AI, AI, Oh? Once Dismissed Skills Are Now in Demand
For years, Silicon Valley's most powerful voices mocked the liberal arts. Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who ironically holds a philosophy degree from Stanford, called degrees like his own "antiquated debt-fueled luxury goods." Marc Andreessen quipped that the average English major was "fated to become a shoe salesman, hawking wares to former classmates who were lucky enough to have majored in math." Elon Musk told an audience at a 2020 technology conference, "You don't need college to learn stuff," then dismissed higher education as useful mainly for proving someone could complete assigned tasks.
The message from tech's billionaire class was consistent and confident: code is king, credentials are overrated, and the humanities are a financial mistake dressed up as intellectual virtue.
Ironically, the rapid spread of AI has quietly exposed exactly what was missing all along, and it isn't more coders. It's people who can think critically, reason carefully, and communicate precisely, skills gained by studying the liberal arts. The very skills the tech world ridiculed are now among the most urgently needed in the AI era. And some of the executives who built the most influential technology companies in the world had them all along.
What the Critics Missed
The dismissal of liberal arts education was always more rhetorical than rational. Consider Parker Harris, co-founder and Global CTO of Salesforce, one of the world's most valuable enterprise technology companies. Harris holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Middlebury College, a small liberal arts institution in Vermont. He is now leading Salesforce's AI strategy and navigating one of the most complex technological transitions in the company's history.
Stewart Butterfield, who co-founded Slack and sold it to Salesforce for billions, credits his success directly to his studies in philosophy at the University of Victoria. "Studying philosophy taught me two things," Butterfield has said. "I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings." That is not a soft skill. That is the operational infrastructure of effective leadership.
Susan Wojcicki, who built YouTube into the third-most-visited website on the internet, studied history and literature at Harvard before taking a single computer science elective in her senior year. Steve Jobs, the most celebrated product visionary in technology history, was unambiguous about where Apple's power came from: "It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing."
These are not exceptions. They are a pattern the dismissers chose not to see.
AI May Have Changed the Equation Permanently
The emergence of generative AI has triggered a wholesale reexamination of which human skills matter most. And the answer, increasingly, might be the ones machines cannot replicate.
AI can generate code, draft reports, analyze datasets, and simulate scenarios at speeds no human can match. What it cannot do is decide whether those outputs are right, ethical, or wise. A 2025 study from the ACM's CHI Conference found that knowledge workers who relied heavily on generative AI showed measurable reductions in critical thinking effort, precisely because the technology made thinking feel optional. That is a crisis in the making.
I recall a conversation years ago, when I was a consultant at BCG, in which another consultant was trumpeting that we could now run Monte Carlo analysis on the new Mac SE30s the firm had purchased. Up to that point, we were still using an HP12c for calculations. A partner asked the consultant to explain what happens in a Monte Carlo analysis after the data is input, and the consultant stumbled in the explanation. That’s when the partner said, “If you don’t know what happens inside the black box, then don’t ever use it with a client.”
MIT Sloan Management Review has identified the ability to think critically about AI output as one of the most urgent competencies for leaders today, noting that AI-generated responses must be checked for "reasoning, tone, and relevance, factors absent from AI models trained to output sets of numbers." The machine produces. The leader judges. Judgment is a skill that can be forged through exposure to history, philosophy, literature, and argument, not through writing functions and debugging loops.
Deloitte's 2024 research found that 82% of organizational leaders feel unprepared for the AI transition, yet adaptive leaders who invested in human-centered skills achieved 40% higher team performance. What makes a leader adaptive in an AI environment? The same qualities that have always made leaders effective: the ability to synthesize ambiguous information, communicate clearly under pressure, and make ethical decisions when the data alone cannot tell you what is right.
The Leadership Skills Liberal Arts Can Actually Build
The case for a liberal arts education is not nostalgia for the ivory tower. It is a practical argument about what leaders may need to do when they sit across from a board, lead a team through disruption, or decide whether to deploy an AI system that could affect thousands of employees.
Critical thinking, the ability to examine an argument, identify its weaknesses, and evaluate evidence, is exactly what's required to interrogate AI outputs before acting on them. Leaders who cannot do so could find themselves delegating their judgment to a machine and calling it efficiency.
Communication, the ability to translate complex ideas into language that moves people, is not diminished by AI. It is amplified. When AI generates the first draft, the leader's job is to determine whether it actually says what needs to be said. That requires a sophisticated feel for language, context, and audience that no algorithm has yet mastered.
Ethical reasoning, the ability to weigh competing values and navigate moral tradeoffs, may be the most urgent skill in the AI era. As AI systems influence decisions about hiring, lending, healthcare, and security, someone in the room must be capable of asking not just "does this work?" but "should we do this at all?" That question cannot be answered by a model. It can only be answered by a leader who has spent time grappling with ideas about justice, consequence, and human dignity.
The Reframe Leaders Need
The real conversation is not about whether to study code or poetry. It is about what kind of leader the AI era might reward. The evidence suggests it could favor leaders who can do what AI cannot: integrate. They must integrate technical fluency with ethical judgment, strategic vision with human empathy, and data literacy with the ability to tell a story that inspires action.
The tech leaders who dismissed the liberal arts built their companies during a period when execution speed was the primary competitive advantage. The leaders who might thrive going forward could be those who bring what speed cannot provide, the wisdom to know what to build, who it serves, and what it costs.
Stewart Butterfield learned to follow an argument to its conclusion. Parker Harris learned to read complex texts and uncover meaning beneath the surface. Steve Jobs learned that beauty and function are not opposites. None of them needed a VC to tell them the liberal arts were worth studying.
The machines are handling more of the execution. The question left standing, the one only a leader can answer, is the one the liberal arts have always asked.
What is this for, and is it worth doing?
Angelo Santinelli is the founder of Entrepreneurial Edge Executive Coaching and Advising and a strategic advisor to PE-backed and founder-led companies. He works with CEOs and executive teams on strategic execution, leadership development, and organizational performance.
