How to prevent poor AI content leading your business down a rabbit hole
Written by Dan Parry • 2 April, 2026
Future Skills Article
How should human skills intersect with AI? Should employees use AI as much as possible, in the interests of efficiency? Or should they be cautious – and protect accuracy, reputation, and trust? How do leaders bridge the gap between human skills and artificial intelligence? Compelling evidence points to a clear, pragmatic solution.
Leaders are at a crossroads. Organisations are rapidly embedding AI while simultaneously trying to maintain human morale and engagement. Meanwhile, a looming skills gap, driven by AI, suggests that technological know-how is key. In fact, only investment in human skills – specifically critical thinking – can restrain AI’s risks and errors, and give a clear role for employees in making the most of AI’s potential.
In the early 2020s, the onset of AI pushed businesses into re-evaluating ‘soft skills’. Authentic teamwork, leadership, and client relationships needed more than something artificial. New value was placed on old-school human abilities. Nevertheless, a skills gap began to emerge.
In the mid-2020s, employees moved from casually working with AI to delegating entire tasks to it. Now that employees are shifting from simply collaborating with AI to assessing it, leaders are finding that an ability to evaluate output is essential for an ever-increasing percentage of the workforce.
In other words, AI creates a specific and widespread need for critical thinking. As we shall see, employers are investing in this more than any other skill. Demand is soaring – similar to, and perhaps because of, the demand for AI itself.
Critical thinking is not believing the first thing your brain tells you. It is the ability to step aside from immediate thoughts, reactions, and intentions – and assess them with the eye of a critic. It reduces hasty actions, ill-considered decisions, miscommunication, and ‘what have I done?’ moments.
Critical thinking means developing the confidence to judge content and either validate it or identify where it’s lacking. In effect, critical thinking is a form of risk management – for example, questioning a plan of action (whether your own or someone else’s) and smoothing its hazardous wrinkles.
Critical thinking enables wider reliance on AI, ensuring people can do more than write a casual prompt and make do with a casual answer. It encourages the ability to:
Critical thinking is the starting point for working effectively with AI. Without a workforce skilled in critical thinking, businesses may struggle to make the most of AI’s potential in the years to come.
AI, demographic shifts, geopolitical uncertainty, and the green transition are transforming the global labour market. In the next five years, jobs will be lost and others created, leading to an evolving demand for new skills.
Employers predict that nearly 40% of the core skills required today will be disrupted in the years through to 2030, particularly as AI moves from experimentation into workflows. If the world’s workforce was made up of 100 people, 59 would need training by 2030 – according to the latest Future of Jobs Report, a survey of 1,000 leading global employers from the World Economic Forum, (WEF, January 2025).
The WEF report found that 63% of employers believe a gap in skills is the biggest barrier to their business keeping pace with change. The report noted that among obstacles to AI adoption, the one most widely cited by employers (50%) was a lack of skills, among both managers and workers.
How do businesses plan to tackle this skills shortage? Upskilling is the most common workforce strategy, with 85% of employers prioritising this over hiring staff with new skills (70%) or reducing staff as their skills become less relevant (40%).
In 2025, critical thinking (also known as analytical thinking) was the most sought-after core skill in seven out of 10 companies, according to the WEF. This is supported by the 2026 Job Skills Report from online learning platform Coursera, which noted “the staggering year-on-year growth in critical thinking enrolments across all cohorts.”
Coursera found that “perhaps the most telling statistic in this entire report is the 185% year-over-year growth in critical thinking for learners focusing on AI.” Analytics company Lightcast noted that “eight of the 10 most sought-after skills in AI jobs are human capabilities, like critical thinking.”
The financial services sector is particularly exposed to AI, with 97% of employers expecting tech to transform their business by 2030, according to the WEF survey. To improve talent availability, 71% of employers in the industry are planning on investing in reskilling and upskilling.
Global consultancies are focusing on upskilling too. For PwC (June 2025), “AI is creating rapid change in the skills workers need to succeed in the workplace, with candidates now more likely to need to operate AI tools and demonstrate abilities such as critical thinking.” Meanwhile, KPMG’s new (March, 2026) intern programme focuses “less on technical aspects and more on critical thinking, data analysis, and drawing conclusions.”
As AI expands output, the workforce is expected to keep pace, monitoring and assessing content. This perhaps explains the rising demand for critical thinking – along with values that support it, like trust. Employers are seeking to trust their people to use AI effectively, meanwhile employees need to be able to trust their own judgement.
Enhanced trust is one of the key benefits of training in critical thinking. Others include the capacity to work alone, confidence in making decisions, and active collaboration (stress-testing ideas, not just passively writing them down). For 77% of employers, the biggest benefit of training is enhanced productivity, followed by stronger competitive edge (70%), and better retention (65%).
At Working Voices, our critical thinking training course explains that AI enables fluent and fast outputs that are well-structured and persuasive – but without human scrutiny they can easily drift into error. People without the skills to spot AI’s mistakes may rely on untested conclusions, leading to the risk of mistakes becoming scaled within their organisation.
AI cannot judge context in the way people can. It can’t weigh competing priorities, or understand the reputational cost of getting something wrong. Nor does it know when a suggested ‘solution’ isn’t actually practical. AI needs human leadership to keep things on track.
Critical thinking skills fit into an employee’s core capabilities. They are more than narrow technical knowledge, for example knowing how to manage a dataset. They are part of the experience of being a ‘rounded’ member of the team, which can make these skills hard to measure.
The WEF’s December 2025 report on skills suggests that leaders must “move beyond static, one-dimensional measures and assess the whole human, capturing how individuals think, adapt and apply their skills across diverse, real-world contexts.”
The WEF notes that human-centric skills grow best in environments that encourage experimentation, failure, feedback, and reflection. Effective critical thinking relies on a culture of respect. As employees evolve from AI collaborators to validators – managing content, accuracy, risk, and reputation – they need to be trusted in their work. And it’s easier to trust people who have been trained.
In the new world order, critical thinking is not optional – it’s the skill that keeps everything else on track. AI may generate answers, but only people can decide if they’re worth trusting.
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The founder and CEO of Working Voices, Nick Smallman has been at the top of his profession for 25 years. Advising global blue-chip clients on engagement, productivity, and retention, he counsels leaders on increasing revenue via simple cultural adjustments.
Overseeing the successful expansion of Working Voices across the UK, the US, Asia, and the Middle East, Nick supports the leadership and communication capabilities of clients in a wide range of sectors. In particular, he has advised companies such as JP Morgan, Barclays, Sony, Nomura, M&S, and Blackrock for more than 15 years.
Developing his reputation for thought leadership, in recent years Nick has been leading work on The Sustainable Human, the subject of his forthcoming book. A concept unique to Working Voices, The Sustainable Human offers a package of solutions focusing on leadership enablement, future skills, and cultural harmony.
Working closely with HR specialist Mercer, Nick has developed solutions to four key modern workplace challenges:
“I’m excited to share the conclusions of three years of research that, if implemented, can make an immediate practical difference to leaders and their organisations.”
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