For me, the secret to standing out in the age of AI was pretty simple: if your company is starting to use AI, use it. Don't wait for someone to tell you where to start. Pick one tool, go deep, and let curiosity lead you. When I was a Learning Designer at Zapier, I decided to focus on one thing, a new tool that had just rolled out: AI Agents by Zapier. I pushed everything nonessential to the side and gave myself two weeks to learn it inside and out. Along the way, I realized that to make my Agents even better, I needed to understand other tools too: AI fields in Tables, Chatbots, and AI steps in automation workflows. That one deep dive became a crash course in the future of work. I started filming myself as I learned, sharing the process and mistakes with others. Soon, teammates were reaching out for help. Product teams asked me to test new features and give feedback. And before I knew it, I'd become the go-to AI person - without a technical background. Eighteen months later, I was promoted to Senior AI Automation Engineer. If you want to stand out and make yourself indispensable, start there: - Go deep on something. Master one AI tool instead of dabbling in many. - Share what you learn. Help your teammates, post your insights, and be generous with your knowledge. - Be strategic. Know when AI is the right solution (and, importantly, when it's not). Being proactive about AI isn't just about saving time. It's about showing that you can drive change, not wait for it. That's what makes you valuable, no matter how much technology evolves.
Generative AI is not just a differentiator, it's a career accelerator that can expand career opportunities far beyond traditional paths. AI literacy empowers individuals to create entirely new opportunities that would previously have been inaccessible to them without significant resources or institutional backing. One powerful example is how generative AI tools, even free ones like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, can enable someone to launch a company instead of simply searching for yet another corporate role. With AI, an aspiring entrepreneur with a business idea is empowered to research and draft a well-thought-out business plan in hours, create and iterate on a brand identity without hiring a creative agency, develop a full-fledged marketing plan, and even simulate customer feedback by asking AI to role play as an ideal customer persona to review, critique and evaluate offerings through their lens. This ability to work with AI on tasks that once required significant investment and teams of consultants, designers, and executive focus groups fundamentally changes the opportunities for career advancement. It lowers the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship, allowing individuals to test ideas, refine messaging, and build expertise at a fraction of the cost and time it would take without AI. It's like having an entire team of executives, business planers, marketers and writers at your fingertips. When I began building my consultancy, I used free generative AI tools to do just that. One of the biggest advantages my AI skills created was being able to use AI to role play as my ideal customer persona, asking it to critique my offerings, evaluate my positioning, and highlight my blind spots. That iterative feedback loop gave me insights into how C-suite would look at my services so I could better address their needs and concerns, and 'speak' their language so it would be easier for me to build trust and ultimately, close the deal. I believe the real power of AI skills is not that it just makes you better at your current job, but that it opens doors to entirely new ones. It helps individuals transform from simply being a "job applicant" to being an "opportunity creator." That's how AI is truly going to reshape the future of work. Because AI skills don't just prepare you for the future—they give you the agency to create it for yourself.
AI skills are no longer optional — they are becoming fundamental for every job seeker, regardless of profession. The reason is simple: AI is transforming how work gets done in three very clear stages — first by automating routine tasks, then by enhancing our abilities, and finally by transforming what individuals and small teams can achieve. Most people stop at the first stage, using AI to save time on emails, reports, or documentation. But the real opportunity lies in the next two stages. When you use AI to enhance your thinking, creativity, and output, you suddenly operate at a much higher level. And when you reach the transformation stage, AI becomes a force multiplier — enabling you to do work that previously required large teams and significant resources. I've experienced this personally while building TeachBetter.ai. Thanks to AI, we have been able to build and scale one of the best all-in-one AI platforms for teachers and students with a two-member team. Everything from product management to engineering to content, design, marketing, and operations has been streamlined because AI handles a significant portion of the heavy lifting. What would traditionally require 20-25 people can now be executed by a lean, agile team that is able to move quickly and deliver high-quality output across every area. This is the true power of AI — not just automating tasks but transforming the very structure of how teams and companies operate. This is why AI proficiency is becoming a defining skill for today's workforce. People who know how to use AI don't just work faster — they think better, create better, and adapt better. They become more strategic, more creative, and more capable. In every field — teaching, engineering, design, marketing, HR, sales — the professionals who embrace AI will accelerate, and those who don't will find it increasingly difficult to stay competitive. The reality is that AI is not here to replace human talent; it is here to elevate it. It levels the playing field, giving individuals access to capabilities that once required entire departments. For job seekers, students, and professionals, mastering AI tools is the most direct way to stand out in a crowded job market and open doors to opportunities that simply didn't exist a few years ago. And if a two-member team can build and scale a platform like TeachBetter.ai using AI, imagine what individuals can do in their own careers with the same mindset. That's the future of work.
