If I need to start over in 2026, I’d learn these 7 skills first — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: Everyone's worried about whether AI will replace them, but that's not the real question. The real question is how do you become the person AI cannot replace? Because here's what we're seeing right now. People who learn how to work with AI are growing their careers faster than anyone could imagine. Just look at these crazy stats. LinkedIn shows that professionals are adding new skills to their profiles 140% faster since late 2022. And Lightcast confirms postings with AI skills paid 28% more, about $18,000 extra per year. And $18,000 per year is you making sure you know all the apps in your industry, making sure you know how to use them and utilizing them and saving your time as well. So today, I want to focus on the skills that actually keep you adaptable and in demand, not just this year, but for the next decade. Skills that don't expire every time a new model comes out.

Let's talk about skill number one. It is called problem framing. And by the way, this skill is very valuable for your life in general. Because before you prompt AI, you need to know what you're solving. And this is why so many people have trouble hiring. This is why so many people have trouble accelerating through their career ladder because they can't verbalize the problem. This same skill perfectly translates into AI. So what most people do, they open the app and they're like, "Write me this. Fix this. Research that." And their first reaction is like, "Oh, this is dumb." So the next time you go to AI, you have to have an idea of what you want and what the problem is.

Anyways, World Economic Forum ranks analytical thinking and problem framing as the number one skill globally through 2030. Stanford found that young workers in AI exposed fields fall behind because task execution isn't enough. So before you open another AI app, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, ask yourself, "What am I actually trying to achieve? Who is this for? What does success look like for this task?" This skill sounds simple, but in 2025, it's becoming your competitive advantage. And it's great when you're just thinking for yourself, when you don't have a team. When you start having a team, you not only have to have that in your brain, you have to have that in writing because the best thing you can do for yourself, if you're thinking of becoming an entrepreneur or building something for yourself, is documenting everything. What's your tone of voice? What's your personal branding? What are your values? Because later on, and I was just at this event, I love Silicon Valley for all the crazy events. I was just at this event by GenSpark, which is like they reached a billion-dollar valuation in less than a year and their revenue is growing like crazy because what they basically did, they pre-problem solved for you. So you build your company, you have your assets like, "Here's the Google Doc with the tone of voice. Here's what we're trying to achieve. Here's everything." And it's like this workspace that takes everything that you're thinking of and uses this as a knowledge base. So the next time you're receiving an email, it creates an AI reply based on that document. So you don't have to prompt it every time. And this is where I feel a lot of business opportunity lies. Because not a lot of people are good at just stating the problems. Creating software that can help you pre-prompt based on your goals, that's the key.

Skill number two, of course, is the actual prompting and AI literacy. This is something all of you watching need. Once you understand your problem and what the best result is, the next step is learning how to write prompts that get clear, usable AI results. LinkedIn ranks AI literacy and prompt engineering as the fastest growing skill in 2025. And I wanted to check this with someone who lives in this space every day. So I asked Amjad Masad, the founder and CEO of Replit, an app that lets you write code, you basically talk to an app and it creates an app for you. So I asked him how to actually become better at prompting, not in theory, but in real life as a developer and founder.

a special guest: We have a YouTube channel. We have a great developer relations person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. And so we try to train people on prompting and the underlying systems. So Replit has a DNA in sort of education. So when we were talking about a billion developers, these billion developers need to learn. It's not going to come for free. So there's a learning curve associated with it and you need to be resourceful. So you need to go to YouTube, search like how to prompt. You just spend a lot of time and practice by building, changing your style. Some people go to OpenAI, for example, and like pick o3 or right now it's GPT-5 we're thinking. And give it the idea and tell it, "Hey, I want you to structure it into a really great prompt."

Marina Mogilko: Prompting is no longer a hack, it's literacy. And again, I don't know if you've had any hiring experience, but your AI tool is this new hire that has access to all the knowledge in the world, but you need to tell them exactly what to do. And that's prompting.

Skill number three is workflow orchestration. Strong specialists these days aren't just using AI. They are using chains of AI workflows. One person today can totally operate at the output of a small team. I asked Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and now CPO at Anthropic, how founders can actually use AI to run leaner companies without becoming full-time engineers.

a special guest: What do you think are top, maybe two or three cases how entrepreneurs can use Claude to automate some operations, which doesn't require you to be very technical?

