# Transcript: Skills You’ll Need To Succeed in the Post-AI Age **Date:** March 12, 2026 · 10:00 PM **Session:** [Skills You’ll Need To Succeed in the Post-AI Age](/sessions/2026-03-12/pp1162912-skills-you-ll-need-to-succeed-in-the-post-ai-age) ## Summary Sandra Peter and Kai Riemer from the University of Sydney present their Skills Horizon Report, identifying four key 'clashes' — policy vs people, efficiency vs expertise, capability vs control, and abundance vs attention — that define the tensions professionals must navigate in the post-AI age. They argue that the most critical skills are deeply human ones like taste, judgment, and meaning-making, and profile the 'grounded leader' as the archetype for success. ## Topics `ai skills` · `future of work` · `leadership` · `workforce transformation` · `cognitive offloading` · `trust` · `information overload` · `generative ai` ## Key Takeaways 1. AI makes senior people better and juniors worse — organizations must redesign mentoring and apprenticeship for the AI age to avoid degrading their expertise base. 2. Taste and discernment are the ultimate skills for the age of AI: the ability to judge output, develop a personal position, and stand your ground when everything sounds convincing. 3. Leaders are shifting from agents of change to sources of stability — in a world where everything changes constantly, creating stable environments for teams to innovate becomes the critical leadership function. 4. Do less with more: the most effective strategy is fewer things with greater focus, care, and discernment, including the skill of unlearning frameworks that no longer work. 5. Getting comfortable with being wrong is an organizational skill — without environments where people can make mistakes without retribution, the necessary experimentation of the AI age cannot happen. ## Full Transcript Things you need to know about us. We're from the University of Sydney, Australia's oldest, or as marketing told us to say, first university. We're 175 years old. Our research area is AI. We are proper nerds. But our job is in meaning making and preparation. We're not only academics at the university, but we lead executive development and upskilling. Most of our time is spent with global CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, heads of state, Supreme Court justices, and all sorts of really interesting people. We get to spend time with them, asking them not only what this new technology is, but what are the things that are going to make us successful. We get to speak to a lot of leaders, but we also get to map out the public conversation as it happens in places like the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Davos, best business books of the year, and South by Southwest. Mapping this all out and talking to 150-plus leaders is what we are bringing you today. One of the things that we found is that the world is changing differently. It used to be that we had these mega trends that point in a certain direction. This has changed in the sense that we're seeing shifts, things that move sideways, that break things. We're facing some deep fractures and uncertainty. Big tech companies like Atlassian have just laid off 10% of their workforce. You're seeing geopolitical changes, moves in energy markets. What these shifts and fractures bring along is a new type of tension that you will need to learn to navigate. We call them clashes. The first clash we call policy versus people. We all want diversity in our workplaces. We want to bring five generations into the workplace. Those generations come with very different expectations about what work is for, what a career is for, how to work, when to work, what leadership looks like. On the policy side, we know there is an increase in performance that comes with belonging in the workplace, from being in the office. Most of you are required to be in the office at least some days per week, and that requirement is growing. But people aren't coming back. They're coffee badging — cycling to the office, grabbing a coffee, badging through, and going back home. For the first time ever, at 83%, people say that work-life balance is now more important to them than pay. That's new. Young people put their walk with their feet — 43% have already quit jobs that didn't fit in with their personal lives. And 78% of employees bring their own AI tools to work, which creates problems around privacy, security, but also efficiency gains. Justin, the global CEO of law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, talked about the fact that having an inclusive culture in the workplace is very different from having policies. Tino, who manages digital transformation for Bavaria, the seventh largest economy in Europe, talked about how his leaders spend more time talking about how work should be done than about the actual work. David Hill, who runs Deloitte Asia Pacific, suggested thinking about how to make memorable in-person experiences — creating those consistently and at scale in our workplaces. The second clash is between efficiency and expertise. AI promises that you will do more with less. 90% of us say that using AI saves us time, and we can show increases in productivity when employees use generative AI. But what if less means less attention, less care, less checking, and less expertise? 40% of workers have already encountered what Harvard Business School calls 'work slop' — verbose, good-looking output with very little nutritional content. A study from MIT found that when you use generative AI, brain activity drops. The concerning finding was that if you take the tools away and give people a task afterwards, that brain activity doesn't come back. That's the cognitive offloading concern. Meanwhile, 63% of executives say AI is so good it will take away entry-level tasks. People are saying they'll only hire with at least four years of experience. The question becomes: what happens in four years when no one trains graduates, when there are no new jobs for young people? Raphael, who runs a creative agency in South America, had one of the best quotes: AI seems to be making senior people a lot better and juniors a lot worse. Senior people know how to give context when delegating, know how to appreciate and judge the output. Young people still need to develop that skill. It's not a prompting task — it's the expertise you need to actually judge the output, because everything AI produces sounds convincing. Robert Thompson, who heads News Corp globally, said this is not just about what you will do with the tools, but an existential challenge to who you perceive yourself to be. The biggest growing theme across all our research has been AI's impact not just on jobs, but on identity. The third clash we call capability versus control. We live in an age where we can source any capability globally. 