Artificial intelligence may seem like a more affordable alternative to employing a robust staff, but investing in a team of living, breathing individuals—and in developing their soft skills—may still be pivotal to your organization’s continued success.

In recent years, AI has become a monumental component of the business sphere. With its range of lightning-fast capabilities, including analyzing data, automating tasks, and crafting professional text, it has been integrated into day-to-day processes across various industries, even for those outside the tech realm. It may, therefore, tempt you as a business leader to embrace this tool wholeheartedly, entrusting it with an indiscriminate majority of workday tasks.

However, AI can’t do it all—and your organization’s success may hinge on the human touch that bots simply can’t recreate. Check out some of this technology’s most glaring limitations, the employee soft skills that ultimately outshine it, and the steps you can take to maximize your team’s irreplaceable strengths.

Customer service

Those who have struggled with a digital assistant on a customer service call know well enough that AI isn’t necessarily suited for verbal interaction. “Representative!” they may shout, only to be misunderstood, rerouted to a different set of prompts, or simply disconnected. It’s evident, then, that while chatbots and other AI customer-service tools can deftly handle straightforward inquiries, virtually anything more complex exceeds their capabilities. These cybersystems operate based on algorithms and data and thus lack the capacity for compassion and emotional intelligence, preventing them from understanding social cues like veiled frustration. They’re also unable to provide any genuine quality assurance or direct solutions to nuanced concerns, such as comparing different product offerings.

Ultimately, top-notch customer service requires the kind of warm, interpersonal connection that only a human employee can provide. (And the ability to actually comprehend human speech doesn’t hurt either.) Soft skills like empathy, active listening, and strong nonverbal communication can more effectively help clients through an issue and address their distress or irritation. This can, in turn, cultivate trust and loyalty to build and maintain client relationships that keep them coming back to your business.

For this reason, fostering these abilities in your client-facing employees is crucial for your business’s long-term growth. To do this, assess their performance by meeting regularly with all department managers and reading reviews on social media. Follow that up with occasional training sessions to educate them about listening to clients’ needs intently, handling irate customers deftly, and communicating solutions courteously.

All that said, you may be able to address increasing demands such as high call volume through the use of AI chatbots, which can field basic concerns and address common requests like inquiries about your operating hours. But ensure that interpersonal interaction is always an option, especially when a customer’s needs exceed automation’s strengths.

Creative work

While generative AI services excel at retrieving, processing, and analyzing data, they lack the spark of creativity and ingenuity only strong employees possess. Take AI-generated art, for example, which crafts images by pulling data from existing digital assets (including other bot-produced artwork), resulting in imagery that is littered with visual errors or even appears downright comical. Automated text by systems like OpenAI, meanwhile, often suffers from repetitive or nonsensical language. Worse, both of these services have faced controversies such as factual inaccuracies and the wrongful re-use of copyrighted materials.

In other words, be mindful of your use of AI when it comes to creative tasks or projects. This tool can assist by generating data-driven insights and automating repetitive tasks, but dreaming up unique ideas, crafting compelling narratives, and leveraging persuasive language will always remain human endeavors, even if employee production is lengthier and more labor intensive. These irreplaceable talents are vital for developing electrifying marketing campaigns, designing aesthetically pleasing products, and crafting engaging verbiage that can resonate with your target audience and hook their attention.

So whether you’re looking to fill a creative role or enhance the team you currently have, consider how you could invest more in these individuals to spur productivity and produce continually innovative material. For example, ask what type of environment may best nurture their spark, perhaps allowing them to operate remotely as desired so they can produce projects outside the confines of an office setting. Or enroll them in seminars and classes led by prominent creatives to help inspire their vision.

Of course, human efforts will still require scrutiny—employees are, like AI, capable of making fact-checking errors or otherwise producing subpar work. But they are also more adept at strengthening their skills based on constructive critique. Therefore, one of the greatest ways that you can reap excellent results from your creative teams is by implementing a system of ongoing collaboration, open communication, and regular feedback.

Leadership skills

There’s no underestimating AI’s ultraefficient data analysis capabilities. However, human staff is essential for crafting powerful business strategies based on these analytics. So while you may turn to automated services to fetch information such as your ROI on a specific marketing campaign, you should lean on your team members to interpret such details, brainstorm solutions, and ultimately make decisions that AI might not be equipped to handle.

For instance, how can you address customer complaints about slow service times or improve the clickthrough rates on your marketing emails? What approaches could you take to better contend with competing businesses that have rolled out new products or services? AI might be able to offer up some broad recommendations, but finding ideas worth executing as part of your business strategy will likely require some creative thinking—something that is, as noted, simply outside the competencies of machinery.

Look for team members who frequently step up with fresh perspectives, solutions, or tactics, and consider positioning them in leadership roles where they can apply these strengths with impact. For better results, you could also enroll these outstanding individuals in professional courses where they can develop the various soft skills required of effective leaders, including business communication and strategy implementation. You may even choose to invite managers in training to shadow you on the job.

These tasks of scrutinizing your team and preparing them to step into leadership positions yet again exceed AI’s capabilities. Though some accessible adaptive-learning programs can streamline employee training, the best way to identify standout performers, foster their talents, and place them in roles where they can shine is to rely on your own proficiencies and those of your current management team.

Preserving the workforce

AI can unquestionably offer unique benefits to your organization. But as with managing employees, executing such tools properly depends on you being realistic about their limitations as well as their strengths. As of now, they fail to fully replace the key soft skills of talented human staff: emotional intelligence, contextual understanding, creativity, and innovation. So avoid the temptation to turn to AI for its sheer speed and instead retain and invest in a talented team of human employees. Automation’s ultimate promise is saving you time and money, but an evident decline in quality may cost you more in the end.

TAKE ACTION:
Assess your organization’s most pressing needs, then consider how your employees’ soft skills—and even your own—could present viable solutions.