Beyond the Tools: The Human Skills That Matter in an AI World

We hear plenty about the skills people need in an AI world. But what do the people using AI in industry have to say?

At Victoria University’s inaugural AI Skills Hackathon, students interviewed 23 industry practitioners about AI in their work.

Associate Professor Natasha Dwyer will share insights from those conversations, analysed against employability skills frameworks. The usual suspects such as strong communication skills proved crutial.

The value lies in the detail: how practitioners describe those skills in the context of their own industries.

The interviews also explored AI’s potential to level the playing field. Smaller organisations can often adopt faster than large organisations, and that speed is an advantage. AI can help small and medium enterprises to compete with more resourced organisations.

Join us to discuss what these industry perspectives mean for human skills, organisational adaptability and where competitive advantage might emerge.

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More about Natasha (Tash):

Associate Professor Dwyer coordinates the postgraduate digital media program at Victoria University.

Her research explores the socio-technical elements of trust. Since 2023, she has led conversational AI projects, with both traditional and practical research outcomes.

One of these projects, the Welcome Room, features in TEQSA's (Higher ed. governance body) Generative AI Emerging Practice Toolkit and is currently developing it into an interface designed for students with a wide range of functional needs.

She previously served as Interactive Designer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and was a Research Fellow at British Telecom. Her role was to facilitate public access to ACMI’s collection