As AI becomes more prevalent in our personal and professional lives, the more we’ll need a way to stand out. In fact, skills like empathy, influence, and the ability to read the room—things AI cannot yet do with accuracy and facility—are already becoming more valuable. 

We are facing an insidious threat to our interpersonal skills, driven not just by AI's growing capabilities, but by our own diminishing opportunities to actually practice communicating. The expansion of our digital lives has already caused a roughly 28% drop in the words we speak daily between 2005 and 2019, and leaning on AI shrinks those vital practice moments even further. Ultimately, when we offload too much to AI, we aren't just taking a convenient shortcut; we are actively causing our fundamental capabilities to atrophy and increasing our communication anxiety because we know that if we are challenged, we might not have the depth of knowledge to respond.

With algorithms drafting our emails and smoothing out our speech, the baseline for communication has never been more flawless—or flat and disconnected. Because so many people are hiding behind this generated perfection, we gain a massive competitive edge when we do the exact opposite.

Communicating authentically, revealing our humanness, increases our value by serving as a real-time signal of trust and genuine effort. Because anyone can now generate flawlessly polished text, unscripted moments containing natural flaws and foibles demonstrate that we’re actually investing our own labor and personal touch into the exchange. 

Striving for a hyper-polished veneer is no longer the........

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