To celebrate the launch of LinkedIn’s first ever book, Open to Work: How To Get Ahead In The Age of AI, Tim Clancy from LinkedIn is offering Little Grey Cells members a free, hands‑on 60‑minute workshop to help their teams rethink how they work and stay relevant in the age of AI.
A lot of people are spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what technical skills they need to develop in AI-first world of work. Should I get better at agent building? Do I need to learn how to write better prompts? Do I need to be able to vibe code? This naturally leads people to question which tools they need to learn, or even spend their own money on subscriptions to get an edge.
Developing strong foundational AI skills is important. This will be table stakes in every job interview you go to from now. If you aren’t looking for a new job, at very best expect some raised eyebrows if you don’t have the AI basics nailed.
What people are missing
However, this way of thinking misses something very important. It is your ability to seamlessly blend technical basics with exceptional human skills is what will matter most in the world of work from now on. If we spend all our time only getting better at the technical aspects of AI, an ever-increasing amount of that work will be done autonomously by AI (or by someone willing to do it at a lower cost).
So the real question is: What are the human skills that AI can never replace that? And how can we spend more time using them?
What sets people apart: The 5Cs
LinkedIn codified this idea in Open To Work: How To Get Ahead in the Age of AI. The ability to be creative, compassionate, communicative, curious, and courageous is what sets people apart.
Creativity generates new ideas.
Compassion helps us understand and connect with others.
Communication makes complex things simple and human.
Curiosity drives better questions.
Courage pushes us to make decisions, take risks, and challenge the status quo.
Without these, there is a risk we become “machine operators” — turning jobs into interactions with AI tools, without adding imagination, judgment, or originality.
How to stay in control
The key to controlling your career in an AI-driven world is therefore to be deliberate and intentional about how you use AI. Delegate simple and repeatable tasks to AI. Use it to create bandwidth. Then invest that time into developing and using the human skills that add value no machine can replicate.
For managers who are looking to upskill their teams and increase AI usage, this is the key insight:
we need to teach people this mindset in order to both unlock their true human potential and inspire them to get better at the technical aspects. Mindset leads technique
Putting it into practice
This is the core theme of the Open To Workshops, 60-minute sessions where teams spend an hour using a simple framework to learn how to think about deliberating delegating work to AI to create more time to use their human skills. I’m offering to run this for free to any teams represented in Little Grey Cells. To learn more, get in touch: [email protected]
