Soft Skills, Sharp Tools: Making AI Work for People

Emotional intelligence is the real leverage layer in AI-native design. The ability to frame problems clearly, earn trust early and hold alignment matters more, not less, when bots can draft, iterate and prototype in seconds. Without it, teams over-index on automation and slide straight back into order-taker mode; with it, AI becomes a strategic amplifier instead of a shortcut.

I explored this at Ladies Who Tech: AI Era on the AI for Human Skills track, sharing how we approach machine collaboration in real projects at Intercom, how we use AI to stretch ideas, and why soft skills remain the foundation of meaningful design work.

The teams getting the most from AI are not the ones with the best prompts. They are the ones where people know how to listen, translate and build trust under pressure. Emotional intelligence is not a complement to technical fluency, it is the backbone.