For a while now, we’ve been hearing that AI is going to change the skills we need at work, but much of the conversation has focused on the technical side of things: learning new tools, understanding AI, becoming more efficient, and figuring out how to keep up with technology that seems to be moving faster every few months. All of that matters, but there’s another part of the conversation that we think deserves much more attention.

What happens to the value of the very human things we bring to work when technology can increasingly handle the technical things for us?

A recent MarketWatch article explored the rise of the “personality hire”, highlighting qualities such as curiosity, adaptability, coachability, communication and judgement as increasingly valuable as AI takes on more routine and technical work.

And perhaps the most interesting thing about that isn’t the phrase “personality hire” itself, but what it tells us about where workplace value might be heading next.

We’re Still Thinking About Skills in the Old Way

When we talk about someone’s skills, we often think about what they know and what they can do. Can they use the system? Can they analyse the numbers? Can they manage the project? Can they solve the technical problem?

Those things are still important, but AI is changing how much of that knowledge and capability can be accessed instantly. You can ask AI to summarise information, analyse a document, generate ideas, write code, draft a proposal or help you work through a problem in a matter of seconds.

So perhaps the question is becoming less about whether someone can produce something, and more about whether they know what to do with what has been produced. Does it make sense? Is it right for this situation? What has been missed? What could go wrong? How will this affect the people involved?

Those are very different questions, and they require something technology can’t simply provide on its own.

The Most Valuable Person Might Be the One Who Asks “Why?”

There is something quite powerful about being able to stop and question an answer rather than immediately accepting it. It might be the person who notices that the data doesn’t quite tell the whole story, or the manager who asks why a team is struggling before deciding that productivity is the problem, or the colleague who spots that an apparently sensible solution is going to create another problem further down the line.

AI can give us possibilities incredibly quickly, but knowing which possibility is actually worth pursuing still requires judgement.

Recent research into human-AI collaboration is beginning to explore exactly this relationship, looking at the human characteristics associated with more effective collaboration with AI rather than simply asking whether someone knows how to use the technology. The research is still developing, but it points towards an important distinction between using AI and knowing how to work well alongside it. And that distinction matters. Because being good at AI isn’t necessarily the same thing as being good at thinking.

This Is Where Emotional Intelligence Comes In

We sometimes talk about emotional intelligence as though it belongs in a completely separate category from performance, but the more technology takes care of technical execution, the harder it becomes to separate the two. Think about what actually happens during a difficult day at work.

Someone needs to give difficult feedback. A team disagrees about the direction of a project. A colleague becomes noticeably quieter in meetings. A decision needs to be made before everyone has all the information. Someone has made a mistake and the instinctive response is to find someone to blame. None of these situations are solved simply by having more information.

They require people who can listen, read the situation, manage their own reactions, communicate clearly and make decisions while considering the impact on others.

TalentSmartEQ’s 2026 State of EQ Report highlights adaptability, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and communication among the human capabilities organisations increasingly see as important alongside technology skills. That doesn’t mean technical skills are becoming irrelevant. It means the definition of being good at your job is becoming broader.

But Let’s Be Careful About What We Mean by “Human Skills”

There is one part of this conversation that deserves a little caution. If we start saying that organisations need more “personality hires”, we could easily end up confusing personality with capability. Being confident isn’t the same as having good judgement. Being charismatic isn’t the same as being emotionally intelligent. Being the person who talks most in a meeting certainly doesn’t mean you’re the best communicator in the room. Some of the people with the strongest human skills are actually the quieter ones.

They’re the people who listen carefully before responding, notice when someone hasn’t contributed, ask a question that changes the direction of the conversation, or know when it is more useful to pause than to immediately offer an opinion.

Human skills aren’t about being a particular type of person. They’re about how we understand ourselves, how we respond to other people and how we navigate situations that don’t come with straightforward instructions.

What Becomes More Valuable When AI Can Do More?

This is probably the question organisations should be asking themselves. If AI can increasingly help with research, analysis, writing, coding and other forms of knowledge work, then what capabilities will help people make better use of all that additional capacity?

Curiosity matters because it encourages people to explore rather than simply accept the first answer. Critical thinking matters because not everything AI produces should be trusted automatically. Adaptability matters because the tools, processes and expectations around us are going to keep changing. Empathy matters because organisations are still made up of people, and people don’t always respond to change logically or predictably. And judgement matters because eventually someone has to decide what should actually happen next.

These aren’t “nice to have” qualities that sit somewhere at the bottom of a job description. They’re becoming part of what it means to work effectively in an environment where technology can do more of the work around us.

Perhaps the Future of Work Is More Human Than We Think

There is a temptation to think that becoming more capable with AI means becoming less dependent on our own human abilities. We think the opposite may actually be true.

The more technology can handle the parts of work that are predictable, repeatable and information-heavy, the more important it becomes to understand the parts that aren’t. The conversation that requires empathy. The decision that involves competing priorities. The question nobody else has thought to ask. The judgement call where there isn’t a perfect answer. The moment when someone needs to feel heard rather than simply given a solution.

AI can help us work faster, but faster isn’t always better. It can give us more information, but more information doesn’t automatically give us better judgement. And it can help us produce more, but productivity alone doesn’t tell us whether we’re creating something useful, sustainable or genuinely valuable.

Perhaps the real opportunity isn’t to become more like AI. Perhaps it’s to become much better at the things AI can’t do for us: thinking deeply, connecting meaningfully, adapting thoughtfully and bringing a little more humanity into the way we work.