Personality hires, rejoice. LinkedIn’s CEO said soft skills are undergoing a hard rebrand.
LinkedIn CEO Ryan Rozlansky said in an interview on the podcast “Tools and Weapons” that AI is automating everyday tasks. He argued that this change improves four human-centered skills: curiosity, courage, communication, and compassion.
“These turned out to be really, really important skills to do the job well,” the CEO said. “I think that focusing and focusing on these along with AI gives us an opportunity to dream big and paint a more positive picture of humans and technology moving forward together.”
Roslansky didn’t discuss specific numbers in the interview, but he gave a broad view of the job market based on LinkedIn data. His views stand in contrast to other voices in Silicon Valley (and a growing number of Americans).
Earlier this year, OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla predicted that today’s 5-year-olds will not need jobs. Boris Cherny, creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code, said the title “software engineer” will disappear this year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he wants highly paid engineers to spend half their paychecks on AI tokens.
Mr. Rozlansky’s vision is not all that unpleasant. Rather, he argues, AI is changing the way people think about work, encouraging workers to see their roles as “a collection of tasks” rather than a fixed title.
He categorizes these tasks into three buckets. There are things that AI can fully automate, things that AI can scale, and things that remain completely human, such as resolving conflicts, persuading teams, and setting strategies.
“These skills are important, but historically they’ve been talked about as soft skills,” Roslansky said. “I think things are going to be much better in the professional world because people are actually much better at these skills and have really honed their craft.”
As AI increasingly automates responsibilities, Roslansky said agents will be able to spend more time talking with colleagues and focus more on communication, judgment and emotional intelligence.
He said his thought process gave him a hopeful outlook on the future of AI. Still, he said he doesn’t have a crystal ball and could ultimately be wrong.
“Sometimes when we get stuck in the quagmire of technology, especially AI, and try to picture where this could go, it can lead us to dark places,” he said. “I believe humans play a very important role in shaping the direction of technology.”