PCMA Convene：AI时代下的人类技能即元技能

Gartner predicts that by 2030, 30 percent of enterprises will see decision quality decline because of overreliance on AI. Photo: Adobe Stock

The term “soft skills” is a legacy of the U.S. Army War College, which coined the descriptions “hard” and “soft” as a way of talking about the skills needed to operate machinery and the human-based abilities that are harder to quantify, such as judgment, discernment, and reasoning, says consultant Amy Blackman, the founder of Fruition Co. and a professor of leadership and strategy at USC Thornton.

Blackman uses the term “meta skills” as a better descriptor for those human capabilities.
“There’s been a whole hard and soft skills hierarchy inversion,” she said. “When a machine can analyze, predict, and execute at scale, knowledge and information become the price of entry rather than the thing that sets anybody apart. The hard skills became automatable.”
And “the things we used to call soft skills, including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity, are now table stakes,” she said. “What are now scarce are skills such as strategic thinking and creative reasoning.”

There’s a crucial distinction “between a strategic initiative — the task in front of you — and a strategic objective,” Blackman added. “The objective is the long game that the task belongs to — the big why.”

AI doesn’t have such context “and can give you a million different ways to answer a task prompt,” she said, “but how are you using your human capacity to interpret, contextualize and prioritize the results?”

More than nine out of 10 event professionals are using AI in some capacity. But only 15 percent are using it strategically, she said.

“That’s not a tools gap, it’s a skills gap and a leadership gap,” Blackman said. “The 15 percent aren’t better at the software. They’re better at deciding what to do with what it gives them.”

Meetings professionals have a natural advantage because they work inside an industry where human connection is the product, she said.

“So the more meta-skilled you are, the less automatable you’re going to be,” she explained. “The human skills that you’ve been cultivating your entire career are the things that can’t be automated.”

PCMA Insights’ upcoming study, “S.H.A.P.E. the Future,” developed in collaboration with Fruition Co., will present five measurable and actionable meta skills to build leadership in an AI filled world.

Decisions are moving to AI tools faster than human judgment is improving. Gartner expects half of all business decisions to be augmented or automated by AI agents by 2027. Deloitte found 60 percent of executives already using AI to support decisions. And Gartner predicts that by 2030, 30 percent of enterprises will see decision quality decline because of overreliance on AI, with early-career employees facing more errors from a lack of judgment, fewer chances to build experience, and weaker pipelines into senior roles.

Source: Gartner Research and Deloitte, “Human Capital Trends,” 2026

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Human vs. Bot or Human + Bot?

In October, the 104-year-old Historic Hotel Bethlehem — which offers 19,000 square feet of meeting space, including at an adjacent conference center — announced that rather than investing in bots, the hotel is providing concierge training for every member of its 200-person staff.

The training will equip every staff member to answer questions about the hotel as well as the local travel routes, dining and entertainment options, and other community services, said Historic Hotel Bethlehem General Manager Kelly Ronalds. “It’s always been about the people and I’m committed to ensuring it always will be,” Ronalds said.

“Viney,” the nickname for the AI concierge created by the tech company CollegeVine, sits at the other end of the spectrum. CollegeVine developed the text-based tool for the peer learning summits the company hosts for the university administrators. At Vineyard 2026 held in Nashville, the agent handled personalized travel itineraries, dietary flags, transport alerts, and concierge requests on site throughout the four-day event. And according to an Event Marketer story, “Viney” helped an attendee who got stuck in a hotel stairwell summon help at the 2025 Vineyard Summit in Chicago, where the AI concierge debuted.

Hitting the ‘AI Slop’ Button

In an analysis of more than 1 million posts between April and June 2026, the AI-detection company Pangram reported that 41 percent of long-form and 30 percent of short-form LinkedIn posts were fully AI-generated. (The percentage refers to the proportion of posts screened, not the percentage of fully generated AI content on each platform.)

In August, LinkedIn debuted a “Seems Like AI Slop” feedback feature to the platform, which allows users to flag posts and comments they believe are AI slop, which LinkedIn defined as “low-effort, likely AI-generated content that may sound polished on the surface but lacks a clear point of view, unique perspective, or substance. It goes beyond style to include content that feels generic, repetitive, recycled, or designed primarily to gain attention rather than add to a meaningful conversation.”

Within a few weeks, more than 1 million members had used the new “Seems Like AI Slop” button, LinkedIn reported in a Sept. 15 post that also stated, “On comments alone, every day we are now catching hundreds of thousands of automated comment attempts and have blocked billions of automated activity (posting at scale, slop) in the last couple months alone.”

Barbara Palmer is Convene’s deputy editor

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