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Here’s how to upskill for the age of AI.
Years ago, I cold-called the founder of Avid Technology looking for a job. I had just spent a summer selling dictionaries door to door, so making a cold call didn’t scare me. But his reaction did.
“You seem uniquely unqualified for a career in technology,” Bill Warner told me. “You went to prep school, studied liberal arts at Trinity, and then went to HBS.”
I disagreed, politely. I told him my liberal arts education had trained me to learn new things fast, and I promised to work hard, ask good questions, and stay curious. He hired me. I knew nothing about video editing technology, but I kept my word and learned quickly. A few years later I was running Avid’s business across Asia and learning Japanese.
I have been betting on the liberal arts ever since. In the age of AI, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s the smartest bet a young person, or a founder, can make.
I said as much this spring, when I gave the commencement address at Trinity College, my alma mater. My message to the graduating class was simple: Be optimistic. You already have the skills you need to thrive.
Don’t optimize for the wrong skills
The standard advice to new grads is to load up on hard technical skills. Learn to code, study data science, become “AI-proof.” It sounds logical, but it’s exactly backwards.
AI is best suited at the codifiable work: crunching data, writing code, and retrieving facts. As that execution gets cheap, its value falls. What becomes invaluable is everything AI can’t do on its own: judgment, taste, communication, creativity, and the ability to lead other people.
Those are not soft skills. They’re the moneymakers, and they’re exactly what a liberal arts education is built to develop.
Prepare for leadership and entrepreneurship
Here’s the good news: A liberal arts foundation opens two doors, not one.
The first is the traditional path into leadership. I’ve hired liberal arts grads for four decades and have rarely been disappointed. They write well, think creatively, ask great questions, and work well on a team. I’ve always valued their EQ as much as their IQ. Those are exactly the traits that get people promoted, put in charge of teams, and trusted to run companies. As AI takes over more of the execution, judgment and people skills become the job, and liberal arts grads have a head start.
The second door is entrepreneurship, and it’s swinging wide open. Americans filed a record 21 million new business applications from 2021 through 2024, and another 5.62 million in 2025 alone. Starting a company is becoming a mainstream path, not the brave exception.
AI is pouring fuel on that fire by knocking down the technical barrier to building. Before AI, less than 1 percent of the U.S. workforce wrote software. Now anyone can spin up an app over a weekend.
But if anyone can build, building is no longer the moat. The moat becomes the human stuff: spotting the real problem, telling a story people believe, and understanding a customer well enough to earn their trust. Founders live and die on communication, creativity, judgment, and resilience. None of that is technical. All of it is liberal arts.
Two paths, same foundation. Whether you want to climb the ladder or build something of your own, a liberal arts education prepares you for both.
How to upskill for the age of AI
You don’t need a specific degree to build liberal arts skills. You need a plan. Here’s where I would start:
1. Become a great communicator. Clear writing is clear thinking, and it’s now the fastest way to turn AI output into action. The best way to get better is to practice and ask for feedback.
2. Learn the AI tools, then “out-judge” them. Let the machine draft. You decide what’s actually good. Discernment is the edge.
3. Read widely, especially outside your field. History, literature, and philosophy build the context and pattern recognition AI does not have.
4. Treat curiosity as a job. The people who keep learning will keep winning.
AI will change how we work in countless ways. It will not change this: We will always need smart, thoughtful humans leading the way.
The liberal arts were never impractical. In the age of AI, they might be the most practical education of all.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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