Want to hire the best “AI native” people? Look out for these traits
Written by AI Transformation & Leadership Consultant Ilari Viippola.
Companies have spent the last few years hiring people who are “AI native”. If you, as a leader, want to drive true transformation, you’re probably looking for the wrong kind of “AI native”. Even though investing in AI technology is important right now, the true business value is in the people doing the actual transformation. So, what kind of people should you look for?
Why now, why this?
Two viewpoints crossed my desktop in June and July that pointed out really well the current struggles companies have in recruiting people that can drive AI transformation for real.
The first, from Harvard Business Review, looked at what AI adoption is actually doing to the middle of an organisation. A lot of different tools are getting rolled out, and the C-level is desperately looking for efficiency gains. The manager layer has inherited a second job nobody told them about: checking what the AI model produced, coaching a team through work that now looks different every week, and holding quality steady with no more time and no more people. The firms seeing real returns, the research found, are the ones investing in that middle layer, not the ones thinning it out on the assumption the software has made it redundant.
The second came from a very different direction. A New York finance firm told the Financial Times it had stopped chasing the "AI-native" graduates it used to want, because their thinking was turning out alarmingly shallow, and had started combing through humanities students instead. Around the same time the New York Times noticed philosophy majors quietly becoming employable again. The thread is not that AI made people stupid. It is that once the machine writes the first draft, the value moves to the person who can tell whether the draft is any good, and that expertise still matters despite thorough Claude skills.
Tech is important, people is the real work
Put the two together and the picture is actually quite clear. The technology part is largely handled, assuming you’ve actually executed it properly. What is not handled is what happens to the people: who checks the work, who is trusted to decide, who carries the quality when the output is instant and endless. That is as real work of AI transformation as building the technology layer, but the real struggle is that the human and psychological side of things rarely make the roadmap.
As an AI consultancy we spend a lot of our time exactly here. Not inside the models, but in the room helping the management layer work out what it is now that the people should understand and handle to keep the transformation going.
A diverse set of people working together is still key in any AI Transformation.
What you should be looking for
As it has become very clear that you can’t do AI transformation without humans, it’s a fair question to ask: what are the skills and qualities you should be looking for when recruiting people in the AI age? Drawing from both experience and the recent articles, I would say the top 3 qualities would be:
Attitude. Forward-leaning people who are willing to do the work, regardless of their title or position in the organisation are the ones who get things started amidst uncertainty. This is something that can rarely be taught or acquired. Fortunately, the desired attitude is quite easy to spot if you possess the second quality on this list.
Understanding human behaviour. The thing most forget in transformation is creating a feeling of control and predictability. Especially when looking for managers and leaders, understanding how people get excited and what are the underlying motives for people to start any transformation is a really important skill, as processes and the actual work changes constantly. This – contrary to the former – can be taught, and look for people who have studied e.g. psychology or social sciences.
Conceptual thinking. When challenges are complex and require applying both technical and psychological solutions, you need to have people who can conceptualise. I.e. people who know how to look for small details that can act as catalysts either for a bigger picture or inspiration. Outside of corporate life, we usually call these people something like artists, philosophers or designers.
The question worth sitting with is not whether your AI works. It is whether you have a diverse enough setup of people in place to steer and handle what AI produces. AI will do some or even most of some work, but by the looks of it, not everything for a very long time. It’s also worth understanding that as we don’t know where the world is heading and what skills are useful in the future, maintaining a diverse skillset workforce is your super power.
P.S. Renessai is doing great, and we think a lot of it has got to do with our diverse team. We have Social Scientists, Engineers (MSc), MBAs, and Arts Majors – all working together.
