By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic & Reece Akhtar

For Harvard Business Review

Illustration:  HBR Staff; Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

Summary.   

Will the new AI tools we’ve all heard so much about eliminate your job prospects before you even get started? Don’t worry too much. You can have a meaningful, exciting, and even creative career. But in order to succeed and stand out from your peers, you’ll need to learn how to leverage these new tools and cultivate these three skills that machines can’t replace.

  1. Curiosity: Don’t let AI make you boring, biased, predictable, or narrow-minded. Get curious and invest the time to learn how you can offload boring tasks onto AI. But don’t fall into an AI-driven routine. Use AI tools to inspire you and make you more inquisitive about the world beyond them.
  2. Humility: Don’t let AI undermine your self-awareness. Start by getting to know the real you. Ask yourself: What behaviors come most naturally to me? What inspires me? What gets in my way? Then, ask others for feedback. AI is incredibly good at adapting and accepting feedback — you should be too. Ask others what you should start doing, stop doing, and keep doing.
  3. Emotional Intelligence: Don’t forget what it means to be human. Your ability to build connections, practice empathy, and communicate effectively (your emotional intelligence) matters more than ever. Before sharing an opinion or making a decision, pause and think about your teammates. Are you working in service of the team’s goals, or your own? To avoid conflict, be extra attentive when communicating digitally. Digital communication often leads to impulsive, cold, and antisocial exchanges whereby conflict emerges.

You made it through college and got your degree. Now, it’s time to take the corporate world by storm. But wait — will the new AI tools we’ve all heard so much about eliminate your job prospects before you even get started?

Don’t worry too much. The AI age will actually create many new human jobs — more so than it replaces. You can have a meaningful, exciting, and even creative career. But in order to succeed and stand out from your peers, you’ll need to learn how to leverage these new tools and cultivate the skills machines can’t replace.

As business psychologists, we spend a great deal of time studying the attributes that help people get ahead at work. Our research suggests that there are three critical talents AI is unlikely to replace, and that harnessing these talents is key to thriving in the future AI age.

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