Why AI skills matter today: AI skills are essential because they sit at the heart of how work gets done now. But here's what matters more: AI can't replace the human skills that truly differentiate us—listening, building relationships, making judgment calls. That's the core message of my TEDx talk, "What AI Can't Hear." When people master AI tools, they gain time and headspace to focus on what makes them irreplaceable. You can work faster, produce better quality output, and tackle projects that once felt impossible. Combined with your human abilities—empathy, curiosity, strategic thinking—you become far more valuable to any organization. A concrete example: When I built The Change Republic, AI became my operational backbone. While I focused on listening to clients and shaping their transformation stories, AI helped me analyze feedback, test messaging, and turn rough ideas into polished content. This meant I could build a coaching practice at startup speed while staying focused on the deeper human work—understanding what people really need. AI gave me velocity. But the human insight—the listening, the connection, the meaning-making—that's what made the work valuable. That combination opened doors to bigger stages and leadership conversations I wouldn't have reached as quickly otherwise. The future belongs to people who can combine AI efficiency with irreplaceable human skills.
I'm Runbo Li, Co-founder & CEO at Magic Hour. Here's my take on why AI skills are rapidly becoming table stakes for job seekers. AI tools are erasing technical gatekeeping — opening up high-value, technical jobs and paths to starting companies to non-traditional candidates. There used to be a 4-year coding college prerequisite to building production-quality software, gluing stuff together, or making things happen. The most striking effect of AI I've seen in the last year is people bypassing it. One of the most impressive career leaps I've encountered was of a former VC CFO whom I talked to recently. He used Replit's AI pair programmer to build and launch his own SaaS app in under 3 months. He had zero software experience. He just sat down with Excel and workflows he knew from his finance job and threw them right into AI co-pilot to make an app. This was not possible two years ago. He couldn't become a "real" engineer, and this app that he's making is not an Excel-based macro. He literally taught himself how to make software with the AI acting as his partner in the driving seat. Prompt engineering — talking in English to make AI do complex things — is now as valuable a skill as coding was 10 years ago. At Magic Hour, we see that the primary accelerant is not coding per se, but prompt engineering. Many of the most effective users of our service are not coders. They have to figure out how to give the AI goals and constraints and hammer out a detailed process, all in English. They have to turn their thoughts into instructions that involve their home context. This skill is getting to be worth more than coding. Now people can go to sleep thinking up videos they want to show, and then by morning have those videos done, without having to learn VFX or hire a studio. That's a sea change. That's why I tell job seekers to put "prompt engineering" on their resumes.
AI skills are becoming essential because, obviously, they save time and effort. And it's not about just handing everything over to a tool and hoping for the best - instead, it's about knowing what to ask, how to review the output, and when to trust your own experience over the suggestion. In essence, AI allows everyone to become a kind of manager rather than someone who just executes tasks. Employers know this, which is why they're increasingly looking for people who can get better results with AI. And, if you're the person who consistently does more without working more, you naturally become the one invited into bigger projects, strategy conversations, and cross-functional work. That's where bigger opportunities tend to open up. A good example is our Sr. Director of Communications & Creative, who recently moved into an AI Operations Manager role. He stayed current on new tools, tested them, and openly promoted what worked across the company. In under one year, he switched from Replit to Cursor, which is typically seen as a tool for more tech-savvy users. Eventually, he also pushed for a company-wide effort to upskill by launching "AI Days" - a monthly initiative where everyone focuses only on AI projects for the day. We use that time to build custom tools with platforms like v0.dev, create custom GPTs, or test new third-party AI solutions to boost productivity.
The requirement for AI skills is increasing rapidly, as virtually every occupation includes aspects of the artificial intelligence sector. The capacity for tools to obtain greater levels of intelligence, and the expectation that workers will be able to work side by side with technology, has increased dramatically. Those who possess the ability to effectively use AI will have the potential to work faster and achieve better outcomes. This skill has evolved to be a primary skill as opposed to an additional skill. Having an understanding of AI also opens up: new opportunity avenues. You can transition to a different occupation, automate your mundane tasks, and illustrate your adaptive capabilities. This indicates that you are prepared for the future of work, not the present. A brief example from my experience. While I was working for GPTZero, I hired a junior level analyst who had no prior experience in technical fields, but had extensive knowledge and understanding of artificial intelligence tools. This junior level analyst utilized AI tools for tasks such as data organization, analysis, and report creation. Within a few months of being with us, she became the premier person within the organization to utilize AI workflows and gained considerable recognition, leading to a promotion to a higher level role, as part of the product development team, much sooner than anticipated. The AI tools that this analyst used did not supplant her work, but rather enhanced what she was doing. Therefore, for everyone today, this is the opportunity available to them.
