What skills should you learn in the age of AI?
Build three things together: enough AI literacy to use the tools well, real knowledge of a field, and the ability to explain your thinking clearly and briefly. The third usually gets the least deliberate practice, though communication topped LinkedIn’s list of most in-demand skills in 2024. As AI produces more of the drafts, code and analysis, more of your value depends on whether people understand your judgement and act on it.
What do people ask AI about skills for the future?
If you have asked ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini about your career recently, the question probably sounded like one of these:
- “What skills should I learn that AI can’t replace?”
- “Is it still worth learning to code?”
- “How do I future-proof my career?”
- “What should I get good at in the next five years?”
When Anthropic studied 4.5 million Claude conversations, personal and professional development, communication and interpersonal skills, and career moves were among the common topics for people seeking advice or coaching.
The answers tend to echo employer surveys. In the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, which surveyed more than 1,000 employers, analytical thinking was the core skill named most often, by about 69%. Resilience, flexibility and agility came next at 67%, then leadership and social influence at 61%. Empathy and active listening was named by half. AI and big data skills are expected to grow fastest by 2030.
Communication often appears as just one item on these lists. We think it deserves more practice time, because it is how the other skills reach anyone else: a sharp analysis changes nothing until someone understands it.
How do you build AI literacy and real expertise?
Use an assistant every week on real tasks from your own work, such as a report to summarise or a plan you want challenged, and compare its answer with what you would have done. You soon learn where it saves time and where it doesn’t.
Check what it tells you. Assistants can state wrong facts, figures and citations with confidence, so verify anything that matters against the original source, and find out what your employer or clients allow you to paste into these tools.
Keep going deeper in one field. Expertise lets you judge whether an AI’s answer is right, spot what it left out and know which question to ask next.
Why does communication matter more as AI does more of the work?
AI already handles a lot of writing. In OpenAI’s study of how people use ChatGPT, writing was the most common work task, about 40% of work-related messages in June 2025, and roughly two-thirds of those requests asked ChatGPT to edit or translate text the person had supplied. Google’s 2026 AI and Economy ATLAS, based on 15 million Gemini interactions, found Gemini use in about two-thirds of occupations but typically in only a fifth of each job’s tasks, mostly drafting, reviewing, developing ideas and looking things up.
When a polished draft takes seconds, it says less about you. More weight falls on the parts you still own: deciding what matters, saying it so another person gets it, defending it when a colleague pushes back and summing it up when your manager has two minutes between calls. You are also responsible for every word an assistant helped you send.
Working with AI draws on the same skill: a model does better work when you tell it the goal, the context and what a good answer looks like, as a good manager would tell a person. Our guide to writing a clear brief for AI or a colleague works through an example.
The pattern started before chatbots. Harvard economist David Deming found that US jobs needing a lot of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of employment between 1980 and 2012, while maths-heavy jobs with little social contact shrank, and pay grew fastest in jobs that needed both. The research shows a trend rather than a cause, but it suggests technical and people skills are worth most in combination.
Warren Buffett puts it more bluntly. In a video reported by CNBC in 2018, he said the one easy way to become worth at least 50% more is to hone your communication skills, written and verbal. That is advice, not a measured pay rise, from someone who has spent decades listening to people pitch ideas.
How do people judge you by the way you explain things?
Partly by your voice. In experiments by Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley at Chicago Booth, professional recruiters and other evaluators either heard a job candidate’s pitch or read the same words as a transcript. People who heard it judged the candidate more thoughtful, rational and intelligent, and were more interested in hiring them.
Long words chosen to impress tend to backfire. In a 2006 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology, psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer found that writing padded with needlessly complex words led readers to rate the author as less intelligent.
Why should you get to the point faster?
Your message competes for scarce attention. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found that people now spend an average of about 47 seconds on one screen before switching, down from about two and a half minutes in 2004. That measures switching between screens, not a fixed attention span, but it is what your email or update is up against.
