In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Johnathan Grzybowski about leveraging your organizational talent to win in the future of work. Johnathan Grzybowski is the co-founder of Penji, a creative subscription service that empowers businesses, agencies, and teams with the simplest way to access creative talent.  He’s also a storyteller and host of Dear Dads and Free Ideas, where he shares insights on entrepreneurship, leadership, and family life.

This research explores how human-centric skills like creativity, resilience, and empathy have become essential strategic assets in an economy increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. While employers prioritize these capabilities for future growth, this research highlights a significant global skills gap and a lack of formal recognition in current hiring practices. These human traits are surprisingly fragile and sensitive to external shocks, yet they remain the most difficult for machines to replicate. To address these challenges, this research advocates for a systemic framework involving performance-based assessments and portable digital credentials. Real-world case studies demonstrate that integrating experiential learning and technological simulations can effectively cultivate these durable advantages. Ultimately, this research argues that investing in uniquely human judgment and collaboration provides the ultimate competitive edge in an automated world.

The video transcript explores the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on society, the economy, and individual roles in the workforce. It emphasizes that while AI is advancing rapidly and automating many routine and data-driven tasks, the future will be defined not by machines, but by uniquely human skills that machines cannot replicate. These human-centric abilities—creativity, complex problem-solving, emotional resilience, adaptability, continuous learning, collaboration, and communication—are becoming increasingly essential in a world marked by constant disruption and technological change. Highlights 🤖 AI is reshaping industries by automating routine, predictable tasks but cannot replace human ingenuity. 🎨 Creativity, complex problem-solving, emotional resilience, adaptability, continuous learning, collaboration, and communication are the key human skills for the future. 🏫 Traditional education systems fail to adequately prepare students for the human-centric demands of the modern workforce. 😷 The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and weakened essential human skills like collaboration, resilience, and mentoring due to remote work isolation. 📉 Despite high demand, many job descriptions and hiring processes overlook crucial human skills, focusing mainly on technical qualifications. 🛠️ AI should be viewed as augmentation, complementing rather than replacing humans, emphasizing the importance of empathy, ethical judgment, and creativity. 🚀 Developing human skills requires active, project-based learning, psychological safety, coaching, and cultural shifts in both education and workplaces. Key Insights 🤔 Human Ingenuity as the New Currency: The video stresses that human creativity and ingenuity, not raw processing power, will define economic and social progress in an AI-driven world. This insight reframes the value proposition of human labor from transactional execution to innovative and empathetic contributions that machines cannot replicate. 🌱 The Fragility and Necessity of Human Skills: Human skills such as collaboration and emotional resilience are described as “muscles” that weaken without regular exercise. The pandemic’s impact demonstrated how quickly these abilities can degrade when social and work environments change drastically, underscoring the need for intentional cultivation and continuous practice. 🧠 Mismatch Between Skills Demand and Educational Focus: There is a critical disconnect between what employers seek and what traditional educational systems provide. Schools often prioritize easily measurable knowledge over ambiguous, complex skills like creativity and emotional intelligence, leading to a workforce ill-prepared for modern challenges. 📉 Hiring Practices Lag Behind Skills Needs: Many companies still focus job ads and recruitment on technical skills, neglecting the human competencies essential for innovation and leadership. This oversight perpetuates the skills gap and hinders the development of a workforce capable of thriving alongside AI. 🤝 Psychological Safety as a Foundation for Growth: The video emphasizes that fostering psychological safety—an environment where experimentation, failure, and vulnerability are accepted—is vital for nurturing creativity and collaboration. Without such a culture, employees are less likely to take the risks needed for breakthrough innovation. 🤖 AI’s Role as Augmentation: AI excels at pattern recognition and routine data processing but lacks the capacity for emotional depth, ethical reasoning, and intuitive problem solving. This delineation clarifies that the future workforce strategy should focus on complementing AI with human strengths rather than competing with machines. 📚 A Framework for Developing Human Skills: Effective development of human skills requires moving beyond passive learning to active, real-world projects that promote collaboration and creativity. Coaching, mentorship, and continuous reflection are essential components. The adoption of such frameworks by leading organizations signals a promising shift toward future-ready education and training models. 🏢 Leadership’s Role in Embedding Human Skills: For businesses to succeed, leaders must explicitly define, measure, and reward human skills like curiosity, creativity, and collaboration. This requires integrating these skills into hiring, performance reviews, and everyday work culture, moving away from one-off training to sustained developmental practices. Like and share if this helps your team or learning journey. #HumanSkills #AI #FutureOfWork #Creativity #Resilience OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - The Human Edge in an AI World 00:01:12 - The Skills We Need and the Gaps We Face 00:03:43 - The Fragility of Our Most Human Abilities 00:05:40 - Building Skills That Machines Can't Master 00:07:46 - A Call to Action for a Human-Centered Future

