“Parents want to know what their kids should study in the age of AI – curiosity, agency, ability to learn and adapt, diligence, resilience, accountability, trust, ethics and teamwork define winners in the age of AI more than knowledge.” – Marc Wilson – Global Advisors
Over the last few years, I have spent thousands of hours inside AI systems – not as a spectator, but as someone trying to make them do real work. Not toy demos. Not slideware. I’m talking about actual consulting workflows: research, synthesis, modeling, data extraction, and client delivery.
What that experience strips away is the illusion that the future belongs to people who simply “know how to use AI.”
Every week there is a new tool, a new model, a new framework. What looked like a hard-won advantage six months ago is now either automated or irrelevant. Prompt engineering and tool-specific workflows are being collapsed into the models themselves. These are transitory skills. They matter in the moment, but they do not compound.
What does compound is agency.
Agency is the ability to look at a messy, underspecified problem and decide it will not beat you. It is the instinct to decompose a system, to experiment, and to push past failure when there is no clear map. AI does not remove the need for that; it amplifies it. The people who get the most from these systems are not the ones who know the “right” prompts – they are the ones who iterate until the system produces the required outcome.
In practice, that looks different from what most people imagine. The most effective practitioners don’t ask, “What prompt should I use?”
They ask, “How do I get this result?”
They iterate. They swap tools. They reframe the problem. They are not embarrassed by trial-and-error or a hallucination because they aren’t outsourcing responsibility to the machine. They own the output.
Parents ask what their children should study for the “age of AI.” The question is understandable, but it misses the mark. Knowledge has never been more abundant. The marginal value of knowing one more thing is collapsing. What is becoming scarce is the ability to turn knowledge into action.
That is the core of agency:
-
Curiosity to explore and continuously learn and adapt.
-
Diligence is care about the details.
-
Resilience in the face of failures and constant change.
-
Accountability to own the outcome.
-
Ethics that focus on humanity.
- People who form trusted relationships.
These qualities are not “soft.” They are decisive.
Machines can write, code and reason at superhuman speed – the differentiator is not who has the most information – it is who takes responsibility for the outcome.
AI will reward the people who show up, take ownership and find a way through uncertainty. Everything else – including today’s fashionable technical skills – will be rewritten.
