AI management an essential skill for future business leaders: experts
TIANJIN, CHINA — As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the business landscape, leaders across industries are preparing for a future where managing AI agents—digital workers capable of performing complex tasks—will be as essential as managing human teams.
According to the World Economic Forum, employers expect that 39% of key skills required in the job market will change by 2030, with AI management at the forefront.
Wang Guanchun, Chairman and CEO of Laiye, a company specializing in AI agents, highlighted this shift at the World Economic Forum’s ‘Summer Davos’ event in China.
“Very soon, I think the valuation metric for a good manager will be: How many digital workers can you manage? That’s a different skill set. It’s about how you can prompt your agents to do the best work they can do,” Wang said, emphasizing the importance of effective communication with AI systems.
Essential skills for managing AI agents
Prompting and verification
Ayumi Moore Aoki, founder and CEO of Women in Tech Global, stressed that prompting—defining clear, comprehensible questions for AI—is now a core managerial skill.
But she warned, “You have to verify the answer. Don’t take anything that’s just given to you as if it were the truth. Check the answer and check the data where the answer was from. I know it’s a lot of work, but honestly, it’s so important”.
Trust, training, and oversight
Babak Hodjat, CTO AI at Cognizant, underscored the need for leaders to learn boundaries of trust with AI: “I think the most important skill is going to be getting over our fear and being able to express what we expect from these systems and also to learn that boundary of trust. So how much and when can we trust these systems?”
He added that as AI improves, the risk of over-trusting these systems grows, making governance and oversight critical.
Jarah Euston, CEO and Co-Founder of WorkWhile, reminded leaders that “an AI agent is essentially just ‘a piece of code’,” and that its effectiveness depends on training and continuous oversight.
“As a manager, you want to leverage the AI to make you and your team more productive, but you constantly have to be checking, iterating and training your tools to get the most out of them.”
Soft skills remain vital
While technological skills are increasingly vital, soft skills such as creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, and empathy are also rising in importance.
“AI is just prediction, there’s no ghost behind the machine. It’s just a formula of prediction. Whatever results they give, the human has to decide whether that answer is ethical, if it really represents society and if it represents the culture and the values of the company,” said Moore Aoki, pointing out that discernment and empathy remain uniquely human strengths.
