We are living through a collapse in the longevity of skills. In a recent article for Forbes, tech analyst Joe McKendrick writes,

“Skills learned today may be obsolete within a couple of years, or even months.” Forbes, April 2024

The piece highlights how AI is rapidly compressing the “half-life” of many technical skills. What once remained relevant for a decade now erodes within 18–24 months. Even top performers find themselves scrambling to keep up as the tools and competencies around them evolve faster than traditional learning systems can respond. Meanwhile, a recent Harvard Business Review article reveals what organizations are turning to in the midst of this skill churn:

“In our analysis of more than 10,000 companies, the capabilities that predicted firm-level performance over time were not technical. They were behavioral: adaptability, collaboration, and decision-making under uncertainty.” HBR, Soft Skills Matter Now More Than Ever, August 2025

In other words: it’s not the hard skills that define advantage in the age of AI, it’s the human ones.

But even that framing may be too soft.

We are not just talking about “niceness,” or “empathy,” or “being a team player.” The challenge is much more structured and much more urgent.

What We’re Really Up Against

As AI systems become more integrated into decision-making, operations, and communication, the remaining human work becomes increasingly transactional, rather than less so. And yet, most professionals, and most organizations, are undertrained in managing even basic transactions:

• How expectations are set
• How cooperation is structured
• How resistance is identified and addressed
• How alignment is built
• How commitments are secured and fulfilled

What’s left, post-automation, is the invisible infrastructure of human exchange. And it’s falling apart.

The Pressure Is Mounting

McKendrick notes that “AI now enables employees to automate a portion of their work, reshaping the skill requirements of virtually every job.” But what happens when all the automatable work is, in fact, automated?

What remains is coordination. Negotiation. Agreement. Trust.

But as HBR’s research shows, these “soft” skills, ironically, are the ones companies struggle to train, assess, and integrate into performance systems.

“We were surprised,” the HBR authors write, “by how little attention was being paid to these skills relative to their predictive power.”

And that’s the danger. We are entering an era where the least visible skills are becoming the most essential. Not flashy. Not code. Not data dashboards. But the ability to complete a transaction, human to human, without dropping the ball.

The Open Question

So here we are:

• The technical skills decay faster than we can replace them
• The remaining work is fundamentally cooperative and transactional
• The research is clear: soft, behavioral, and adaptive skills now drive performance

And yet few organizations, teams, or individuals have developed a reliable framework to operate transactionally

And that leaves us with the challenge:

In a world dominated by AI, where efficiency is increasingly machine-driven, what’s left to master is us.

Author
John Patterson
Cofounder and CEO
INFLUENTIAL U
John Patterson steers the ship at Influential U, boldly challenging the traditional, often myopic views of success in our hyper-individualistic era. He isn’t afraid to poke fun at the archaic obsession with attributing every win or loss to single actors, calling out the industry’s penchant for oversimplified 'transactional' comprehension. Leading a crack team dedicated to innovating businesses and business ecosystems, John is all about integrating the personal with the whole system—because, let’s face it, no one wins alone.