Why some employers are paying extra for ‘human’ skills

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 kicked off the AI boom, the message to workers has been a menacing one: adapt or die.

In 2026, this is hardly an idle threat. Its most recent variation came in a Financial Times report this week which revealed that Swiss investment bank UBS was demanding prospective junior staff demonstrate AI proficiency in order to land a lucrative job.

There is a sense of inevitability to the way companies across white-collar sectors – consulting, finance, tech and the like – have made AI adoption a key metric for professional success. Last year, KPMG started evaluating staff AI use in its annual performance review (although perhaps it should have focused on bread and butter matters like “don’t misuse confidential client information”). Meta’s decision to start tracking its employees’ AI use led to widespread internal anger.

Those who resist acquiring fuzzily defined “AI skills,” we are told, risk being “left behind”. The problem with all this is that for many young workers, the train has already left the station.

Budding bankers reading the FT’s story on UBS (as all budding bankers ought to be doing), might have learnt about research from Morgan Stanley predicting that more than 200,000 jobs would be lost across the sector in Europe alone. If our aspiring baby banker decides to look towards Silicon Valley for a more “AI-proof” career, they might encounter a sector where pretty much every major firm – Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Block – has used AI as a loose justification for mass job cuts this year.

A brutal correction is coming for white-collar work. It is young workers, facing a stagnant hiring market for graduate roles, who are at the coalface. Many are stumbling into the adult world of gainful employment woefully under-prepared, and just a little confused. While some companies have gone all in on the “everything AI” messaging, others are quickly realising that the technology has robbed them of staff who can do the people stuff.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that consulting giant EY was giving $US100 million ($138 million) in bonuses for staff who could demonstrate “human” skills. A New York financier told the FT they were hiring humanities graduates because all those “AI natives” lacked critical thinking skills. Employer groups warned a recent Senate inquiry that graduates lacked the kind of “soft skills” required to thrive in the workforce.

This is no surprise. AI has made academic cheating impossibly, seductively easy, and universities have effectively put doing anything about this in the too-hard basket. Some in the sector, like University of NSW vice chancellor Attila Bungs, have claimed that the technology will actually “liberate” the sector.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that in their quest to create transcendent, post-human superintelligence, the frontier AI labs have helped accelerate an epidemic of mass cognitive decline.

At its core, AI promises liberation from friction. But there can be no learning, or upskilling, to use a bit of employer-speak, without friction. You cannot get ChatGPT to do the 10,000 hours of practice required to master a skill.

It is, comparatively, a lot easier to develop those “AI skills” which so many modern employers are demanding. The reality is that if you are struggling to figure out how to get Claude to do something, you can simply . . . ask Claude to tell you.

AI will probably continue to wreak havoc on the job market. Unfortunately, it makes cold, hard capitalistic logic for many companies to cut jobs where AI can deliver outcomes on the cheap. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are showing no signs of slowing its development, despite plenty of alarm bells around safety.

Still, the need for people that can think for themselves, and withstand a bit of friction, will never be truly lost.

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