To thrive in an AI-powered workplace, professionals must proactively cultivate human-centric "power skills" like building strong relationships, preserving critical thinking, and embracing "hybrid intelligence"
Key highlights:
-
-
-
Human connection is now a competitive capability — Treat relationships as core infrastructure instead of cultural fluff by designing work to keep real collaboration, accountability, and regular face-to-face interaction at the center with AI in a supporting role.
-
Protect your judgment and meaning as “human-owned” — Start with independent frameworks and reasoning, then use AI to refine and stress-test; and schedule recurring “no-AI” blocks to keep analytical muscle and professional agency strong.
-
The winning model is hybrid intelligence — The standout professionals in 2026 will be those who are fluent in both human dynamics and AI assisted workflow.
-
-
Professional services work fundamentally relies on judgment, trust, and relationships. Clients engage firms for confidence and strategic guidance, while a good reputation in this sector develops through the consistent delivery of high-quality counsel. While AI can enhance these capabilities, these technologies may also erode professional value if permitted to displace the distinctly human elements that differentiate exceptional service.
The imperative for 2026 is to maintain full professional capability by embracing human strengths while leveraging technological tools. Consistent application of the following practices will protect and develop the competencies that AI cannot replicate.
Build your human connections muscle
In the near future, professionals may spend more time interacting with AI systems than they do with colleagues. Over time, AI creates opportunities to disengage from human interaction; and AI systems remain consistently agreeable, perpetually available, and never introduce tension into professional discourse.
For time-constrained professionals, this predictability may appear advantageous; however, this convenience carries a substantial cost. In professional services, relationships constitute essential infrastructure rather than supplementary benefits. When professional interaction shifts from human to machine interface, social acuity diminishes as professionals lose exposure to subtle human dynamics. Critical developmental experiences — including the ability to manage discomfort, resolve misunderstandings, and navigate the productive friction that builds capacity for maintaining and repairing strained relationships — become scarcer.
To preserve human connection capacity with intention, implement these measures:
-
-
- Prioritize work that requires genuine collaboration and shared accountability and keep AI as a supporting resource.
- Establish regular face-to-face interaction, both virtual and in-person, with colleagues to invest in relationship-building conversations that extend beyond project deliverables and timeline discussions.
- Actively engage in professionally challenging interactions, including those involving constructive feedback delivery and negotiation. These experiences maintain trust and prevent the gradual atrophy of human collaboration skills.
-
Protect your brain and your meaning at work
AI technologies offer substantial efficiency gains through automated drafting, summarization, and information analysis. However, excessive reliance on these capabilities may diminish the cognitive repetitions that maintain professional acuity. In professional services, intellectual capacity, which includes attention to detail and analytical reasoning, constitutes the primary asset. This capacity requires the ability to discern significance, interrogate underlying assumptions, and articulate complex tradeoffs with precision.
Delegating these cognitive tasks to AI systems daily may yield short-term efficiency while lowering costs, but this may lead to work becoming ambiguous and require less nuanced judgment. As a result, professional instincts may atrophy.
An additional consequence of AI overreliance involves the erosion of professional meaning and engagement. When AI systems generate the majority of intellectual output, professionals may risk becoming approvers rather than creators. Work devolves into review and authorization — a repetitive pattern that can lessen one’s connection to making a substantive professional contribution. Indeed, the role begins to resemble a production line of incremental validations rather than meaningful professional practice.
To avoid this, you should implement the following practices to preserve both intellectual rigor and a meaningful sense of agency over critical professional activities:
-
-
- Integrate deliberate cognitive exercises into weekly routines — Initiate substantive work with independent analysis — by establishing frameworks, identifying priorities, and constructing logic — before employing AI to refine structure, enhance clarity, and stress-test reasoning. Subsequently, critically evaluate AI-generated output by identifying omissions, examining underlying assumptions, and assessing potential errors.
- Establish dedicated periods for unassisted professional work — Schedule regular intervals for research, conceptual development, and drafting without AI support to ensure sustained development of analytical capacity and professional judgment.
- Anchor work to meaning and outcomes — Identify work of particular professional significance and maintain direct engagement with these tasks, again without AI assistance. Regularly reflect on the tangible impact of contributions, including the delivery of client value and the support of colleagues, in order to better sustain meaningful connection to professional purpose.
-
Hybrid intelligence is the future
The most effective professionals in 2026 will be those that are focused on their capacity to integrate human literacy with algorithmic literacy, which is a competency framework known as hybrid intelligence.
Human literacy remains the fundamental differentiator in professional services, encompassing the ability to interpret interpersonal dynamics, establish trust amid complexity, deliver constructive feedback with appropriate sensitivity, and maintain both self-awareness and relational intelligence.
Algorithmic literacy involves understanding the specific capabilities and limitations of AI tools, including honing a proficiency for output verification, tool evaluation, and sustained awareness of bias and risk considerations.
The combination of these two factors within hybrid intelligence can give professionals a potent way of fighting the accelerating cognitive deterioration and agency decay that some may experience with AI overuse.
Today, organizational mandates for AI adoption are becoming increasingly prevalent and will approach universality over the next few years. While firms compete through technological capability, competitive differentiation will ultimately derive from the human excellence of their professionals — a dynamic that will similarly shape individual career trajectories.
You can find out more about how a focus on power skills can help professionals in the workplace here
