[0:00]I interview people all the time, but there's one answer I got two years ago that's been living rent-free in my head ever since. It was about AI and jobs and whether we're all going to lose our jobs. But the person who said it wasn't a tech CEO or an AI researcher, it was this woman, Jane Wurwand. Founder of the multi-million dollar skin care company, Dermalogica. I've known Jane for years and her life story is fascinating. She didn't go to college. She started working at 13, sweeping hair off the floor of her local beauty salon. And all that perspective led her to believe something that feels almost radical today. That the jobs that will survive this AI era will be the ones that engage in human connection. Something she calls high touch. The equal and opposite reaction to that high-tech is high-touch. Service-oriented businesses where humans are doing things that humans do best. Cooking, caring, touching, kindness, compassion, talking. I'm not in the business of just skin care products, I'm in the business of human connection. So now two years later with AI having changed our world even more, I called Jane back to see if she still believes all of that. And here what advice she has for young people navigating this high-tech, high-touch world. In this high-tech, high-touch paradigm, you talk about it in the terms of the skin care industry when we were together and you literally in industry where people are getting touched, right? It's it's physical touch, but it occurs to me and the reason I think it's been it's it's had me thinking so much the last couple of years and talking to people about it, is that it's not confined to physical touch, your concept of high-tech high-touch. It's also about this broader idea of just just having a human voice when you call your kind of your Wi-Fi's gone down and you call your Wi-Fi provider and you actually get a human voice and not a bot. Give us some some sort of tangible thoughts on which are the high-touch jobs and areas of employment that you think survive this rapidly growing technology that may take other jobs away. The the jobs that I see that are going to be booming, and I see it already, are the jobs that really can't be replaced. Hospitality, travel, anything in the in the human being industry. If you are receiving a cancer diagnosis, goodness forbid, you an AI bot might have found that or detected that that rogue cell. But you certainly don't want that bot talking to you and giving you the diagnosis. You want a human being to sit with kindness and empathy and hold your hand, literally, and say, we've got a plan, we're going to execute on it. Let's discuss the steps and we've got a whole team behind you. We're here for you. We've got you. You need to be deeply reassured because you'll be terrified. So, all of that said, any work piece of work that brings that to us, whether you're working in retail, whether you're working in an industry that is is full of technology. What can we bring as humans that makes that workplace, that business, that space, kind, empathetic, that you feel seen, you feel heard, that you matter, that somebody knows a little bit about your life so that you can chat and talk. These are all incredibly important social aspects of what being human is. I think what you're describing is actually quite an optimistic spin on some of the fears that people have because I've spoken to young people and I've kind of seen all of their comments online and many of them are sort of slightly kind of furious about this world that we're in because they felt there was a social contract where you get educated. You pay an enormous amount of money to go to university or tertiary education, and then you come out and actually there aren't jobs because the jobs have been taken. What do you say to the graduate who has a degree in accounting or coding? I mean, literally what would you say to the 25-year-old who did all the things they thought they needed to do and now finds that tech can't do the job and you're in your approach to skills and the care industry, would you say to that person you need to pivot totally, you need to retrain, you need to find a way to get into the high-touch world? Well, I think you have to take whatever your strength is, whatever called you to that. Like if you studied accounting and you say, actually I hate it, I can't stand it, but my dad or my mum was an accountant and they wanted me to have a good good job, then, you know, take the box and move move on. You could change you could change professions, change your career, but if you love it, you may not want to. So, what can you take from what you've already learned? So let's just take accounting, attention to detail, numbers, checking, organizing, you keep spinning that out. There's lots of other jobs that would require that. I mean, you might this sounds like a stretch, but bear with me. You might be a fantastic event planner because you if you have a great attention to detail and you have high executive skills and you're organized, and you can communicate, and you now if you fall down on that communication piece, you go, I had all of it but not dang, I don't have I'm not very good with people, then that's what I would study and start to get good at it, because even if you stay as an accountant, your human skills should be really high, because they need to be. Because you you're not going to compete with a robot. We don't have those same tech skills. We don't have that coding. You have everything else that is needed by other humans. So we have to take the strength and move with it. I think you're exactly right that this is where people need to think about the jobs where in the in the kind of AI world. There are actually jobs that you may not think of as being high-touch, but event planning demands, in fact, interpersonal skills. Absolutely. As do many jobs. As do many jobs and even if and and it it is so we shouldn't box things into that's tech and this is human. There has to be an there has to be this connection. There has to be, remember, equal and opposite reaction existing together. And now we we do all the time. And so, I think that we have to take if you're if you've graduated, I listen to a podcast recently with a with a group of graduates that did learn coding, and they feel really cheated, because now they're being told, we're actually we don't need you to code, we don't that's a skill that we don't need, it's obsolete because we can AI can code it. No one needs to learn to code, but you remember a few years ago, everyone was told, you have to learn to code. Of course no education is wasted. Education is an amazing thing to have and go for it. However, so many people have graduated, I think with the degree and it's a four-year college or a three-year college in England that that gives you education, but education isn't skill. And what we're really missing right now are human skills. We don't have enough of those skills. I mean if you want to be go into one of the, you know, best top paying jobs right now, it's welding. You know, you could become a welder. That will really serve you well, you don't need to go to university. So there's this that's a slightly different, isn't it, because skills, there is a I can see the resurgence of skills. Is that different from the high-touch world that you're talking about? No, it's all part and parcel of the same because what's happening is people are saying, you know what, we are we are missing that, but we've we've still got this hierarchy of education where the gold standard is the university degree. Like, oh, not for my child, you know what I mean? Like I oh, I love that you need, you know, welders but not for my child. My child's going to go to university and study mellic languages or whatever they want to. I think we have to rethink that and we have to discuss kind of break down that hierarchy or sort of like, if you want the the the elevation of the four-year college to be, I'm not knocking it but I never went to university. I went to trade skill school. I studied skin care nuts allowed me to build a business that's a global industry. Do you think, I mean to talk to the kind of coder, and and I think Stanford had a a study that showed that employment amongst software developers has fallen by something like 20% recently. And talking about those coders, you're right, they feel cheated. Is the key for them or for anyone in their kind of 20s who has that that background of education that may now be obsolete because of AI, is actually what we're talking about, the key is to develop your interpersonal communication skills. Yes, Correct.
[9:08]The things that used to be called soft skills and now the hard skills, you need them. It's not just nice to have, it's a need to have. And so, we have to re and you've got to dig in. And this is a generation unfortunately that is seems to be lacking in a lot of the proclivity or the desire to concentrate on those, because they're not easy. Listen, you go into a room of people you've never met, can you go up and introduce yourself and start making a conversation? I know I can, because I learned it in a salon and it's not it's not like I was born with it, but I and the youngest of four girls, so I guess I was because I had to grow up and, you know, have my voice. But you can learn it and I think that's where we've got to say that's where you've got to really beef up your interpersonal skills. And if you own the business, don't advocate the person who's who's answering the telephone to a bot, don't. I know how much easier it is, I know it seems so much more efficient, but if that human being is not on the end of the phone, there is no human connection to your business or your company. Your first message of branding is that voice that answers the phone and it doesn't have to be in an office at a desk, it can be obsolete I mean remote, it can be obviously remote. However, it has to be a double-down delicious sort of person who sounds great and is kind and genuinely has empathy, because we can hear or spot a fake in 30 seconds. Jane Warland. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jane. Thank you. Thank you so much, Katty.