Human-centric skills—creativity, resilience, empathy, collaboration, and lifelong learning—have shifted from ‘soft’ extras to strategic necessities. Drawing on the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 and global data from employers, educators, and learning platforms, this episode maps demand and supply, highlights regional gaps, and shows how education and hiring systems often fail to recognize these capabilities. The paper documents the surprising fragility of these skills (pandemic-era declines in resilience and teaching), their limited visibility in job postings, and their low automation risk under generative AI—making them both scarce and increasingly valuable. It also summarizes industry and regional patterns and the long time horizons many learners need to develop higher‑order human skills. Finally, the episode proposes a nine‑principle roadmap for assessment, development, and credentialing—emphasizing authentic performance tasks, psychologically safe learning environments, and portable digital credentials—and presents case studies (AWS, PwC, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Udemy, Majid Al Futtaim) that illustrate scalable, equitable approaches to make the human edge a measurable, portable asset.

This conversation explores how human-centric skills like creativity, resilience, and empathy have become essential strategic assets in an economy increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. While employers prioritize these capabilities for future growth, the conversation highlights a significant global skills gap and a lack of formal recognition in current hiring practices. These human traits are surprisingly fragile and sensitive to external shocks, yet they remain the most difficult for machines to replicate. To address these challenges, the conversation advocates for a systemic framework involving performance-based assessments and portable digital credentials. Real-world case studies demonstrate that integrating experiential learning and technological simulations can effectively cultivate these durable advantages. Ultimately, they argue that investing in uniquely human judgment and collaboration provides the ultimate competitive edge in an automated world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Kathryn Landis about effectively leading diverse teams. Kathryn Landis helps organizations accelerate success by empowering growth-minded leaders and their teams with executive coaching, team coaching, offsites, and leadership development training in today's dynamic business environment. Kathryn's insights and strategies have gained recognition in prestigious publications like Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes, further establishing her reputation as a sought-after expert in the field. She holds an MBA from Northwestern University, Certificate in Executive and Organizational Coaching from Columbia University, Certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Cornell University and BS from Indiana University. Moreover, Kathryn is a National Diversity Council Certified Diversity Professional (NDCCDP), Associate Certified Coach by the International Coaching Federation (ACC) and Professor of C-Suite Leadership New York University.

