Revolut is looking for a scent agency to collaborate with. Netflix and OpenAI hired an event manager and tech communications storyteller for up to $775k.
Would you have seen all that coming?
Or, the video clip of Sam Altman where he was asked what the most important skill a 25 year old should learn right now.
The answer, not gpt. Not coding, and prompt engineering either. Instead: Understanding what people want.
And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it anymore.
If you think about it, companies are not just competing on product anymore. Rather, they are competing on meaning, on cultural presence, on the ability to make people feel something. To be part of something in the increasingly artificial era.
And to do that they need people who can bridge the technical and the human sides, who understand both the business and the customer, and who can read what is actually happening in the world and translate it into something that matters.
It is not just about understanding AI in the general sense, but AI meeting a consumer whose expectations and judgment have shifted in parallel. Those two things together are changing what businesses need and therefore what jobs actually require.
And that is what this piece is about. The jobs of tomorrow that are being shaped by today’s shifting forces.
The Driving Forces
I’d say there are two main forces driving the emergence of these well paid novel job titles and companies hiring for meaning and culture.
The first is the consumer. With unlimited options and an abundance of everything, expectations around what a brand should be, feel like, and stand for have changed fundamentally.
If it was once enough to buy a product that solved a problem, that is now only the starting point. What follows is the brand world, the values, the point of view, the aesthetics, the language, the community, and overall the cultural relevance [the feeling that a brand actually gets the world its audience is living in right now].
People can tell the difference between a brand that means something and one that is performing meaning, and they are increasingly loyal to the former and indifferent to the latter.
The second force is AI. Not as a threat but as an accelerant. When the cost of production drops to near zero, what remains and what matters is the thing that cannot be automated. That is genuine human judgment, cultural intuition, the ability to read what people actually want and translate it into something that resonates. When everyone can produce content the question is no longer who can produce it but who can make it mean something.
It is these two forces arriving simultaneously that are driving the strange job titles, the unexpected salaries, and the transformation of roles that used to live comfortably in one lane.
What the new jobs actually look like
Currently we are in this strange in between where companies do not really know what they are looking for and applicants cannot offer the solution in a clean box and description either that would meet the hiring algorithms wherever they are.
It is like we are all operating in a market of pre-orders and sample sales, trying to figure out who buys and what actually sells.
Regardless, some kind of a pattern there is and is evolving already.
As mentioned, Netflix and OpenAI paid up to $775k for a tech communications storyteller.
Not a PR person, not a content manager, but someone who could take genuinely complex technical ideas and give them a narrative that actually travels.
And then there is Revolut looking for a scent agency.
A digital bank. Scent. You cannot just make this up.
What these roles have in common is that they sit at the intersection of disciplines that used to live completely separately.
Technical understanding and cultural judgment at the same time. The ability to synthesise across functions, communicate across audiences, and move between the strategic and the executional without losing either.
Not a generalist in the loose sense but an integrator.
Someone who can hold multiple domains at once and make something coherent and valuable out of the combination.
One good example: the tech translator.
I was actually at a Forbes summit in Zürich recently where Lara Sophie Bothur, one of the DACH region’s most prominent tech translator influencers, was speaking about exactly this and how she has built her entire career around it and why this kind of role is becoming increasingly needed.
The market is paying serious money for this kind of person because they are genuinely hard to find.
Not because the skills do not exist but because most professional development has pushed people toward one lane or the other rather than both at once.
The value is increasingly being created in the space between the lanes.
The AI and human paradox
The same shift that is making technical fluency more important than ever is also making human qualities more valuable than they have been in a long time.
On one side, you need to understand AI. How models work, what they can and cannot do, how to work alongside them, where they break down and why. That is increasingly the baseline, not the differentiator.
(If you do not know where to start your learning journey, I would highly recommend the 16-week AI/ML Series from Niharika Batra here on Substack.)
On the other side, the thing that actually separates the people who will matter, is something AI cannot replicate. The ability to sense what feels true and what feels off. To read a room, build trust, and make something feel genuine in a world that is becoming increasingly synthetic.
We are talking about judgment, taste, empathy, cultural intuition.
Not soft skills in the dismissive sense but actually the hardest skills to develop and the hardest to replicate because there is no logical formula to them. They come from paying close attention to people and the world around you for a long time, and make meaning and novel predictions out of it. They require willingness to be curious beyond your immediate job title or degree and ask questions that connect domains and cross functions.
The paradox: The more AI can do, the more those distinctly human things matter. When everyone has access to the same tools and the same models, the differentiator is no longer the technology. It is the judgment behind it.
So the answer is not to choose between the technical and the human but to develop both simultaneously. That combination is genuinely uncomfortable to build because it means staying in a permanent state of learning in multiple directions at once. It is also what the most interesting roles are quietly being built around.
So what should we do? How do you and you brand stay relevant?
Sam Altman’s answer was not coding, not AI, not prompt engineering, but understanding what people want. The more you look at what the market is actually rewarding right now, the more that answer makes sense.
There seem to be two sides to this and you need both.
The first is about mastering the tools of your field with AI. Learning whatever is most relevant to your work inside out, automating what can be automated, and using AI to gather intelligence and build faster than anyone around you. Not to replace your thinking but to extend it. The people who will matter are the ones who keep building with these tools up to a point where others start asking for their help. That signals genuine mastery rather than surface familiarity.
Alongside that comes the deeper work of understanding the system around you. Who feeds whose input. How the different functions connect. What happens upstream and downstream of your role. That kind of systemic thinking, understanding the full picture rather than just your corner of it, is what turns a specialist into someone genuinely indispensable.
The second side is harder to build and cannot be shortcut. It is the human layer that sits on top of all the technical fluency. The judgment about what actually matters. The cultural intuition to sense what resonates and what falls flat. The empathy to understand what people actually want beyond what they say they want. These things compound slowly and come from paying close attention to people and the world around you for a long time.
The first side is learnable and relatively fast to develop if you are deliberate about it. The second side takes years, which is also why the combination of both is so rare and so valuable right now if you are not used to thinking more holistically.
For brands the same pattern holds. The ones staying relevant are using AI to move faster, produce smarter, and understand their audience more precisely than before, but the ones winning beyond that are the ones with a genuine point of view that no tool can generate for them. The aesthetic, the values, the cultural intuition about what their audience is living through right now. That is the layer that converts attention into loyalty.
Finally, it’s worth saying that the old categories are not wrong in anyway. They are just no longer sufficient on their own. Instead, the value is shifting toward the intersections, toward the people and brands that can hold the technical and the human at the same time without losing coherence in either direction.
So these are some thoughts and observations I have on the evolving job market and the combination of skills and roles that keep creating value. I would love to hear from you, and what you think are the jobs and meta and micro skills we should posses to stay relevant also tomorrow.
-Maria