Across sectors, professionals say AI is accelerating at a pace that makes standing still a career risk. One of the responses has been a wave of upskilling.
Across sectors, professionals say AI is accelerating at a pace that makes standing still a career risk. The response has been a wave of upskilling, not just in technical areas but also in human-centric skills AI can’t replicate.
For some founders, the arrival of AI has prompted a surprising pivot away from code and into fields machines still struggle to master.
“As a SaaS founder, I'm seeing AI rapidly change our industry. Instead of fighting it, I've decided to level up my skills in human-centered design—something AI can't quite nail,” said Nikita Sherbina, Co-Founder and CEO of AIScreen, a digital signage software company.
Sherbina recently began a service design certification to better connect technology with human behavior. The bet is that while AI can automate analytics and churn out content, only humans can grasp why users make certain choices.
That recalibration of leaning into creativity, empathy, and complex judgment has become a throughline for industries where rote tasks are being rapidly offloaded to machines.
For others, like David Hunt, Chief Operating Officer of Versys Media, the call to adapt was immediate and pragmatic.
“Honestly, survival,” Hunt said of his decision to invest in prompt engineering and applied data science courses. Clients were suddenly asking sophisticated questions about automation and AI, he explained, and standing still would have made him “irrelevant fast.”
Hunt’s focus is embedding large models like GPT into operational systems while making space for staff to concentrate on strategy and personalization. “I don’t want [AI] replacing people; I want it replacing the repetitive work that slows them down,” he said.
In marketing and publishing, the shake-up has been particularly jarring. Traditional team structures are dissolving, replaced by leaner setups that integrate AI at the core.
“I’ve gone from leading a team to becoming a one-person marketing department…and it’s working,” said Maria Edington, VP of Marketing at WizeCamel.com.
Rather than chasing certifications, Edington embraces experimentation—running AI-powered campaigns in real time. In her view, AI isn’t pushing marketers out but exposing who truly understands their craft.
“It’s going to separate real strategists from people who just ‘look good’ in meetings,” echoed Dwight Zahringer, founder of the digital agency Perfect Afternoon.
Zahringer, who has operated in SEO for over 20 years, now leans into AI for repetitive tasks like schema markup but positions himself as a strategist who knows where to trust (or ignore) machine output.
Not all upskilling is happening in boardrooms and dev shops. Erinn Everhart, a licensed marriage and family therapist in California, said she’s investing in advanced trauma certifications such as EMDR and IFS, even as clients’ expectations are shaped by AI-driven wellness apps.
“Parents struggle with kids addicted to AI-powered social platforms, while simultaneously expecting therapy to work like their ChatGPT interactions—fast and formulaic,” she said.
Everhart hopes AI can take over administrative paperwork, freeing her to do what “only humans can do—sitting with someone’s pain.”
Even in aerospace, AI is rewriting workflows. Chaudhry Awais Ahmed, Chief Editor at Tech Trend Tomorrow, said generative AI is now running optimization simulations that once required large teams and powerful computing clusters. The result: engineers are shifting from repetitive modeling to analysis and innovation.
The pattern is clear: AI is less about wholesale replacement than it is about making new fluency the benchmark.
For professionals across different fields, that urgency to adapt or become irrelevant has translated into certifications, retraining, and in some cases, entirely new career playbooks.
AI is changing what skills matter and for those willing to evolve, it may just open up more pathways than it closes.
