Why Human Experience Still Wins in the AI Era

The fire’s crackling low tonight, casting that warm, steady glow across the room. Blue jeans, flannel-pull up a chair-maybe a good cigar if that’s your thing. We’re not here for stiff lectures or casual rambles. This is just one mentor sharing what he’s seen, what he’s learned, and what still matters when the world changes faster than we can sometimes keep up.

Let’s start where this whole conversation began: that IBM announcement from Friday. A $240 billion company, the kind that’s supposed to be the bellwether for where tech is headed, flips the script. Their CHRO, Nickle LaMoreaux, stands up at a summit and says they’re tripling entry-level hiring this year-yes, for software developers, HR roles, the very positions everyone was told AI would swallow whole. Why? Because they’ve hit the wall on what AI can truly replace. It handles the routine 34 hours a week of junior coding just fine, but the real work-the collaboration with clients, the cross-team coordination, the judgment calls that turn raw output into something valuable-still needs a human who knows what the end result is supposed to look like.

This echoes what Cognizant’s Ravi Kumar has been saying for months: AI doesn’t shrink the pyramid; it broadens the base. They’re planning to bring on 24,000–25,000 fresh graduates in 2026, up nearly 20% from last year, pulling in liberal arts folks alongside the engineers because AI lets young talent punch above their weight. They “bike in the Tour de France” while the rest of us are still learning to ride. The message is clear: Gen Z isn’t being displaced en masse. The jobs are evolving-less drudgery, more direction, more human elements like creativity, ethics, and teamwork. The ones who thrive will stack AI fluency on top of durable skills: asking better questions, spotting biases in outputs, communicating intent clearly, and steering the tools toward outcomes that matter.

Now, let me tell you a story that ties right into this-one I’ve carried for decades, and one that explains why I’m still standing in the middle of this storm, not swept away.

Back in the mid-90s, I was working at UTA Engineering Television as technical director and webmaster-wearing a lot of hats in a small operation. One of the professors I crossed paths with was Bill Askew, an EE faculty member and Professional Engineer who taught a graduate course called Engineering Management. Bill wasn’t your average academic. He’d been a UDT (Underwater Demolition Team, the forerunners of the SEALs) in World War II, then went on to Texas Instruments, working closely with Jack Kilby during the invention of the integrated circuit. The man had stories-real ones, told with the quiet authority of someone who’d lived them.

What he taught in that classroom wasn’t in any textbook or syllabus. It wasn’t circuit diagrams or management matrices. It was how to communicate clearly under pressure, how to function on a project team without ego getting in the way, how to underpromise and overdeliver by setting realistic expectations and then following through-no excuses. These were the things that separated competent engineers from the ones people trusted with the big problems.

I took those lessons with me when I stepped into adjunct teaching. Over the years, I taught graduate courses in technology management and related fields. I noticed the students getting younger-more coming straight from undergrad, less life under their belts. What started as sneaking in anecdotes from the field became full lectures. In Foundations of Technology Management, group deliverables weren’t just assignments anymore; they were real-world challenges designed to force collaboration, expectation management, and follow-through. I wanted them to learn what Bill had shown me: that the technical piece is important, but the human piece-knowing how to work with people, how to deliver when it counts-is what makes the difference.

Fast-forward to today. My career has stretched long enough that I can draw from those same wells, sometimes with a little embellishment for the sake of a good story-se non è vero, è ben trovato. In my current role, I’m often in a mentor position, passing along the same principles: communicate clearly, manage expectations, deliver what you commit to. Did I go to school specifically for mentoring? No. Did I pass a certification exam? No. You can’t put a price on human experience-the scars, the wins, the quiet realizations that come from decades of showing up.

And here’s the heart of it: AI will never have that. It can grade papers in minutes, generate code from a sentence, simulate scenarios by the thousands. But it has no lived stories-no wartime service that taught resilience, no late nights at Texas Instruments watching an invention change the world, no years of watching students grow from book-smart to street-smart. It can’t sit across from someone and say, “I once promised this under fire and made it happen-here’s how.” That depth, that context, that ability to see the end result before the first step is taken-those are human reserves.

In this agentic era, where tools handle the execution layer with terrifying efficiency, the premium is on people who can direct them wisely. Gen Z has the advantage of being native to these tools; they can learn prompting and orchestration quickly. But the real edge comes when you stack that fluency on top of durable human skills-communication, judgment, collaboration, the ability to mentor and be mentored. That’s what Bill Askew gave me, what I tried to give my students, and what I’m still giving now.

My own path has been the same mix: a talent stack built over time (SME depth across domains, teaching and writing honed along the way), resourcefulness (upskilling in AI in just a year when the wave hit), and a measure of timely luck (the boom arriving right when my experience peaked). What could’ve made me an anachronism instead magnified my value. I checked my old columns before leaning in here-no need for self-deprecation; they held up because they bet on the human side all along.

So if you’re reading this-whether you’re Gen Z stepping into the arena or someone further along wondering if the ground is shifting under you-remember: the tools will keep getting faster, but the need for people who know what victory looks like, who can tell the stories that make sense of it all, who can guide the next wave without losing the thread-that never goes away.

Pull the chair closer. The fire’s still going. We’ve got time to talk about how you build your own stack.