Is the power of people skills enough to keep gen AI in check?

Higher-level languages, automation, low-code and no-code development platforms, and better programming environments have been gradually reducing the need for IT staff to perform low-level, routine tasks for years so they can take on more innovative challenges. With generative AI, this trend is accelerating dramatically, and technology professionals will have to diversify their skillsets faster than ever to stay a step ahead.

That can soon become difficult however, since AI systems seem to be doubling in capability every three to six months. So another option for tech pros and their managers is to focus more on people skills instead.

Fortunately, emotional intelligence and communication skills are something people can change, says Ronald Placone, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who’s done research in this area. “It’s not like personality, which is pretty hard wired,” he says. In fact, people normally gain emotional intelligence with age, he says. “But you can speed up that process,” he adds. “And when you do, you’ll be a more effective leader, keep people more engaged, and turn talent into performance.”

Many companies are doing just that.

“As generative AI automates routine tasks, it frees people to concentrate on high-value activities that require distinctly human qualities such as problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity,” says Pragashini Fox, head of talent and diversity at Thomson Reuters.

In addition to upskilling technical competencies, the company’s training programs are also more focused on enhancing soft skills, he says, and preparing people for a future where they can thrive alongside AI. But he emphasizes that doesn’t mean technical skills are going to become less important.

“With AI’s integration into every facet of work, understanding and leveraging AI technology will become even more crucial,” he says. “A balanced blend will empower people to thrive in new hybrid roles, ensuring both the human and technical aspects of work complement and enhance each other.”

Humanity first

In a recent survey of nearly 700 business leaders, researchers at USC and other institutions found that the most important skill for the AI age was integrity, followed by strategic vision, ability to inspire others, motivation, and drive. And a January report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed that 90% of employers were looking for an ability to solve problems, and nearly 80% were looking for strong teamwork skills.

Technology and business training company O’Reilly Media has also seen more interest from developers in soft skills. There’s been a 23% increase in project communication skills, a 22% increase in professional development skills, and a 13% increase in project management skills, according to the company’s 2024 tech trends report, released in January. And it plans to add more than 1,080 new soft skills-related offerings this year, including live training courses, video courses, and books. 

“IT is not an individual sport,” says Laura Baldwin, president at O’Reilly Media. “You can have individual contributors, but the reality is that the bulk of the team needs to work together as a team, and that’s where soft skills for everyone matter.”

This trend has been accelerating with AI, she adds. “You need to be able to think critically about how you’re going to apply AI in your work, and explain it and bring along the rest of the team.”

Last year, there was an explosive growth of interest in gen AI skills on the O’Reilly platform, Baldwin says. Everybody wanted to know what it was and how it worked. Now, she says, people are trying to put it into production,  thinking about legal and security issues, and bringing products to market. This requires bigger teams — and the demand for soft skills will continue to grow.

“Soft skills are going to re-emerge as a big superpower,” says Ricardo Madan, SVP at TEKsystems, a $2 billion technology consulting company, adding that there’s long been a myth that technologists can survive on technical skills alone.

“There’s an untruth that IT professionals can live with no EQ and just show up in Birkenstocks and dirty T-shirts,” he says. “That untruth has lived for a long time but it’s going to start running out of oxygen very quickly, though there are some hard-core engineering cultures that hang on to that mystique and worship the ability to be these grumpy know-it-alls.”

That might continue to work for a few rarified geniuses, he adds. “But most of us are mere mortals,” he says.

Madan is responsible for thousands of technology-focused employees — people who write code, configure systems, implement security and set up networks. And staffing requirements are already starting to change.

“I like people with psych backgrounds, who’ve taken critical thinking classes,” he says. “We have people coming in from nontechnical domains, and we’re doing outreach to communities that are traditionally disenfranchised when it comes to IT, who don’t have access to bachelor degrees and coding boot camps.”

There’s also internal career mobility, he adds, allowing people from other areas to move into the more technical jobs, or moving hands-on technical folks into project management.

“That’s been changing for some time,” he says. Mid-career people from, say, marketing and sales can bring new perspectives to technology problems compared to people who’ve been steeped in computer science from day one. But for the past year and a half, since ChatGPT burst on the scene, those critical thinking skills, that skeptical outlook, have become even more important.

