Moving from transactional to value-led sales is an HR challenge before it's a sales one. It demands hiring new profiles who can translate tech into business language. For existing teams, it's not just about training; it requires a deep assessment of whether current employees have the right skills and are in the right roles for the future.

As AI handles technical tasks, uniquely human skills like curiosity, empathy, and judgment become paramount. Leaders must adapt their hiring processes to screen for these non-replicable soft skills, which are becoming more valuable than traditional marketing competencies.

Don't hire based on today's job description. Proactively run AI impact assessments to project how a role will evolve over the next 12-18 months. This allows you to hire for durable, human-centric skills and plan how to reallocate the 30%+ of their future capacity that will be freed up by AI agents.

Companies once hired siloed 'digital experts,' a role that became obsolete as digital skills became universal. To avoid repeating this with AI, integrate technologists into current teams and upskill existing members rather than creating an isolated AI function that will fail to scale.

Anticipating that AI will automate baseline work of junior analysts, Temasek’s strategy is to push these employees to develop skills and perform at a level two grades above their current role. This preemptively adapts their talent development model for an AI-enabled world, focusing on higher-order thinking from day one.

As AI automates technical and mundane tasks, the economic value of those skills will decrease. The most critical roles will be leaders with high emotional intelligence whose function is to foster culture and manage the human teams that leverage AI. 'Human skills' will become the new premium in the workforce.

With AI agents automating raw code generation, an engineer's role is evolving beyond pure implementation. To stay valuable, engineers must now cultivate a deep understanding of business context and product taste to know *what* to build and *why*, not just *how*.

Successful AI integration is a change management challenge, not just a technical one. As AI automates routine tasks, organizations must strategically reinvest in their workforce by cultivating uniquely human skills like creativity, complex judgment, and nuanced problem-solving.

The critical barrier to AI adoption isn't technology, but workforce readiness. Beyond a business need, leaders have a moral—and in some regions, legal—responsibility to retrain every employee. This ensures people feel empowered, not afraid, and can act as the human control layer for AI systems.