According to Business Insider, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick – a prominent AI expert who’s consulted with JPMorgan, Google, and the White House – says young job-seekers should completely rethink their approach. Instead of focusing on AI skills that quickly become obsolete as the technology evolves, they should identify what specific tasks they’re actually good at. Mollick, author of “Co-Intelligence,” argues that AI can handle the parts of jobs where applicants struggle through “task distribution.” He emphasizes that knowing how to provide clear instructions to AI and having enough expertise to judge its output are becoming crucial abilities. This advice comes as AI threatens entry-level jobs across industries, making it especially challenging for Gen Z to find work.
Task mastery beats skill chasing
Here’s the thing about Mollick’s advice – it completely flips traditional career thinking on its head. We’ve been trained to think in terms of skills: learn Python, master Excel, get certified in whatever hot technology is trending. But Mollick’s saying that’s basically a losing game when AI can pick up those specific skills faster than you can master them. Instead, he’s suggesting we think about the actual work we do best. Are you great at synthesizing complex information? Excellent at client communication? Skilled at spotting patterns others miss? Those are the tasks you should build your career around, and let AI handle the rest.
The humanities still matter
What’s really interesting is Mollick’s emphasis on broad knowledge and humanities education. In an age where everyone’s rushing to technical skills, he’s basically saying the opposite – having a strong foundation in liberal arts might be your best defense against AI. Why? Because AI systems are trained on massive datasets, but they don’t actually understand context, nuance, or human experience the way someone with deep knowledge in specific areas does. Being able to judge whether AI’s output is actually good requires expertise that goes beyond just knowing how to prompt the machine. It requires actual domain knowledge.
Soft skills are the new hard skills
And this isn’t just theoretical – Indeed’s Hiring Lab is already seeing the shift. Communication, leadership, and organizational skills are becoming increasingly valuable precisely because they’re harder to automate. Think about it: AI can generate code, write reports, analyze data, but can it genuinely lead a team through a difficult transition? Can it navigate office politics? Can it inspire people during tough times? Probably not anytime soon. The irony is that as technical abilities become more automated, the human skills we’ve sometimes dismissed as “soft” are becoming the hardest and most valuable to find.
The urgency problem
Now here’s what worries me about all this. Mollick says he’s most concerned about whether we’re tackling job restructuring with enough urgency. And he’s right to be worried. We’re seeing entire entry-level positions disappear while our education system and hiring practices haven’t caught up. Companies are still posting job descriptions that look like they’re from 2019 while expecting candidates to have AI superpowers. There’s a massive disconnect happening, and young people are caught in the middle. The question isn’t whether jobs will change – they already are. The question is whether we’re preparing people for what comes next.