Shorter can also work better. In a field experiment by Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink of Harvard, a concise email asking school leaders to complete a survey got a 4.8% response rate, against 2.7% for a wordier version.
Here is the same update said two ways:
“So I’ve been going through last quarter’s numbers, and there’s a lot going on. Sign-ups were down about 12% after the price change, but some of that is probably seasonal, and marketing changed the campaign in March too, so overall, if we look at it properly, I think the new pricing might not be working as well as we hoped.”
A listener has to wait until the last few words to learn what you think. Try:
“I think the new pricing is hurting sign-ups. They fell 12% after the change. Some of that may be the seasonal dip or March’s campaign change, so I’d like to test the old price for two weeks to find out.”
The second version opens with what you think, states the same doubts once and ends with a request someone can approve.
Which communication skills should you practise?
Say the point first
Open with the conclusion, request or recommendation, then give only as much background as the listener needs. If you cannot say the point in one sentence, you may not have decided what it is yet.
Explain it to someone outside your field
Jargon is efficient among specialists and confusing everywhere else. Explain an idea from your work to a friend in a different job; if they cannot repeat it back, look for a plainer version or a concrete example.
Brief clearly, whether it’s a person or an AI
Say what you want, why, what to work with and what a good result looks like; our briefing guide has a worked example.
Choose the precise word
“The meeting was bad” leaves people guessing; “the meeting overran and nothing was decided” tells them what happened. Sometimes one word does the job of a clause: feedback can be candid or blunt, a summary concise or succinct. Having those words ready saves you padding a sentence while you search.
Answer live, then stop
In an interview, meeting or client call, there is no draft. Answer the question you were asked in a sentence or two, add one reason, then stop and let the other person steer.
A five-minute exercise to start today
- Pick something you need to explain this week, such as a decision, a problem or a request.
- Write the one sentence you want the other person to remember.
- Record a voice memo: that sentence, one reason and one example, in under 30 seconds.
- Listen back once. Is the point in your first sentence? Cut one thing that did not change the meaning, then record again.
For a longer version with a listener, try the one-minute exercise in how to be more articulate.
Is it still worth learning to code, or other technical skills?
Yes, if your work or interests call for them. AI can generate a lot of code, but someone with real expertise still has to check what it produced and whether it solves the right problem. Deming’s finding that pay grew fastest where technical and social skills meet is a reason to build both: explaining your work makes technical skill more useful to the people around you, but it does not replace that skill.
Play: the words for judging an answer
Five sentences about checking and explaining work. Pick the word that fits.
Judge the answer
1 / 5The AI’s answer sounded confident but was ____: two of its sources didn’t exist.
Check the answer
Unreliable. It means you can’t trust it. Accurate means correct, and unbiased means fair to every side.
Before you share it, ____ the figures against the original report.
Check the answer
Verify. It means to check that something is true. Embellish means to add invented detail, and estimate means to make a rough guess.
A good explanation can ____ a complex idea into a few clear steps.
Check the answer
Distil. It means to reduce something to its essential part. Inflate means to make bigger, and obscure means to make harder to understand.
She stayed ____ when the client pushed back, and asked what had worried them.
Check the answer
Composed. It means calm and in control. Defensive means quick to protect yourself from criticism, and evasive means avoiding a direct answer.
When the summary was wrong, he ____ the mistake straight away instead of hiding it.
Check the answer
Acknowledged. It means admitted that something is true. Denied means said it wasn’t true, and downplayed means made it seem less important.
Your score
Where does arcoco fit?
arcoco is our English vocabulary game for iPhone and Android. You practise word meanings and choosing the word that fits a sentence or a picture, and words come back for review. That covers one part of communication: having precise words available when you need them.
It does not coach your speaking, judge your presentations or work on pronunciation, and we have not established that playing improves spontaneous speech. Treat it as a few minutes of optional word practice alongside the speaking and writing practice above. Before deciding, read how the games work and what is free on each platform.