a colleague or customer can try. You discover details that weren't obvious from the complaint. Perhaps the customer understands the explanation, but doesn't know which choice applies to them. Perhaps the sequence is wrong. Getting something in front of them gives your understanding a chance to become more precise.