Somewhere around 2024, we first realized the impact AI will have on our future of work.
Maybe a tiny bit of paranoia? But mostly realization.
The realization that it will touch all of our work.
Since then, what we've felt has largely become what we’ve seen. Many businesses don't need the same headcount they needed five years ago with the workflows, automations, and even agents that AI technology can provide to knowledge workers now.
If you’re wondering why this is simultaneously exciting and anxiety-inducing, there's a good reason for that: excitement and anxiety are closely related emotions.
But change at work is scary. As humans, we each have unique experiences and emotions which have trained us with a different level of comfort when it comes to change. We have different levels of risk tolerance.
These things are hard to change. What’s easier to change is our ability to be curious.
What Ted said!
The last year or so, I’ve been helping our team navigate these changes by being one of the curious ones. We’ve built several custom GPTs for either function-specific work (like turning a list of notes into a formatted job posting) or context-rich work (like training a GPT on our brand voice, content strategy, and examples of great content to help us outline and draft new content). Just yesterday I was drafting our implementation plan for a new organization-wide AI tool that promises more configuration and tighter privacy than the ChatGPT or Claude we can all access everywhere.
This is where curiosity becomes the perfect teacher. For this week’s newsletter, I thought I'd share a few things to help you in the year ahead, so that you can navigate all this with more excitement and less anxiety.
First: the human skills that got you here today, will still be wildly important tomorrow.
Reading body language.
Understanding emotions.
Taking responsibility and accountability for your actions, for your strategy, for your team.
Bringing intuition to your work, through a combination of earned knowledge, and that very-human gut instinct AI can never replace because it’s inherently unpredictable.
AI can draft the meeting summary. It can't judge the unspoken hesitation from the one team member who didn’t speak up to flag a blocker that could derail the project.
Soft skills are timeless. One exception to the rule of “what got you here won’t get you there.”
Risk management, delegation, and escalation frankly are human skills that require a human project manager to take accountability and ownership. The judgment, the taste (there’s a buzzword you'll hear a lot this year), the specific way you and your team do things, that human touch will always be needed.
Pauline McKeown and I explored that topic last year on our podcast, and we’ll revisit the topic later this year because so much has changed.
Buffalo’s Women in Tech conference is one of the most amazing events this city puts on every year. If you’re looking for a place to learn about what’s ahead with AI, that also is focused on uplifting and inspiring voices in our tech community who aren’t always heard, Women in Tech is where you need to be.
M&T Bank’s new CIO, Linda Tai, kicks off the day at 1 p.m. with a keynote address in Seneca One’s Auditorium.
Breakout sessions throughout the day focus on prompt engineering, data storytelling, communication across different personality types and more. Pauline is back for year 2 as a breakout speaker presenting Future-Proofing Your Tech Career, and we’d love to see you there.
Then to close the day at 4:30, the final panel discussion is dubbed Spark to Success: The Way In. It's all about turning inspiration into action.