“Separating fact from fiction has been a big one for us,” says Madan.

Gen AI tools like coding copilots can generate a lot of new code quickly, but how well does that code serve a company’s needs?

“The ability to communicate what you’re doing is more of a premium,” he adds, “That ability to really listen to a customer, to be the voice of reason when you see clients or colleagues stressing over things because they’re dealing with timelines, financial penalties, or budgets.”

And that’s showing up not just in hiring, but in internal development, where TEKsystems is running a workforce development platform that offers soft skills training not just to internal staff but for customers, too.

Paying it forward

Wipro Technologies is a technology and consulting firm with nearly a quarter million employees, and has already begun looking for more soft skills in its hires, says COO Amit Choudhary.

“We’re not just checking on Java and Python, but on how you communicate in a conversation,” he says. “Do you understand the question before you start answering it?”

The company is also leaning into more mentoring and coaching for existing staff. “All successful athletes, even at the peak of their careers, have coaches,” he says. “Why shouldn’t our leaders and managers have coaches? That’s where soft skills are learned.”

And those managers and leaders, in turn, are expected to mentor their employees not once a year, but almost on a daily basis, he adds, which helps increase the value of the manager.

Wipro has had technical skills training available for a long time, however, as well as softer skills. “The main shift happening now is we’re seeing people spend more time — and we encourage people to spend more time — on non-technical skills, on project management skills.”

After all, when a project is facing problems, root-cause analysis often shows that the real issues weren’t in the code but in the understanding of the problem, design, the project management, or domain knowledge.

One benefit of productivity improvements that come from gen AI is that employees can now spend more time developing these skills, Choudhary adds.

“Almost 90% of our next generation associates — our entry-level employees — have undergone soft skills and communication skills training,” he says. “And in the last year, we’ve seen a doubling of advanced soft skills and communication skills training for our mid-level associates, too.”

From fast code to the right code

Even companies focused exclusively on technology look at demanding more soft skills from their employees.

Take Expel, a managed security services provider with just under 500 employees, mostly developers and security analysts. The company is in the process of running multiple experiments with gen AI to see how it can improve services and productivity and still maintain appropriate levels of governance, says CEO Dave Merkel.

The first area of interest is with Copilot technologies in the context of integrated development environments that the company is already using.

“First, we optimize the individual,” he says, using gen AI to make developers more productive. But it’s not about reducing headcount.

“My issue isn’t that we have too many developers,” he says. “It’s how we can go faster. I have to compete harder on brain power in a market that’s growing quickly. I’m looking to turn every developer into the single most productive engineer on the team.”

And even if the engineers do get dramatically more productive, he says, there’s a big backlog of work the company wants to get done. But just moving faster isn’t enough, he says.

Without communication skills and the curiosity needed to find out why things are being done, those productivity benefits can easily go to waste. “I can produce 10 times more useless garbage,” he says.

The company has three full-time people who create internal training materials, as well as vet third-party training providers.

“We’ve actually made significant investments in learning and development across a variety of domains,” Merkel says. “Core leadership skills is one.” The company is also investing in building communication skills. “How do you manage difficult conversations between people? And curiosity — how to ask questions, the stakeholder management skillset as well.”

There’s also a mentoring and coaching program in place.

“Five years from now, the hiring profile for engineers is going to be radically different,” he says. “We’ll always have some specialty areas where someone is solely focused on technology — but they’ll be specialty areas, not the vast majority of engineers we have on the team.”

Over at TaskUs, a business process outsourcing company, the total tech team is about 700 people, with 200 in development and the rest in support, infrastructure, engineering, networking, and security — and everyone is interested in skilling up on gen AI, says CIO Chandra Venkataramani.

“Whenever I do a town hall with my entire team, the main question I get is, ‘Can I get more training?’” he says.

For technical skills training, TaskUs uses PluralSight, which has been dramatically expanding its AI offerings since gen AI’s emergence. But the company is also about to launch a new training initiative, focusing on management skills and mentoring.

