Two of the most respected research bodies in the world arrived at the same conclusion last year from two different directions. I’ve gone back to revisit the research and want to hare some context as you settle into Q3 and eventually, year-end planning.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 and MIT Sloan’s EPOCH study, published in June 2025, are telling leaders the same thing: as AI accelerates, human skills are not becoming less relevant. They are becoming the edge.
The data has been available. The question is whether leaders are acting on it.
What the WEF Data Has Been Saying and How It’s Playing Out
The WEF Future of Jobs Report draws on surveys from employers representing more than 14 million workers globally and maps the skill landscape through 2030. The findings on human skills are not simply sprinkling on top, they are core theses of the report.
Empathy and active listening ranks #7 on WEF’s list of the most essential core skills for 2025, cited by 50% of employers surveyed. It sits alongside analytical thinking, resilience, creative thinking, and leadership and social influence…and right next to AI and big data literacy.
This is the list boards reference when setting talent strategy. Empathy is on it. And I have seen this play out among seasoned Board members in conversation after conversion about what they are demanding of their company leaders.
Even more striking: WEF partnered with Indeed to assess more than 2,800 granular skills for their capacity to be substituted by current generative AI. Skills rooted in human interaction, with empathy and active listening named explicitly, currently show no substitution potential whatsoever. The report calls them irreplaceable due to their “deeply human components.”
This is what I’ve been shouting from the rooftop. With AI, leaders who are bad at the people skills where have nowhere to hide. Due to our complex challenges ahead, we need leaders who can listen, model resilience, see different perspectives, course-correct when they are wrong, and inspire through change.
The skills climbing fastest in the rankings tell the fuller story. Between the 2023 and 2025 editions of the report, leadership and social influence jumped 22 percentage points in the share of employers identifying it as a core skill. Motivation and self-awareness climbed significantly as well. As technical tasks migrate to machines, the skills surging in value are the ones only a human being can deliver.
What MIT Named and Proved
MIT Sloan postdoctoral associate Isabella Loaiza and professor Roberto Rigobon took a different approach to the AI and workforce question, asking: “What human capabilities complement AI’s shortcomings?” The approach shifts the discussion from disruption and labor substitution toward human abilities. What skills do we need in combination to get the most out of our AI investments? “We don’t want to instill fear in people’s hearts,” Loaiza said. “We wanted to show how AI is going to complement workers.”
Their paper, published in June 2025, analyzed nearly 19,000 work tasks across approximately 950 job types and developed a framework for the human capabilities AI cannot replicate. They called it EPOCH:
Empathy and Emotional Intelligence.
Presence, Networking, and Connectedness.
Opinion, Judgment, and Ethics.
Creativity and Imagination.
Hope, Vision, and Leadership.
These are not soft skills in the dismissive sense of that phrase. As Loaiza and Rigobon write: “AI feels different because it threatens to replace capabilities deeply connected to our cognitive ability.”
And yet AI has clear limitations: it cannot make inferences from small datasets, struggles with problems that have more than two viable solutions, and cannot navigate decisions based on shared human experience or subjective belief.
On empathy specifically, the distinction the researchers draw is notable: “AI may be able to detect emotions, but humans can create a meaningful connection and share what the person is experiencing.” Detection is not connection. Simulation is not presence. That difference is the competitive edge we need right now.
The employment data validates the framework. All five EPOCH capability groups were associated with employment growth, with the largest impact coming from hope and opinion capabilities. New tasks being added to the U.S. labor database in 2024 carry higher EPOCH scores than tasks that are disappearing.
The labor market is actively selecting for human capabilities, not moving away from them.
“In a lot of fields workers can’t be fully replaced,” Loaiza said. “If you’re aiming for disruptive innovation or truly transformative business, humans have a huge role to play.”
The Both/And These Studies Are Describing
Both the WEF report and the MIT study land in the same place: the future of work is not human versus machine. It is human and machine, and the leaders and organizations who will thrive are the ones who develop both.
The WEF is explicit that workers must balance technical expertise and human-centered capabilities to compete through 2030.
MIT’s EPOCH framework was built specifically to identify where AI augments human work rather than replaces it, arguing that human-intensive tasks are the strongest candidates for augmentation precisely because they cannot be automated away.
This research describes the Both/And leadership model I coach, teach, and talk about: cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™. Leaders do not have to choose between being technically capable and deeply human.
The data is now making the case that choosing only one is the actual risk.
What This Means for the Next Generation of Workers
The stakes extend beyond current leaders. The same skills these studies identify as irreplaceable are precisely the ones that young people entering the workforce need to be developing right now. Empathy, judgment, presence, creative thinking, and the ability to inspire others toward a vision: these are not skills that get built in a semester. They are built over years of practice, feedback, and real human interaction.
Two recent Forbes articles I wrote, one for college gads and one for high school students, explore what this means specifically for the next generation.
The recap: technical literacy matters, but it is the human layer on top of it that will determine who rises, who leads, and who creates lasting value in an AI-saturated world.
The Decision in Front of Leaders
The research is not asking leaders to consider human skills. It is showing that organizations are actively prioritizing them, that AI cannot replicate them, and that the skills built on top of them are rising fastest in demand and employment growth.
Again, leaders without human skills will have nowhere to hide. Two of the world’s leading research institutions have now put that in writing that’s been around for a while. The only remaining question is what leaders choose to do with it.
Photo credit: Sasun Bughdaryan