The video explores the evolving partnership between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) in the workplace, emphasizing that AI is reshaping the nature of work not by replacing humans but by augmenting their capabilities. Contrary to common fears of job loss due to automation, the reality is that AI assists in performing specific routine, data-intensive, or repetitive tasks, allowing humans to focus on creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and interpersonal skills. This collaboration is transforming jobs by unbundling tasks and assigning them to the most suitable agent—human or machine—leading to more efficient, innovative, and responsive organizations. Highlights 🤖 AI is augmenting human work by handling routine and repetitive tasks, not replacing entire jobs. 💡 Human skills like creativity, empathy, and critical thinking remain essential and complementary to AI. 🏦 Real-world AI applications in banking and pharma demonstrate faster, more accurate workflows with elevated human roles. 🤝 The future workforce will operate in hybrid roles, blending human, AI agent, and robot collaboration. 🎯 AI fluency and foundational human skills are critical for adapting to the changing job landscape. 🚀 Thoughtful redesign of workflows unlocks massive economic potential, boosting productivity and job quality. 🌍 Leaders must act now to redesign work, invest in skills, and measure human-machine team effectiveness to ensure equitable benefits. Key Insights 🤖 AI as a Task Augmenter, Not Job Eliminator: The video challenges the binary narrative of AI replacing humans, showing instead that AI excels at specific tasks—routine, data-heavy, and predictable—while humans contribute judgment, creativity, and empathy. This division of labor creates synergy and enhances productivity rather than causing wholesale job loss. The implication is a reframing of work design, from entire jobs to discrete tasks, enabling organizations to deploy AI where it excels and humans where they add unique value. 🧠 Human Skills Are More Valuable Than Ever: Despite automation fears, human-centric skills such as creativity, critical thinking, leadership, and interpersonal communication become increasingly critical. These skills enable workers to guide AI tools, interpret outputs, and fill gaps that machines cannot address, particularly in emotional intelligence and complex decision-making. This insight underscores the importance of education and training systems focusing on these competencies to prepare the workforce for the AI-augmented future. 🔄 Workflow Redesign Over Piecemeal Automation: The video stresses that simply adding AI tools to existing workflows yields limited benefits—likened to putting a jet engine on a horse-drawn carriage. True gains come from reimagining entire processes to leverage human-machine collaboration end-to-end. Such redesign leads to more profound increases in efficiency, innovation, and customer responsiveness, highlighting the need for organizational change management and strategic planning alongside technology adoption. 📊 Economic Opportunity and Productivity Dividend: By 2030, the U.S. could unlock approximately $2.9 trillion in value through AI-driven productivity improvements. This is not about jobs lost but about shifting human labor to higher-value activities, increasing wages, growth, and job quality. This insight reframes AI as an economic multiplier and a catalyst for prosperity if managed well, emphasizing the collective benefit potential of human-machine collaboration. ⚖️ Risks of Inequality Without Strategic Action: The video cautions that failing to redesign workflows and invest in upskilling risks concentrating AI benefits among a small elite, worsening economic inequality. This highlights a critical social and policy dimension: equitable access to training, AI fluency, and thoughtful leadership are essential to distributing gains broadly and avoiding societal divides exacerbated by technological change. 🌐 The Changing Job Landscape and Hybrid Roles: Jobs are becoming more hybrid, involving human workers, AI agents, and robots collaborating dynamically. Examples include salespeople augmented by AI for lead generation and medical assistants supported by diagnostic AI and robotic tools. This insight reveals the complexity of future work ecosystems, where managing human-machine interfaces and team dynamics will be a vital organizational competency. Like and share if this helped you! #AI #FutureOfWork #Automation #Skills #WorkflowRedesign OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Humans and Machines at Work 00:01:14 - From Fear to Framework 00:02:22 - Real-World Examples of AI Collaboration 00:03:34 - The Shifting Landscape of Jobs and Skills 00:04:50 - Unlocking Trillions and Call to Action

This research explores the shift toward a collaborative work model where humans, AI agents, and robots function as partners rather than competitors. While technology could theoretically automate over half of current work hours, the text emphasizes that most human skills will evolve rather than disappear, particularly those rooted in social intelligence and strategic judgment. Organizations that redesign entire workflows—rather than simply automating isolated tasks—stand to unlock trillions in economic value while shifting human roles toward high-level orchestration. However, achieving this potential requires deliberate leadership and a commitment to widespread workforce upskilling to prevent economic disparity. Ultimately, the research suggests that the future of labor depends on combining distinct human strengths with machine efficiency to expand productivity and opportunity.