The opportunities for applying AI are abundant, from content personalisation and rationalisation to continuous skill feedback, enterprise skill architectures, and more. However, the implications of AI and its capabilities have created so much noise that we have primarily focused on what AI can do. We have forgotten a critical component: how our distinctly human characteristics can amplify AI outputs.

My approach to AI is simple. We should leverage AI to increase human productivity and performance, not to replace humans. This Human+AI approach illuminates skills unique to humans and can only be mimicked by AI. When we use AI to augment human productivity instead of replacing it, we are required to be even more human than we might be otherwise, not less.

To be an AI-powered L&D professional, you need to cultivate five human-centric skills. These skills are not discrete; you may need several or all five skills to work together for any given task. By persistently developing these skills, L&D professionals can harness AI to enhance our work and truly elevate learning experiences, while ensuring that technology amplifies our humanity rather than diminishes it.

 

The Top 5 Skills That Make an AI-Powered L&D Professional

Curiosity and Creativity

Curiosity and creativity are perhaps the most uniquely human skills that AI cannot fully simulate. What does it mean to be curious? And why are curiosity and creativity so important in the Human+AI relationship?

Human curiosity is boundless. It is a blend of emotional and cognitive drivers to explore the unknown and innovate. AI alone cannot ponder and wrestle with existential questions or innovate from an internal drive. While AI can mimic certain aspects of curiosity, it does not possess the essence of curiosity as humans do. It’s one of the many areas where human intelligence and emotional depth remain distinct and irreplaceable. We cannot teach AI to be curious any more than we can ask it to experience love or heartbreak (AI can only summarise what it has learned about love and heartbreak).

What our human curiosity does is enable a dynamic Human+AI partnership. Similarly, AI can augment human creativity in this alliance but cannot replace the unique qualities that human creativity brings to the table.

Humans bring an open, spontaneous, and culturally relevant lens to creative outputs. Creativity is deeply intertwined with the human experience, emotions, and social context, which AI does not inherently possess. What AI is really good at, is scaling the creative process.

AI can generate a range of ideas, concepts, components, and iterations. Still, the human side of creativity will practice empathy by taking those inputs and crafting them into the most resonant, inspiring, and engaging learning experiences for other humans. AI can be a tool that serves our curiosity, but it cannot replace the uniquely human experiences of wondering, discovering, evolving, and innovating.

If you were to use AI to create a training course for your employees, you would need to first deeply understand your learners and consider what will resonate with them. Once you have been curious about your learner’s needs and have created a framework for your course, you can use AI to generate content by feeding it queries specific to your needs. You cannot simply ask AI to ‘create a course on executive presence for leaders’. You must know what your needs are and how to explain them. This process also involves critical thinking and clear communication.

 

Critical Thinking

Humans and AI have different strengths when it comes to critical thinking. In many ways, this is the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Artificial intelligence is good at making data-driven decisions and quickly processing vast amounts of information. Wisdom, on the other hand, involves a deeper understanding of human nature and life experience.

Humans and AI can complement each other by leveraging both wisdom and vast amounts of intelligence. The key here is that humans must be able to facilitate AI and develop their wisdom through lived experiences. While AI can assist by providing information, humans must use prompts to identify relevant details and sift through AI-generated content. Human critical thinking guides AI capabilities in the right direction. For example, before ever using an AI tool to help you create your leadership course on executive presence, you need to already be aware of what problem the learning experience will be solving. You must think critically about why each piece of content within the course is valued and how it relates to your learners.

Discerning the difference between the reality of something AI generates and your expectation of it is crucial to producing learning content. AI can take a holistic view of several moving parts and detect the differences and similarities between them. What it cannot do is explain or understand what those differences are, why they matter to the situation at hand, and whether you should respond to them or not. All in the context of your learning goals.

 

Collaboration and Clear Communication

AI is excellent at generating content from thoughtful queries and unravelling connections in large data sets. Our communication with AI must be as clear as possible in both situations. This includes prompting AI with thoughtful language and feeding it with organised, well-structured data.

AI has enabled us to quickly generate so much content. This makes it our responsibility to discern what is necessary, useful and intriguing, and to facilitate future collaboration and communication. AI is a tool. The goal is to integrate it seamlessly, not to isolate or diminish collaboration but to enhance shared human experiences.

As AI becomes more integral to our workflows, collaboration will become a means to connect human capabilities to achieve what AI alone cannot. Many fear that collaboration will diminish as AI becomes more widespread. As our workflows become more automated, the onus is on us humans to embrace strategic collaboration as much as possible to align goals, foster growth and leverage innovation.

It takes more than one person to generate impactful outcomes and strategic collaboration ensures that AI enhances human potential rather than supplanting it.

 

Nurturing Uniquely Human Skills in the Age of AI

AI is good at many tasks, especially time-consuming ones. It can and will profoundly impact L&D professionals as time goes on. As we implement AI into our workflows, uniquely human skills will be in even higher demand and our focus needs to shift from ‘AI as a technology’ to ‘humans as adopters’.

AI may possess intelligence, but wisdom—gained through a life of thoughtful curiosity, collaboration, and personal experiences—remains distinctly human and needs to be continuously developed.

 

Matt Donovan 

Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at GP Strategies