AI did not become the ultimate tool and threat overnight. It took more than 35 years. When computers were first introduced to humankind. In 1951, Cambridge mathematician Professor Douglas Hartree said that all the complex calculations required to run in England would take about three “computers”. It was 1975, when Bill Gates challenged it, and the famous early mission for Microsoft came up as: “a computer on every desk and in every home”.
Accounting on computers dates back to 1986, the first release of accounting software Tally came in through Shyam Sunder Goenka and his son Bharat Goenka. There was a panic that all accountants, inventory managers and all clerks would be losing their jobs. What actually happened? All of them started using computers. More jobs were created. We became more efficient. Those who lost their jobs did not lose them due to tally. They lost it because they could not work on tally. Upgrading and learning are the name of the game.
How AI evolved
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Speech Processing
During the 1990s, to convert speech to text, we started with Dragon Naturally Speaking; training that model itself was a pain in the neck. It would take hours, and again, the efficiency wouldn’t be more than 80%. That part was also AI. Now, AI can understand and speak back in all languages spoken in the world.
Image Processing
Converting pictures into pixels and returning them to the pictures without any loss was also AI. Gradually, developers shifted their focus from hard rules to machine learning, IBM, and Deep Blue, which won the chess championship in 1997, and AI became the talk of the town.
Multi-Modal Big Data
Computers, which were first considered a tool and computer science, a skill, turned out to be a complete engineering branch. After 2012, the data exploded, and so did computing power. Big data analytics became the buzzword. Neural networks became handy. Relational database management systems appeared. Multimodal databases were introduced first by big data, and the scaling of the data was seen for the first time. This led to the unprecedented growth of possibilities in computers and the IT sectors. This was also AI in action.
LLM Models
AI, as the term is used, is the development of the capability of computers to perform tasks that need human intelligence, such as learning from data, recognising patterns, understanding languages, and making decisions. All this already happened in the last 70 years; we just didn’t realise that. However, the last part remained there to create insights out of the charts, tables and data available. The LLM models were introduced in November 2024, and we realised AI is here. It was already there for the last seven years growing quietly, and since then, there was no looking back. When that became handy, people realised that AI had appeared.
The entire world started working on it, and the models became advanced as they were trained day by day by thousands of people training them together. Now, the situation is that the entry-level jobs have reduced because of these trained models. Many layoffs have happened. The companies which have not laid off are just not recruiting. Staying ahead in this tide is possible only by curiosity, consistency, and experimentation. The panic was sure to follow.
Now, hundreds of tools appear every week. Existing LLM models keep revising themselves, and out of the four, i.e. GPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek, one becomes the winner every week. Your jobs will not disappear. They will be chipped off, re-sculpted and rewritten. Humans, however, have their own advantage. These 5 skills will keep you ahead of the times, always:
Five Key Skills to Master AI
Empathy
AI can never emulate the human part of it. For example, a teacher’s job has changed from being a knowledge holder to a facilitator of knowledge to a motivator. Learning from LLMs is not more than anything, but having a slate that talks back. The knowledge part will be one hundred per cent accurate, but no LLM can motivate a student. The way a dedicated faculty can.
Communication
As a communicator, AI can never make a language mistake, but it doesn’t know what to say in a given scenario and what not to say. As a negotiator, it can give you the best logic and the insights, but to understand when to bring out the last card and checkmate is a very humane skill.
Critical thinking & Innovation
As an innovator, you can think of new things, whereas AI can read thousands of papers and give its opinion in just a minute. Yeah, AI can do your 80% of routine tasks, but it cannot think about that crazy idea and that a unnatural leap.
AI can do the job, but you are the one who creates the prompt and the context, and that is possible only if you know your job well. Asking really intelligent questions has become much more important than ever before. your ability to form the right questions and check that the answers are sensible. That will be there in differentiator in the coming time.
Collaboration
Five AIs cannot come together and solve a problem. The way five humans from different walks of life can bring their perspectives together to solve a problem. Sonnet, GPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, they would like to win over each other and work independently, but would never accept each other’s capabilities. We, humans, have learned to be together in herds and societies and have won for ages.
Energy of a human presence
Think about an online webinar and an offline seminar. In an offline seminar, you can very well read the energy and aura of the people. There you can read the room. You can look at somebody’s eye and understand whether that person wants to talk to you or not. Empathy is the name of the game where we humans win.
Last, but not least, connecting the dots. Your ability to learn from a tour, feel some smell, carefully examine a specific painting, and bring the insights back into your business. Is something no AI can do. No AI can bring the vibration under the finger when you trim the guitar to the best of music-creating apps. That feels like meditation. Here, the output is not so important, but the journey is. The fulfilment comes from this journey.
So the answer lies in the 5 skills that are: your empathy, your communication, your critical thinking & Innovation, your collaboration, and your Energy of a human presence that come with the very individual experiences of life that make you what You Are! Use AI as a tool, and you become the master.
