Industry to Educators: Teach Human Skills, Not Just AI

A year after 250 CEOs demanded mandatory AI education, industry leaders are zeroing in on the durable "human" skills they can't hire for.

Industry executives are increasingly steering educators away from teaching AI literacy and towards teaching durable or “human” skills in the age of AI.

The shift in messaging comes after several years of industry leaders pointing to AI skills as the leading indicator of future employability - and acts as a signal for Higher Ed and K-12 institutions seeking to prepare students for the demands of a fast-changing workforce.

“I can teach the tech skills, I can teach the insurance [domain-specific] skills…what we need is to figure out how to teach the human skills – how to teach future-proof skills that set an employee up for success no matter what domain they find themselves in,” said Steve Jones, Global Head of Data Science and AI at AIG at the AI Summit 2026 hosted by The Urban Assembly and Google.org.

“What we’re seeing is new employees that don’t have the fundamental skills to function in a collaborative team environment. We can filter resumes for experience and degrees, but at that point, we’re looking for people who can collaborate, that demonstrate resilience, that can communicate effectively. That’s becoming a priority for us when we think about the future workforce.”

For the past several years, the message from industry ran in the opposite direction. In May 2025, more than 250 chief executives – including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi – signed an open letter to lawmakers demanding that computer science and AI education be made mandatory for every U.S. student, warning that in the age of AI, children must be prepared “to be AI creators, not just consumers” or risk falling behind.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has been just as direct, telling one interviewer that the most important specific hard skill a student can learn right now is getting really good at using AI tools – framing it as the present-day equivalent of learning to code when he was in high school. Both LinkedIn and the World Economic Forum, meanwhile, had named AI literacy the single fastest-growing skill workers need to succeed. The directive to educators was unambiguous: teach AI and teach it early.

A Horizontal Workforce

The emphasis on human skills comes at a time when educators are seeking clear directives from industry regarding how to pivot academic programming in the age of AI. Universities have begun adding AI programming at a high rate in an effort to remain competitive in an environment where high school graduates are beginning to question the value of traditional higher education.

But with AI capabilities changing so quickly – and the future so uncertain – industry leaders are increasingly zeroing in on college graduates that can demonstrate “soft” skills that point to success in the workforce.

“We look at skills like negotiation, public speaking, and leadership as the most important in the future,” said Steven Butschi, Director of Education Go-to-Market, North America, at Google on a panel earlier in the day. He pointed to the surge in demand for elevator operators as a representative example, predicting AI will spur a comparable wave of new and unanticipated roles.

Some executives described building a “horizontal” work structure that replaces the traditional vertical structure in corporate environments. Instead of separating employees into columns by their expertise and job function, large employers are increasingly seeking to put employees across sectors into the same room consistently – where the ability to collaborate across fields becomes more important than depth of expertise.

“We can’t just have people doing ‘sensing’ in their own fields anymore,” said Michael Griffiths, US Offering Leader at Deloitte. “We need people to sense, think, collaborate, and design – to be in all those processes at once – and that comes down to group strategy and group decisioning in a way that we haven’t really done before.”

Earlier in the week, industry leaders at the Independent Colleges & Universities of New Jersey Annual Conference hosted by Princeton University articulated similar desires. Executives from major investment banks, pharmaceuticals, and tech companies emphasized the same shift.

“The problem we have is not in finding people with the right degrees, or even the right experience,” said one tech executive on a panel. “It’s in feeling secure that the employee stepping into their new role is going to be resilient, that they’re going to be able to function in a team environment, that they have the durable skills that allow them to navigate a flexible and dynamic working environment.”

Sports and Team Collaboration

Jones added that one of the key indicators his hiring team looks for on an application is whether or not the candidate played team sports in college.

“We’ve had tremendous success in hiring people who have experience in team sports,” said Jones on the panel. “It’s become one of our key differentiators when we have similar candidates in terms of degree and experience.”

An executive at a New Jersey engineering firm communicated the same hiring strategy. Engineers, he noted, have a unique ability to focus on mechanistic details in their work. But without the ability to communicate across teams, those skills drop in value.

“We almost exclusively hire engineers who have played team sports,” he said.

The sentiment has been surfacing in academic conversations for several years. Marc Watkins, who directs the AI Institute for Teachers at the University of Mississippi, has argued that the skills that matter most in an AI-saturated environment are discernment, evaluation, judgment, and reflection – precisely the capacities that “cheap intelligence” can’t supply.

Educators at Elon University, whose free Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence is now used at more than 4,000 institutions across 170 countries, reached a similar conclusion, devoting their 2026 edition to the argument that capacities like critical inquiry, ethical reasoning, and communication are more important than ever, because they’re what let students question AI’s outputs and apply its results with judgment and purpose.

And a chorus of classroom teachers has put it more bluntly: the danger isn’t that students can’t operate the tools, but that they’ll operate them passively. As one California high school teacher told NPR this spring, she feels a responsibility to teach students to interrogate and verify what AI generates – because “if we stop questioning what it says, we can be led to believe anything.”

What Schools Are Building

But university-level responses to AI have often taken the form of new AI-centered academic programming. To be clear, several executives did emphasize that students need guidance around AI as opposed to banning the tool outright, but their commentary on future-ready skills took a different tone.

One New Jersey University at the ICUNJ conference outlined plans to introduce a Professional Studies program in response to the impact AI is having on the workforce. The interdisciplinary program aims to bring students from diverse majors together to analyze the demands of the professional workplace and consider academic opportunities that prepare undergraduates for those experiences.

Northeastern University also has a longstanding College of Professional Studies, built around an experiential-learning model that integrates real-world consulting projects and employer collaboration into the academic program. And multiple university administrators at both conferences indicated that they are developing or expanding “Co-Op” experiences through their Career Centers that move beyond the traditional one-and-done apprenticeship model.

As educators consider the impact of AI on the traditional educational experience, the shift in messaging from industry leaders is likely to serve as a key signal for the development of new academic programming that may or may not be AI-centric – but will likely be human-centric.