a special guest: Yeah, so I was actually talking to a fellow friend who's a second or third-time founder and he was telling me, he's like, "Mike, I'm really glad you launched Claude Max because Claude is my product manager, Claude is my lawyer, Claude is my founder therapist as well." And what he does is he has a Claude project for each of those disciplines. So he has his product manager Claude, he has contracts Claude and he just uses that for all of those things. It's let him run a very lean initial company overall and do those pieces. And so even though he happens to be fairly technical, he's not coding with Claude really in his day-to-day. He's actually set up Claude to be sort of a mini version of some of these disciplines already, even as the models continue to get more and more powerful in those ways. Even today, with the right context and the right sort of history around something, you really can start having these sort of per job function thought partners in there. And for an entrepreneur, for sure, have a model that validates your idea or sees what you might be missing. Another one doing competitive intelligence to understand what's even out there and understanding those pieces. Of course, helping you build with code is another part of it, too. But even beyond that, the way I like to think of it is when you grow a company, you want the best CFO. You want the best head of product, etc. When you're an entrepreneur, especially like I was a first-time entrepreneur without a big network, you're doing all those things yourself. So why not try to bring the best of what we know into that company via something like Claude?

Marina Mogilko: What I love here in this whole thing is basically the mindset shift. He's not thinking one-to-one task. He's thinking in roles and systems. Claude is a product manager. Claude is a contracts partner. Claude is competitive intelligence. That's workflow orchestration in action.

Skill number four is verification and critical thinking. So your job is to check. This might be the most underrated skill of the decade. Because sometimes AI is so confidently wrong. And honestly, I've been in this situation. I was interviewing Blake Shaw. That was like a year ago. So I was using AI a lot, but it was still hallucinating a lot more. And it just came up with a quote by Blake Shaw, which I read out loud, and Blake stares at me and says, "I don't think I said that." We were in the studio. He was in this chair. I wanted to disappear. I felt so bad about myself not double-checking things, especially when it's something that important. So Blake Shaw was a pivotal moment for me. Now we double-check everything three times. And there are actually three simple verification habits that you can develop.

First of all, you fact-check with different AI. If ChatGPT gives you a stat, take it to Perplexity and say, "Find sources for provided information." If there are no solid sources, then it's a red flag. Ask for confidence levels. After an answer, follow up and say, "For each key claim, rate your confidence. 95%? Up to 95%? Up to 80%? 40 to 60%? Less than 40%?" And explain why. You'll be surprised how often AI downgrades its own claims once you ask. And try to get a second opinion. Paste ChatGPT's answer into Claude or Gemini and ask, "Critique this response. What's missing, biased, or incorrect?" In a world full of generated content, this becomes your superpower. This isn't just me being cautious. When I spoke with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, he explained how seriously they take grounding and verification inside Copilot, especially for health.

a special guest: Talk to me about what you just released, Harvard Med research, right? Within Copilot, if I ask a medical question, how's it going to work?

a special guest: Exactly. So now, I mean, we find that like about 40% of our queries each week are health-related.

Marina Mogilko: 40%?

a special guest: Yeah, 40. It's pretty remarkable. Like millions of people a day are asking health-related queries. So we decided to really focus on improving the quality of the health answers. And part of doing that is that we ground the answers in citations from Harvard Medical, which is an amazing kind of gift to the world, like the most respected health institution. And we also do the NHS in the UK, and we'll be doing other health systems over time. And so people now get really high-quality, very reliable, pretty accurate answers. Like sometimes it makes mistakes. You can't rely on it yet. You always have to go see a doctor, etc. But if you think about it, most of the time in a health care situation, people are trying to make sense of a complicated technical set of language that they don't really understand. They're probably anxious or worried, so they want to repeat things lots of times. They want to get it explained in a very simple way. And sometimes they want help actually making a decision about who to go see. So we also now have recommendations for physicians. You could go see a doctor, you could see a dermatologist, you could see a physio. And we will find someone that fits your preferences.

Marina Mogilko: Even there, with Harvard-level data and huge models, he still says you can't fully rely on it. You still need human judgment, which is exactly why your verification critical thinking skills are not optional. They're becoming more and more important. Again, I wanted to share a very personal anecdote. I'm going through this right now. My 4-year-old, I don't know what's happening. She's going through a very weird phase where when I say no, she becomes really aggressive and everything. And I am still like learning how to deal with it. So I went to Perplexity. Perplexity's first answer was, "See a doctor." And I was like, "You know what? I'm going to check with ChatGPT." ChatGPT was more forgiving. It was like, "Oh, it's just a stage." And then I went to Copilot, and I read this article where her behavior is just so typical for a highly sensitive 4-year-old. Especially when it comes to things like health, you want to rely on a certain model that you trust more. The way to understand which model you trust more is by discussing more and more problems with different models and see which one fits. So now when I do research, I go to Perplexity. When it's day-to-day, ChatGPT. When it's interacting with my Gmail, Google Docs, adding things to calendar, trying to research something, Gemini is amazing. When it comes to health, Copilot has access to amazing database. It's basically about experimenting and seeing what works best for you. And if you're a mom watching, if you have any advice for me, I would really appreciate it. I think we will see a specialist, but just mostly for me to make sure I develop the right behavior. But every child is different. My 6-year-old didn't have this phase, and I'm like, "Whoa, this is interesting."