85% of applications are SaaS-based. But crucial capabilities like AI are now very concentrated. For companies in Australia with requirements to keep data onshore, it can take up to six months to access the latest AI models for enterprise use. Most organizations plan to maintain or expand business with China, but 99% of dysprosium, a critical material for Nvidia chips, comes from one factory near Shanghai. The number of regulations, laws, and tariffs have gone up exponentially in the last five years. Nikki, the global chief transformation officer at Unilever, talked about being more globally minded. 75% of startup founders, even in the US, use Chinese AI models. Stephen Marshall, former Premier of South Australia, talked about the shift from efficiency-first thinking to building resilient supply chains. The fourth clash is between abundance and attention. It will be more important and more difficult than ever for every single one of you to find the signal in the noise. 90% of all data was created in the past couple of years. Most people are on at least seven social media platforms, listening to podcasts, subscribed to newsletters, and getting news from social media. Meanwhile, 54% of longer LinkedIn posts are now AI-generated, and there's been a 770% increase in dedicated AI slop sites on the internet. Each of us wastes 3.5 hours a week due to information overload, and we get disrupted 275 times a day from notifications. AI is also the solution for information seeking, but not for news. The BBC found that 51% of AI news summaries had inaccuracies that changed the content. James Chessell, editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review, talked about the difficulty of staying on top of conversations when people are simultaneously talking on Reddit, WhatsApp, and other platforms during your town hall. Kirsten, Chief People Officer for one of the biggest banks, emphasized how emotionally draining it is to stay on top of all those conversations. Skills bring some stability. Every year we bring an instrument called the Skills Horizon, and we've made it public and free. We look at what skills are in a productive base, what's developing, and what's emerging. We organize them into four clusters we call 'the blobs.' The first blob is 'speaking the language of tech.' Last year the motto was 'you can't fake it anymore.' This year it's about making it work. We're done with proof of concepts. AI fluency, generative AI productivity, rethinking processes and career pathways, ethics, cybersecurity, and quantum are all in this cluster. Morton from ABB spoke about needing a broad foundation to set AI policies. Mat Honan, executive editor of MIT Tech Review, spoke about figuring out what AI isn't, not just what it is. Michael Sprenger from Sony talked about redesigning organizations to make best use of AI rather than just applying AI to existing processes. The second blob is 'solving problems of scale.' These are geopolitical, external, market-type problems. Leaders talk about trust — trust in supply chains and new forms of trust for stakeholders and communities. Understanding new business infrastructure — from energy and chips to data centers and AI models — is critical. Sophia Hernandez, Global Head of Marketing at TikTok, talked about connecting authentically with audiences. There's an emerging phenomenon: as AI and content generation breaks established models, trusted brands may become the new cornerstones for consumers seeking orientation. The third blob is 'working across difference' — diversity, creativity, international boundaries, ways of working. Leaders are shifting from being agents of change to sources of stability. The environment is changing so fast that leaders now create stability for their teams to work effectively and innovate. Vicki from Verizon said she cannot think of a more volatile period of greater change in her career. Meredith Whitaker, president of Signal, advised moving slowly and fixing things — using this as an opportunity to repair what isn't working. The fourth blob is 'thinking through complexity.' The best advice is to do less with more — less things, more focus, more care, more discernment. Unlearning is key: figuring out what models, theories, and frameworks no longer work. Ben Luey, CEO of Twitch, highlighted that for most questions now, you either have too much data or not enough, and what you need is judgment. Nicola Moroney, Chief People Officer at IBM, said getting comfortable with being wrong will be a critical skill for both individuals and organizations. You need environments where people can make mistakes without retribution to enable necessary experimentation. Being grounded is something we heard over and over from leaders. Our profile for this year is the grounded leader. First, they have taste. We think taste is the ultimate skill for the age of AI. Taste is the ability to develop your own position and be confident enough to stand your ground, to make judgment that people will recognize as deeply personal. The grounded leaders we speak to are intellectually omnivorous — they read widely, explore weird corners of the internet, spend time digesting what they read, and cultivate taste in others. Their role is to be meaning makers, helping people understand what is going on around them, how it impacts their team and organization. They keep it real — they don't speak in jargon, they talk straight to people. They are placemakers, making sure their organization or community is an actual place with an identity. And they are lifelong learners with curated learning diets — spending focused periods on specific topics like cyber resilience, then quantum, and so on. We leave you with a quote from Danny Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist: let's hope there are better ideas that come up and capture the imagination of people. Go out and find those better ideas. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-12/pp1162912-skills-you-ll-need-to-succeed-in-the-post-ai-age)