What kind of person thrives when AI is doing more of the thinking?
It’s a question I suspect very few smaller businesses have got to yet. There’s enough to think about just deciding whether and how to use AI in the first place.
But I think it’s coming. And sooner than most of us expect.
If AI is increasingly handling the technical, the analytical, the procedural — what does that mean for the kind of people you want around you? What does good actually look like when the machine is doing more of the thinking?
It came up at a Business Hwb (a partnership between University of Wales Trinity St Davids and Wales Management Council) event last year — exploring the AI opportunity for SMEs — and it’s back on the agenda this June. Still an emerging thought rather than a settled view. I’m not sure anyone has the answer yet.
My instinct is that the people who thrive won’t necessarily be the most technically brilliant. They’ll be the ones who stay genuinely curious — who ask the question nobody else thought to ask, and who don’t simply accept what the AI tells them. Who build real trust with the people around them. Who know what they don’t know. Who can read a room in a way no algorithm ever will.
These aren’t new qualities. But I think they’re about to become considerably more valuable — and considerably harder to spot in a CV or interview process designed for a different era.
A new wave of graduates is about to hit the jobs market. I find myself wondering what strengths they’ll need to demonstrate to genuinely prosper in this new world of work. And whether the businesses waiting to recruit them have really thought about what they’re looking for yet.