It seems wherever you turn, everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence (AI). Business leaders and educators are increasingly made to feel that if they don’t rush to jump on the AI bandwagon, they’ll be left trailing in the dust.

But amid fears of jobs being taken over by robots, or of businesses too slow to adopt the latest trends losing their competitive edge, is it possible that we’re all looking in the wrong direction?

By honing in on technology, are we losing focus on what really matters – the human workforce?

A changing workforce…

With the introduction of AI technology into the workplace more and more tasks are, naturally, able to be automated. Additionally, businesses are seeing more and more potential to enhance their products and services with AI integrations – all of which will inevitably have an impact – for better or for worse – on the workforce.

In certain areas, AI is inevitably expected to replace some previously human functions or job roles – particularly in fields where the main product is about performing repetitive tasks at scale.

However, where work involves dealing with humans – customers, suppliers, partners – AI is so far from being able to deal with the randomness of people that it will never be more than a hyper efficient personal assistant, a tool or a great piece of kit.

One thing is certain, though – no matter the industry – the skill sets most valuable to employers are already changing. So rather than forging ahead, fully focused on technology, perhaps the key to success will be leaders’ ability to step back and predict which human skills will be most useful in the age of AI.

Upskilling the company workforce in the right areas may well prove to be the wisest long term investment an organisation can make right now – regardless of which AI technologies it ends up adopting.

Soft skills

There are certain areas of work where even the most advanced of robots will struggle to beat a human – and these are tasks requiring creativity, emotional intelligence, communication, critical thinking, decision making etc – that is to say tasks requiring intrinsically human skills.

• AI can’t read the room
• AI can’t judge how far to push a negotiation
• AI can’t tell when to use small-talk to warm up a discussion

In fact some argue that ChatGPT is less clever than your cat – and no-one’s worried about cats taking over!

In general, it seems perfectly intuitive that as more tasks become automated by machines, the demand for intrinsically human skills can only increase.

But let’s not leave it to intuition. A joint report, Essential Skills Tracker 2023 by social enterprise Skills Builder Partnership together with KPMG, CIPD & Edge Foundation sets out the fundamental importance of soft skills or “essential skills” development – as well as the costs associated with not investing in them.

The report defines essential skills as:

“Those highly transferable skills like problem solving, teamwork and leadership that you need for almost any job”

And shows that these skills are too often overlooked in education – and this at great cost to the economy and society.

According to the report, workers with higher levels of essential skills earn on average an extra £4,600 a year – whilst the cost to the UK economy as a whole of not investing in these skills comes out at an estimated £22.2 billion a year in terms of lost productivity!

Indeed, a previous study by Skills Builder Partnership, (Trailblazers 2022) found that providing opportunities to build essential skills in the workplace can drive productivity: 89% of employees who benefited from essential skills learning & development opportunities felt their performance improved and 75% felt more engaged in their work. And their managers reported a similar phenomenon.

Human focus

So, as the world races to be among the first to adopt the latest tools or to become the next technology pioneer, perhaps the real winners will be those who pause, reflect and focus on actual real life people – giving them opportunities to develop those all important soft skills.

The technology will continue to improve and over time it will become clearer and clearer how each organisation can best make use of it to support their workforce. And supporting the workforce is the crux of this: AI is only as good as the workforce it supports – so whatever you do, don’t lose focus on people in your quest for the latest technology. In short, either we invest in our people … or believe our businesses can be run by cats.