“If a person is, say, a phenomenal coder but not a good leader, we work on upskilling them and making them promotion-ready, so when a position opens up, they can immediately jump to that,” he says.

Yet another new project will provide female employees with mentors and technology leaders from outside the company.

“When it comes to soft skills training, we want to continue to support our staff in this age of generative AI innovation so our people don’t just learn new technology skills, but also new people skills,” he says.

From tech to business

Another non-technical skill tech professionals might want to invest in is business and domain knowledge, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.

“The good developers will always be employed, building things AI can’t build,” he says. “The whole economy is switching to become software-powered, so more software will be built. Qualified coding won’t disappear, but the bar for being a qualified coder will rise, and the jobs will change significantly for everybody.”

For the top coders, the ones saving the company every day, “people will put you on the moon,” Mueller says. “But there’ll be a lot of current developers who have that attitude, and will get a rude awakening.” For those in particular, becoming better at people skills will become very important, and Mueller recommends they focus on the business side.

“Speak the language of business,” he says. “Understanding the business and the real-world impact of your code is getting fundamentally more important.”

The business side has already begun to play a bigger role in corporate technology. It started with the growth of SaaS, says Carm Taglienti, CDO, and data and AI portfolio director at solutions integrator Insight. Business units were able to quickly choose and deploy the tech they needed, with IT stepping in to provide integration, governance, security, and other support functions. The same thing is happening now with AI, as a result of the commoditization of gen AI and the addition of gen AI tools and features to existing enterprise platforms.

“The shift we’re starting to see in organizations is that those who tend to run these AI projects tend to be more business people, instead of technical people,” he says. Instead of data scientists, AI projects increasingly need people who understand the business value and have domain knowledge.

“I don’t think it’s drastic yet, but the technology is taking a back seat,” he adds. “The cloud demonstrated some of this already. Data as a service, software as a service — it started to show we didn’t need all these technical people; we could rely on trusted third parties. You can think of large language models as just another SaaS service, to an extent.”

Business analysts, data analysts, and subject matter experts will merge with technical experts into IT, he says. “You might still have some programmers, but not a lot of them.”

Nick Kramer, VP for applied solutions at SSA & Company, a management consultancy, says he’s already seeing signs of this shift. Previous generations of AI and analytics, big data, or streaming data, were led by technologies.

“The thing setting generative AI apart is the people driving the AI agenda are much more the business leaders than the technical leaders,” he says. In fact, a chief AI officer can come from the business side as often as from the IT side.

And the IT jobs turn into more consultative jobs. “It becomes less about hands-on technical doing and more of an explanatory role and how do we translate the business context to the technical choices in our AI architecture and vendor selection,” he adds.

Keeping realistic expectations

Dayton Children’s Hospital CIO J.D. Whitlock doesn’t expect things to change too much with gen AI. Vendors will add it to their platforms, such as the HR and ERP, and later, once the regulatory requirements are met, to some of the medical systems as well. And there will be vendor-provided training associated with the new features.

“But it’s not like we’re building our own large language models,” he says. “If I was at an academic medical center with a $100 million research budget and a bunch of PhDs running around looking for ways to spend government funding, it might be different. But we’re a smaller health system.”

The organization has about 4,000 employees, several outpatient centers in addition to the main hospital, and serves 300,000 patients a year, and Whitlock’s team only does limited in-house development mostly for administrative efficiency applications.

And he’s not adjusting job descriptions just yet, he says. For a new interface engineer, for example, he’ll want to see interface design skills and the ability to set up integrations with other platforms. For business intelligence jobs, the main skill is SQL. And for developers and other IT staff, gen AI will come via Microsoft Copilot in conjunction with the Microsoft Power Platform, with training provided via the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Plus, there’s another advantage going with a popular platform. “The whole world will be using it,” Whitlock says. “You can go to YouTube and watch the videos.”

And people skills?

“We’ve always had to have good people skills,” he says. “We work with our business leadership to effectively meet their IT needs, and now you sprinkle generative AI on that. In a sense it’s transformative, but it’s just another new technology you have to figure out how to implement thoughtfully in order to gain efficiencies.”