AI skills have become essential because the pace and complexity of work have outgrown what anyone can hold in their head. The job seekers who thrive are the ones who know how to pair their human judgment with tools that help them think, create, and decide more effectively. It's no longer about what or how much we know. It's what we do with this information and how we apply it in innovative and influential ways. AI isn't the destination. It's a method of reaching it. It is the way we clear mental clutter and speed up the work that bogs us down. When we define AI as a resource and a tool rather than an identity, the whole conversation shifts, allowing us to move faster, solve problems with greater precision, and spend more time on work that advances us personally and professionally. I am an executive coach and leadership development facilitator. Two recent clients proved how much AI can sharpen career clarity. One used AI to compare three possible career paths against his twenty years of experience, which helped him choose the strongest direction and craft a short bio for informational interviews. Another uploaded her 360 feedback and used AI to distill pages of comments into a clear summary for her managers, outlining the skills she wanted to strengthen and the support she needed to evolve. But let's be real. There's no "mastering" AI. How can we when this tool is evolving by the hour? The real skill is learning to adapt to AI, get comfortable with it, and shape it to our own work. AI is the how behind better thinking, better decisions, and, fortunately for job seekers, better storytelling about our value. When job seekers show they can work with a rapidly changing toolset, they signal agility, curiosity, and the kind of problem solving that sets them apart in an AI-shaped workplace that's changing in real time.
AI skills will transform an individuals ability to be able to increase efficiency creating capacity to either do more or to utilize excess capacity to improve quality of their deliverables. The ability to do more and improve their effectiveness will allow those earlier in their career to develop quicker and accelerate through the organizational stack sooner. For more senior folks, in addition to the personal benefits of the above mentioned efficiency and effectiveness principles, the knowledge and exposure of AI skills will allow them to build and transform their organizations to have higher levels of throughput, distinctive competitive muscle, and ability to serve existing as well as gain new customer segments. For me, this was transformative when I was launching my podcast in Q2 of 2024. Having never done it before, I was initially relying primarily on manual editorial work using video and sound editing tools, manually transcribing interviews, and going through numerous keyword iterations to post a single video. This effort was taking over 40 hours for a single episode. In the last five quarters while I have had to invest my time in learning and keeping up with the pace of rapidly developing AI enabled tools, my efforts on each episode are now down to less than 4 hours. From transcription, to video and sound editing, to intelligent copywriting, posting, and engagement, the use of AI enabled tools has given me hours of capacity back and the product quality is far superior than what I was able to previously achieve with manual work.
I've reviewed 100s of job postings in the past year and the common theme is showing some understanding of how AI can be used to become more efficient. You don't necessarily need to be an AI expert, but you do need to show that you are upskilling and aware of how you can use AI to do your job better. This is important for job seekers of all ages, but especially for experienced job seekers who can often face ageism and/or assumptions that they aren't staying on-trend with current technology. However, demonstrating AI skills can definitely mitigate ageism risk. I recently worked with an IT analyst client in his late 60s - we led off his resume/LinkedIn with his generative AI experience and he landed his dream job within months in spite of the challenging market. The key is being clear that you know how to leverage this technology to improve the company's bottom-line.
Many fear AI will replace white-collar jobs. I argue that AI will instead re-skill them, favoring those who master it as a strategic tool. Our primal "fight or flight" response makes us see AI as a foe, but every technological leap in human history has been driven by those how dared to harness a powerful new force. Consider the transition just a century ago: horses were the dominant mode of transportation. Those who daringly mastered the automobile and aviation, often through self-teaching, built the next generation of empires. Today, early adopters of AI are positioned to dominate the next half-century. New enterprises will be founded, and a new cohort of technology leaders will emerge. This is simply the natural progression of every technological revolution, from controlling fire to inventing the wheel. In my own case, I started small, using ChatGPT and Gemini to research and draft content for a liquor store blog I was operating. Initially, my prompt engineering was clumsy. However, as I improved, the tools made producing content (listicles, cocktail trends, spirits history) significantly more efficient. This AI-fueled content strategy provided strong SEO and value, helping the brand scale from a single store to three, eventually leading to my successful exit with a 3X ROI. I am now leveraging these newly acquired skills to capture Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) business-specifically, using AI to rapidly generate, refine and optimize marketing content for discovery across platforms. This has enabled me to scale my marketing agency, which had not actively onboarded new clients in three years. What began as an efficient way to pump out content for a single store has transformed into a core, highly profitable service offering. At 52, I can attest that this proficiency is not age-limited; mastering AI adds tangible, immediate value to clients and unlocks significant career growth. Note: This response was human written, but reviewed by Gemini for grammatical consistency.
