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Why do soft skills and character matter more in the age of AI? Because AI amplifies the human using it. UneeQ's COO Emma Lavelle explains what to do.
Here's a quick thought experiment. Hand a stadium-sized PA system to two guitarists. One is skillful and brilliant and one is enthusiastically out of tune. The amplifier doesn't care either way; it takes whatever signal it's given and makes it much, much louder.
That's AI in the workplace right now. Tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are the biggest amplifiers ever wheeled out on stage. And it raises an important question: who is holding the guitar and what are they amplifying?
I’ve been thinking about this more and more. AI will multiply the impact of every person in the workplace, so ensuring you have people with the relevant skills (both human and technical) and aligned character traits to your company's values matters so much more.
Let's unpack why that's true — and what the research suggests you should do about it.
There's a popular belief that the most valuable workplace skill of the future will be "knowing how to work with AI." I disagree.
Knowing how to work with AI is commonly already a baseline expectation — it’s like knowing how to use email.
I believe the more valuable skills of the future, is what AI can't do: judgment built on context and experience, emotionally intelligent communication, creativity to ask better questions and come up with truly original ideas. And (crucially) accountability when things go sideways.
In other words, the human is still the headline act — AI is just the amp.
I believe character traits such as integrity, curiosity, and compassion will become increasingly needed and valued in the workforce, perhaps even more so than technical skills.
Skills tell you what someone can do. Character tells you what they will do — especially when no one's watching, when the deadline is brutal, or when the AI just handed them a shortcut that's tempting but unethical.
AI is an amplifier, of both good and bad output. A small lapse in judgement can be amplified by AI across thousands of customer interactions, a global workforce, a product codebase — the list goes on.
Which means so-called “soft skills” become even more important to nurture within a company. You may already know I think the term dramatically undersells the importance of these traits, as I wrote recently in an article called what are the best soft skills in leadership.
With the amplification of AI, traits like integrity mature from being a nice-to-have on the company values poster into a load-bearing wall.And the flip side is just as powerful. Traits such as curiosity are multiplied by AI into faster learning across the whole team. Compassion is multiplied by AI into thousands of better customer moments.
Hire and grow people whose values match yours, and AI becomes a force multiplier for the culture you want.
When it comes to understanding the importance of these soft skills, the data shows that businesses are well aware.
Executives agree, almost unanimously. LinkedIn's research found that 9 out of 10 global executives say soft skills — what some now call "durable" or "human" skills — are more important than ever, with communication topping the list of most in-demand skills overall.
And character has always been the hidden hiring variable. Leadership IQ's landmark study of over 20,000 new hires found that 46% fail within 18 months — and 89% of those failures come down to attitude (coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, temperament). Only 11% fail for lack of technical skill. We've been hiring for the résumé and losing people over character for decades. AI just raises the stakes on that mistake.
Employers already rank human skills among the fastest-rising. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that while AI and big data top the list of fastest-growing skills, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility, curiosity and lifelong learning are all rising right alongside them through 2030. The same report expects 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030. Tech skills and human skills are climbing the charts together.
And when it comes to what employers consider to be core skills in today's workforce, technical skills very much take a back seat to non-technical, as the chart below shows.
In a recent interview with HR.com, I point to a practical playbook for HR and L&D leaders:
1. Hire for values, train for skills. If 89% of hiring failures are attitude-driven, your interview process should spend at least as much time on character and culture fit as it does on credentials. Define the traits your culture values (your version of integrity, curiosity, and compassion) and screen for them deliberately, the way you'd screen for any must-have technical skill.
2. Treat human skills training as core infrastructure. Judgment, empathy, and difficult conversations don't improve by watching a video. They improve through practice — realistic, repeatable, slightly-uncomfortable practice. The kind that builds genuine confidence before the stakes are real.
3. Make learning continuous, not episodic. Organizations can become "continuous learning systems", where coaching and development happen alongside work, not in an annual offsite. Capability is no longer static, so development can't be either. This mindset can start at the top — learning is a leadership trait, not just a junior one.
If you are using AI, amplification is already happening. Your choice is what gets amplified.
Companies that invest in developing humans behind the AI will find that every new tool makes their people more valuable, not less. Companies that don't will discover, at full stadium volume, which guitarists were out of tune.
As leaders, we have to decide to be part of creating the future, rather than letting it happen to us.
