Coding is no longer the must-have skill of the AI era, said Salesforce’s chief futures officer, Peter Schwartz.
“The most important skill is empathy, working with other people,” said Schwartz in an interview with Business Insider at the Singapore tech conference ATxSummit.
“Parents ask me what should my kids study, shall they be coders? I said, ‘learn how to work with others.'”
Schwartz said empathy is the ability to understand and relate to another human being, like with coworkers. It’s the ability to “collaborate and to creatively work together.”
“That will be the most important thing because the AIs can deal with all the routine stuff,” he added.
When asked how to screen for it, Schwartz said it’s hard to measure. “I don’t have a good answer,” he said.
“But that’s what I am looking for. I look for that empathy that this is a person who’s really going to be a great teammate, somebody I can work closely with,” he added.
AI has come for coding
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said earlier this year that his company might not hire software engineers in 2025 because of how much AI agents have helped boost some coders’ productivity.
Schwartz called AI’s impact on coding for Salesforce “huge.”
“We’ve seen a massive increase in productivity of our coders because they have the tools to be able to do coding much faster — frankly, more creatively,” Schwartz said.
During Google’s third-quarter earnings call in October, CEO Sundar Pichai said more than a quarter of the company’s new code was generated by AI.
As AI gets better at writing code, some product managers have speculated that AI will increasingly take on some technical coding tasks and circumvent their need for engineers. Job postings for software engineers on Indeed have hit a five-year low.
Some tech leaders said learning the fundamentals is still essential, while others emphasized the importance of soft skills in setting candidates apart.
Mark Zuckerberg said in a July interview with Bloomberg that he believed the most important skill was “learning how to think critically and learning values when you’re young.”
“If people have shown that they can go deep and do one thing really well, then they’ve probably gained experience in, like, the art of learning something,” Zuckerberg said, discussing what he looked for in job candidates.
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