Industry to Educators: Teach Human Skills, Not Just AI
Source: Mike Kentz Substack Author: Mike Kentz Original source: https://mikekentz.substack.com/p/industry-to-educators-teach-human Published: 2026-06-22 Source type: essay
Private backup: the full article text is archived in the private repository at archives/articles/mikekentz-substack-com-industry-to-educators-teach-human.source.md. It is not published on the public Quartz site.
Summary
Mike Kentz reports a shift in employer-facing AI education discourse: after several years of executives urging schools to make AI and computer science education mandatory, industry leaders at education/workforce events are increasingly emphasizing durable “human” skills such as collaboration, resilience, communication, negotiation, public speaking, leadership, cross-functional judgment, and the ability to work in horizontal teams. The article does not reject AI literacy; instead, it treats employer demand for human capacities as a signal that future-ready education should be human-centered as well as AI-aware.
Pull quotes
Human skills as future-proof skills
“I can teach the tech skills, I can teach the insurance [domain-specific] skills…what we need is to figure out how to teach the human skills – how to teach future-proof skills that set an employee up for success no matter what domain they find themselves in.”
— Steve Jones, quoted by Mike Kentz
Horizontal work
“We need people to sense, think, collaborate, and design – to be in all those processes at once – and that comes down to group strategy and group decisioning in a way that we haven’t really done before.”
— Michael Griffiths, quoted by Mike Kentz
Big ideas
- AI literacy has to be taught inside real subjects
- Students need to bring the purpose; AI should not supply it for them
- AI-enabled knowledge-work transformation
Claims
- Industry signals are shifting from AI-tool proficiency toward durable human skills
- AI literacy should teach students what to do with AI, not just what to think about it
- AI adoption in schools is mostly a people-change problem
Key evidence and examples
- Kentz contrasts the 2025 open letter from more than 250 CEOs calling for mandatory AI and computer science education with 2026 conference comments emphasizing communication, collaboration, resilience, and leadership.
- AIG’s Steve Jones argues that domain-specific and technical skills can be taught by employers, while durable human skills are harder to hire for.
- Google education executive Steven Butschi names negotiation, public speaking, and leadership as especially important future skills.
- Deloitte’s Michael Griffiths describes a move toward more horizontal work structures where workers across fields need to sense, think, collaborate, and design together.
- Several examples point to experiential, interdisciplinary, and professional-studies models rather than AI-only programs as possible institutional responses.
Education relevance
Highly relevant for AI literacy strategy, higher education redesign, K–12 career readiness, professional learning, and district conversations about whether AI preparation should focus narrowly on tool fluency or more broadly on judgment, communication, and collaborative work.
Durability note
The specific executive comments are event-bound, but the durable contribution is the employer-side signal: as AI capabilities and tools change quickly, the educational target may shift toward capacities that help students adapt across tools, domains, and teams.