Skill number five is creative thinking. The last 20%. The part AI still can't really do well. AI can generate endless drafts, variations, and versions, but it can't choose what's meaningful. It can't invent a new angle, connect two unrelated ideas, or understand what will emotionally resonate with your audience. That part is still 100% human. Creative thinking becomes your advantage because AI gives you infinite raw material, and you turn it into something original. And this is exactly what Reid Hoffman and I talked about on our podcast.

a special guest: Yes, AI tools will be available in a small number of years for everything. And there'll be AI tools for not just the thing I've created with Reid AI, but like real-time interaction with Reid AI and all the rest of that. And that will happen. But what we should be doing is figure out how do we add our own creativity? I mean, you're one of the creators and everything else. How do we add our own creativity and amplify ourselves with the tools? So like, for example, of course you could have an AI just do all your short editing. I bet you the AI doing your short editing is not as good as the AI plus a human doing it. And a human using it can now do a whole bunch more than they before. And they might be able to say, "Let's create 15 different versions and like test them to see which are good and do that." And all of a sudden you have that acceleration of superpower. So fear is generally best converted to curiosity. That doesn't mean it won't be difficult. And it doesn't mean that you won't be learning new things. 'Cause AI will be learning new things and becoming better and better.

Marina Mogilko: Exactly.

a special guest: But it's part of the reason why I encourage people to go play with it, go try it. Because as they realize it, they go, "Oh, I can still do these things using AI." So, for example, if I'm writing an essay, as opposed to starting with a blank page, I'm probably going to start with a GPT-4 prompt. All right? And say, "Hey, I'm thinking about this this this this this." And this. I got this. Okay. Now this is what I'm going to start working from in terms of how to do it. And that, by the way, just accelerates me and makes my ability to bring in my intelligence as opposed to having to type a lot and stare at the blank page, I can move faster and get to more interesting things. And so it's a be curious and hopeful, but doesn't mean don't expect, you know, potholes, transitions, difficulties. Those will be there, too.

Marina Mogilko: His point was simple. AI can accelerate you, but you bring the ideas, the intuition, the taste. Instead of starting with a blank page, you start from a GPT draft, and then creative thinking turns that draft into something that actually matters. AI assembles, humans create. And the World Economic Forum predicts that creative thinking will grow in demand in the next 5 years, even faster than analytical thinking.

Skill number six is repurposing and multi-format synthesis. So basically, you take one idea and you turn it into 20. This skill is exploding right now also for me. In the world of infinite content, the person who can multiply one good idea into many formats has unfair leverage. I think we've done a pretty good job with my team this year. There were 3 months when we generated 90 million views, and most of those views came because of this idea where we take a long-form video and multiply it into different short-form videos, into an email, into a LinkedIn post, into an Instagram reel. Like AI made it kind of easy to do all of that. And it's basically giving you free exposure and free views.

Skill number seven, which I absolutely love and I've been following this skill since day one, is continuous learning and adaptation. And this skill actually makes all the other skills possible. This is the skill founders mention most when I ask them what they're teaching their kids. And the old model of education is dead. Learn for 20 years, work for 40, retire. Yeah, doesn't sound like a dream life anymore. Now it's you learn continuously for your entire career. You're free to change careers. You're free to change industries. Just go where your excitement leads you. Here's how Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, put it when I asked him about what I should be teaching my kids.

a special guest: It's still important to be good at like learning knowledge from the first principles yourself and not depending on the sort of AI tutor leading you through. Like I think one of the most important things is from school is the discipline of being able to teach yourself. That's a meta skill. And that comes with friction. So, I think as a parent you still have to introduce like discipline and friction into the process because if it comes all too smoothly and it's always on tap, then there's a risk that the child could just get used to having everything instantly available and doesn't learn from the hard work, the benefits of hard work, which I think are important. So, that's like something to think through now that everything is going to be so seamless.

Marina Mogilko: I love this idea. Learning how to learn with some friction. Not everything handed to you instantly is the meta skill. AI can make everything smoother, but if you lose the ability to push through hard things, you lose the muscle you'll need the most.

So again, here are the seven skills that will make you irreplaceable in the age of AI. Problem framing, AI literacy, workflow orchestration, verification and critical thinking, creative thinking, repurposing and synthesis, and continuous learning. And here is the thought I want to leave you with. By 2030, 39% of today's skills will be outdated, but millions of new opportunities will open for the people who evolve with AI. So, the question isn't will AI replace me? It is am I learning the skills that make me impossible to replace? Start with one skill this week. 1 hour, 1 tool. That's all it takes to begin. And the people who start now will be the ones leading the next decade.