Many companies today test candidates' creativity by giving them a very specific problem to solve with little to no time. This is precisely where AI can help you in your next job application. Four months ago, I started at Productive, and one of the tests I had was to create a functioning cold outreach campaign from scratch in 4 hours without spending too many resources. In those two hours, I learned the basics of N8N and used it to create an almost completely autonomous sequence by connecting tools like Ocean.io, Apify, ChatGPT, and Reply.io. Of course, it did not work perfectly, but the concept was enough to get me the job :)
I had a content manager at our marketing agency who was mostly responsible for ensuring his content team was creating the right content and enough of it, but he'd often have to help them out himself. He's always been a huge AI fan, talking about new advances and boring most of us. Over a period of 3-5 months he'd occasionally want to show me something he'd built that either integrated with or utilized AI to automate or semi-automate tasks and processes that were responsibilities of his content team. After about 4 months of this and him getting better and continually creating more automated tasks/work by AI, he'd reduced the amount of human work needed by the content team by almost 60%. My concern was always quality or mistakes so I'd test things and double check, but the end result was consistently BETTER than human work. Long story short he quickly received a promotion to a new job that didn't exist at our company before so I made it up, and his title became Chief Operational Efficiency Officer. He went from a lower level manager to an executive in a few months due to his AI proficiency and ability to implement.
Working with AI is no longer optional. AI is changing the way people work on a fundamental level. At AskZyro, we track multiple industries, and in all of them, the highest performing people are not the most experienced. They are the ones who can use AI to get more done. Employers expect employees to have the skill of being able to automate workflows, get information to create a summary in an instant, and make decisions based on data—these are all skills that employees should have, and ones that can be done faster with AI. The difference in skills and the reason for holding a stronger position in the company is based on a person's ability to work with AI. When using AI skills, a person is perceived differently. They go from being mere executors of a task to people who use AI as a tool to construct strategies. The ability to strategically use AI to automate a task helps focus on the creative execution of the ideas of a task. This is the skills gap that most companies are looking to fill. We have a content strategist on AI that we worked with, Emma, who reflects this situation perfectly. Emma had been working at mid-level roles to strategize content for a long time in monotonous workflows. Emma spent 2 months learning AI for research, outlining, and content optimization. With those workflows, she went from spending 5 hours on a task to spending a mere 90 minutes distributing optimized content for even stronger project insight. What changed wasn't just how productive she was; it was also her positioning. She was able to market herself internally as someone who can spearhead AI adoption for the larger team. She was only in the role for a few weeks when she was promoted into a hybrid strategy-operations role where she currently leads a small team that builds internal AI workflows. She gets paid 55% more now, and even more importantly, she gets to do the type of work she wants to do. What this story illustrates is that AI didn't eliminate her job; it redefined it in a way that supercharged her with a unique and unreplaceable value. This is the reason AI proficiency became a superpower to propel your career forward; it elevated the potential for every professional to be a differentiated, higher-value contributor. Integrating AI into your skill set is no longer optional for job seekers. The importance is paramount and very timely for the jobs of the future.
AI skills are becoming essential because many parts of modern work now move faster than a person can track on their own. The flow of information in modern work can easily overwhelm someone without the right support. AI tools help people sort what matters and compare choices with greater ease. A person who understands these tools gains a sharper view of their responsibilities. The value comes from using the tool to strengthen judgment, not replace it. Knowing how to use these tools makes it easier to move into work that has more depth. Many teams depend on someone who can sift through information and explain what it shows. AI can help with the first part, so the person can devote their time to the part that shapes decisions. This change often puts them in a stronger position for advancement. One example that stays with me involves a colleague who worked in a reporting role. He was skilled and steady, but much of his time went into preparing the same weekly documents. He decided to learn how to use AI tools to organize the information and shape the first draft of each summary. Once he became comfortable with the process, his workload changed completely. With less time spent on collection, he concentrated on understanding patterns and sharing what they meant. His manager encouraged this direction and included him in meetings that shaped future work. This eventually led to a new role focused on analysis. What helped him grow was not the tool itself. It was his willingness to use it in a way that strengthened his judgment. That is why AI skills matter. They give people the room to think, and when people have that room, they often rise faster than they expected.
