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Ernst & Young is putting a price on being human.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the professional services firm will spend $100 million to reward employees who demonstrate adaptability, innovation, and judgment. Not long ago, companies were offering incentives to get employees to use AI. Now, with workplaces awash in AI-generated material, EY and other firms are trying to ensure that someone still knows what to do with it.

"What we recognize signals what we value," EY's chief talent and culture officer told the Journal. Education is beginning to send a similar signal. This fall, every campus in the University of Maine system, plus two Kansas community colleges, will award credit for credentials in leadership, communication, critical thinking, persistence, and teamwork. XQ Institute’s scan of state policy actions earlier this year found that 35 states are incorporating similar competencies into their “Portraits of a Graduate” – reflective of what skills students need to hold to thrive post-graduation. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and ETS is going one layer deeper with their Skills Progressions, released earlier this year, describing how collaboration, communication, and critical thinking develop over time, with assessments to follow.

For years, these abilities occupied the soft side of education: important, certainly, but difficult to define, measure, or reward. AI is hardening its value. Employers are paying for them. Colleges are awarding credit for them. Researchers are trying to determine how students develop them, and what happens when technology displaces the human interactions that require them.

That concern is showing up in the classroom-device backlash. Two education professors argue in a Washington Post op-ed that individualized digital instruction can crowd out the conversation, disagreement, and collaborative problem-solving through which children develop attention, curiosity, judgment, and empathy. Emerging research on AI-assisted tutoring points in a similar direction: The strongest results so far come when AI supports a human tutor, while evidence for AI-only tutoring remains limited. In one study, 40 to 47 percent of students assigned to work independently with an AI platform never used it.

None of that makes AI the enemy of human development. ISTE's Profile of an AI-Ready Graduate imagines students using AI as learners, researchers, synthesizers, problem-solvers, connectors and storytellers. The technology changes how they perform those roles; it does not relieve them of the responsibility to think, judge, connect, or create.

The question is no longer whether students need to learn to use AI. It is what they must learn to bring to it.

— Thomas

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