We spent years being told that technical people were the smartest people in the room. The builders, the coders, the back-end architects. If you didn't understand the infrastructure, you were somehow less equipped for the future. Turns out that's the job being replaced the fastest. And the skill nobody's been talking about, the one that's actually going to matter, is one most senior leaders have been building their entire careers without anyone calling it by its proper name.

I run a creative production studio, and lead AI workshops. I'm part of the ecosystem producing the newsletters, the LinkedIn threads, the explainer content that senior leaders are consuming right now trying to stay across it all. And almost everything in that content is about tools, outputs, workflows, adoption rates.

What it almost never addresses is the deeper question: which human capabilities become more valuable as AI scales, not less?

Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, whose chips power every AI product you've ever used, answered that question in a way really left me thinking. He described the future's most valuable professional as someone who sits at the intersection of technical awareness and human empathy. Someone who can infer the unspoken, see around corners, sense that something's off before the data confirms it. Someone, in his words, who can” feel” the vibe.

Not write code. Not master a tool stack. Feel the vibe and read the room. I guess it seems obvious when you think about it.

Boris Cherny, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, one of the world's most advanced AI companies, recently shared that he and most of his team haven’t written a single line of code in over two months. Everything is written by AI, and overseen by humans. And he's not alone: when I started doing some digging for this article, I found that company-wide, between 70 and 90 percent of all code at Anthropic is now AI-generated. They've also started recruiting “generalists” over specialists, because the traditional technical execution skills matter far less when AI handles the execution. So whilst the world is full of “AI” hype, do we actually need to go back to the pure basics of what makes us good leaders instead? The human stuff.

Because the skill that defined "smart" for a generation is being automated, at the very companies doing the automating. So what's left?

I believe it’s EQ; Emotional Intelligence. Something that got ignored, felt like a ‘nice to have’, but according to Huang, it’s the thing that will define us as leaders of these companies. 

Let’s go back to his definition; sensing other people, inferring what's unspoken in a room, seeing around corners, keeping an ear to the ground when it comes to culture, feeling when something is off before the data confirms it. It’s getting kind of witchy, and I'm here for it.

But honestly, emotional intelligence is the MVP (Most Valuable Player)  in our AI tool stack.

And it is genuinely, not figuratively, the one thing AI cannot replicate. Models can process data and pattern-match at scale. They cannot read a stakeholder who isn't saying what they actually mean. They cannot sense that a brief is fundamentally wrong before a word of work has been done on it. They cannot feel the room.

I've been making brand content using AI since before most agencies had a policy on it. I worked on Channel 4's first AI-powered brand partnership ad in May 2025, and what surprised me most wasn't the capability of the technology, it was how much the human stuff mattered. Knowing what a brand actually needed, understanding the audience and more than anything, understanding the stakes and risks of making this piece of work for a company like Channel 4. 

And that’s where brand leaders really need to shine, and will stand out. Use your judgment, look around, use your EQ. That's the thing you've been building your whole career and now in this mad new world, is needed more than ever,

The leaders best navigating AI transformation right now aren't the most technically literate people in the room. They're the ones who understand AI well enough to direct it with confidence, and who bring their judgment into the process rather than outsourcing it entirely. They're the ones who can look at an output and say ‘this is close, but it's not right, and here's why’ and actually mean something specific by that.

That skill has always mattered. But it matters more now, because the volume of content being produced is increasing at speed and the editorial judgment behind it often isn't keeping pace. Someone has to be the person who knows. Someone has to be the person in the room who can feel when something is off.

You don't need to learn to code. You never did. But you do need to get curious enough about these tools to have a genuine point of view on them, understand where they fit in, and where they don’t because right now a lot of senior people are delegating that thinking downward and then wondering why the outputs don't feel right.

The brief still matters. The instinct still matters. The ability to look at something and know, before you can fully explain it, that something isn't working: that is more valuable now than it's ever been.

Jensen Huang didn't say the future belongs to the most technical people in the room. He said it belongs to people who can infer the unspoken. See around corners. Read a room.

So now more than ever, trust your judgment. Trust your spidey senses and lead with the human stuff. Turns out, that's always been the job.