AI is a fantastic equalizer that's helping candidates stand out based on their genuine skills. It removes the friction from the parts of the job that might not be your natural strength, allowing your true talent to shine. Whether it's writing perfect client emails or troubleshooting code, AI can help polish your work and give you more time to show off your strengths. We worked with a brilliant student in our Medical Billing program who was technically excellent but terrified of the communication aspect of the job because English was her second language. She was hesitant to apply for client-facing roles. She worried she would be too slow in composing responses. We taught her how to use AI agents to draft and polish her professional correspondence, and she felt a lot more confident. She ended up landing a job at a major clinic as a patient coordinator because she could confidently show her communication skills. AI is really changing a lot of people's lives and opening up career trajectories for people who used to be overlooked too often.
Today, almost every job uses AI as a tool to increase productivity, so understanding the basic principles related to AI and how to leverage it in the different tools you use for work is critical for the appropriate growth of your business. AI is being used across all industries, such as marketing, finance, operations, etc. Therefore, for someone to succeed today, they must have both the ability to apply their domain expertise with advanced skill levels for mastering the use of AI. In my opinion, one use case that comes to mind is my product manager and leader who was not a machine learning specialist, period. Yet, this individual became very focused on understanding how to use AI to analyze large sets of data and also build prototypes quickly. Within weeks, he was able to use AI as a method to build predictive models of customer behaviours, create user experience (UX) designs, and build product validation that would have otherwise taken weeks, if not months, to complete. This helped get the attention of executive management, and during this time he was promoted to two levels above where he was because he had defined a new way to think about what could be accomplished by this area of our organisation and how to create a product to support the business goals of prototyping speed and flexibility.
AI expertise is in demand due to the fact that it is turning into specialized knowledge to general knowledge like computer literacy in the 1990s. Employees that are unable to take advantage of AI tools will be left behind those that can, and the productivity of an individual multiplies with the knowledge of AI, enabling individuals to perform more advanced jobs traditionally handled by bigger groups or more senior positions. One of the junior developers in our team who had acquired knowledge of AI coding helpers such as GitHub Copilot was able to do the work of senior engineers, in six months, when it came to complex API integrations. This shortened his promotion of junior to mid-level engineer by half the normal time period, and projects that otherwise would have been beyond his reach with his lack of AI skills got completed. It was not only about the use of AI, but about being able to approach problems and then verifying the results as well as integrating the AI abilities with the understanding of the domain to produce production quality work more efficiently.
A month ago, my clinical operations team struggled with long turnaround times for routine documentation. We piloted a small AI tool to generate first-draft summaries from encounter data. We worked with clinicians to define inputs, review outputs, and refine prompts until the drafts matched expectations. With one tool, review time dropped by about twenty percent, and the clinicians asked for broader deployment. That small experiment changed the way I view AI. I believe that AI has a measurable operational impact when applied thoughtfully. This approach works across EHR documentation, RCM automation, and virtual care workflows. AI mastery changes how teams approach problems, enables faster, higher-quality output, and positions individuals to take on more responsibility. The principle I rely on: start small, measure rigorously, and let results guide adoption.
Responsible AI, Global AI Governance & Compliance, Published Author, Advisor.
Answered 3 months ago
We have to accept that AI is here to stay. Change, especially in the job market and our economy, is inevitable. AI skills are essential for working smarter, and companies recognize that AI is an indispensable part of a professional's toolkit for moving quickly and efficiently. As a leader in the space and a mentor for emerging talent, I've spoken to many college students about their fears of "AI taking their jobs." On a recent AI panel for the CSULB METRIC program, I talked about how, coming from a privacy background, AI initially terrified me, but I leaned into it. While working for a MAANG company, being an author, consulting, volunteering, and running a small business, I was always busy. As a professional multitasker, efficiency became a survival skill. I relied on AI to handle the mundane organizational tasks that used to drain me i.e. creating timelines, prioritizing lists, and editing content. Once I understood how to use AI (and updated my privacy settings), it became a vital resource to help me organize my business while launching privacy-safe voice assistants and image recognition tools. The most common question I get from college students today is, "What jobs are safe from AI?". My answer: "The ones who work on AI products and those in compliance." New jobs are emerging as older ones are optimized out of the market. AI regulation, like the EU AI Act and California's SB 53, is advancing as quickly as new AI startups. Want to be a software engineer? Pivot to machine learning engineering. Studying graphic design? Pick up AI design specialization. AI is here to stay, but we don't have to abandon our career goals, we need to pivot and leverage AI as a tool to grow in our careers.