Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - 7 AI Skills That Will Make You Irreplaceable | Advice from Replit, Anthropic, and Microsoft

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Job postings with AI skills now pay $18,000 more per year (Lightcast, 2025). By 2030, 39% of today's skills will be outdated. These are the ones that won't. So I asked the people building these AI tools and working inside the biggest AI companies in the world — what skills will make you irreplaceable in the AI era? From every conversation, 7 skills kept coming up — the ones that actually keep you employable, valuable, and ahead of everyone else. I asked Amjad Masad (CEO, Replit) how to actually get good at prompting. Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder, now CPO at Anthropic) showed me how solo founders run lean companies with AI workflows. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder) explained why creative thinking is the one thing AI still can't copy. And Mustafa Suleyman (CEO, Microsoft AI) told me what he's teaching his kids that matters more than any app. Topics: AI skills 2026, high income skills, AI careers, Replit, Anthropic, Microsoft AI, LinkedIn, Amjad Masad, Mike Krieger, Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman, future of work, prompt engineeringMore from the Silicon Valley Girl: Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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 this 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, pay 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. And if you're near to my channel, I run a podcast called So Conventive where I interview founders, CEOs, and AI experts, and in every interview, I ask them one question, which skills will be relevant in the future because I'm worried about myself and I'm really

worried about my kids who are six and four because they are growing up in a world I've no idea about. So 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 letter 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, chat GPT, 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 2000, 25 is 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 it was just at this event, I love Silicon Valley for all the crazy events. I was just at this event by Jen Spark, 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 sold for you. So you build your company, you have your assets. Like, here's the Google Dog 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, on that documents so you don't have to prompt it every time. And this is where I feel a lot of business opportunity life. 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. But I'm going to talk about Jen Spark a little bit later in this video. It really blew my mind.

Skill number two. Of course, 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 vibe code.

You basically talk to an app and it creates an app for you. So ask him how to actually become better at prompting. Not in theory, but in real life as a developer. and founder. We have a YouTube channel. We have a great developer relations, a 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 and sort of education. So when we're 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. You need to be resourceful. So you need to go to YouTube, search like how to prompt. You know, spend a lot of time in practice by building, changing your style. Some people go to OpenAI, for example, and like pick 03 or right now is GPT5 with thinking,

and give it the idea and tell it, hey, I want you to structure it into a really great prompt. Prompt it for me, something like that? Yeah. 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, 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 Anthem. How founders can actually use AI to run leaner companies without becoming full-time engineers. 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? Yeah. So I was actually talking to a fellow friend who's a second or third-time founder,

and he was telling me, he was like, Mike, I'm really glad you launched Claude Max because Claude is my product manager, Claude is my lawyer. Claude is my, you know, 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 his, you know, like 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, but 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, you know, 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, you know, have, you know, a model that validates your idea or sees what you might be missing.

Another one doing, you know, 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 to go higher,

I want the best CFO, I 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?

What I love here in this whole video is basically the mindset, shift. He's not thinking one-to-one task. He's thinking in roles and systems. Clod as a product manager, clot as a contracts partner, Claude as competitive intelligence. That's workload orchestration in action. Okay, skill number four. 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 Scholl, which I read out loud. And Blake stares at me and says, I don't think I said that. We were in this studio. He was in this chair. I wanted to disappear. I felt so, so bad about myself, not double-checking things, especially when it's something that important. So Blake Scholl 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. So first of all, you fact check with different AI. If chat DPT 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 Chad GPT's answer into Claude or Jam 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 Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI,

He explained how seriously they take grounding and verification inside Copilot, especially for health. Look to me about what you just released, Harvard-backed research, right? Within Co-Pilot, if I ask a medical question, how is it going to work? Exactly. So now, I mean, we find that, like, about 40% of our queries each week are health-related. 40%. Yeah, 4-0. 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, you know, pretty accurate. Like sometimes it makes mistakes. It's not, you can't rely on it yet.

You always have to go see a doctor, et cetera. But if you think about it, most of the time in a healthcare 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. 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, wanted to share a very, very personal anecdote. I'm going through this right now. My four-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'm still, like, learning how to deal with it. So I went to perplexity.

Perplexity's first answer was, see a doctor. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to check with Chad GPT. Chad GPT was more forgiving. It was like, oh, it's just a stage, blah, blah, blah. And then I went to co-pilot, and I read this article where her behavior is just so typical for a highly sensitive four-year-old, especially when it comes to things like health,

you want to rely on a certain module. 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 chat GPT, 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, cool pilot 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 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 six-year-old didn't have this phase and I'm like, whoa, this is interesting. Skill number five, creative thinking. The last 20%. The part AI still can't really do well. AI can generate endless drafts. Variations. Variations. inversions, but it can't choose what's meaningful. It can't invent a new angle, connect to 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.

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 Read AI, but like real-time interaction with Read AI and all the rest of that, and that will happen. But what we should be doing is figuring out how do we add our own creativity? I mean, you're one of the creators and everyone 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 cannot do a whole bunch of money. more than they before. They might be able to say, let's create 15 different versions and test them to see which you're 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 that doesn't mean that you won't be learning new things.

Because AI will be learning new things and becoming better and better. Exactly. 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, you know, for example, if I'm writing an essay, as opposed to starting with a blank page, I'm probably going to start with a GPD4 prompt, right, and say, hey, I'm thinking about this, this, this, this, this is this, this, 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,

supposed 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, it's a, be curious and hopeful, but doesn't mean don't expect, you know, potholes, transitions, difficulties. Those will be there too. His point was simple. AI can't 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 five years, even faster than analytical thinking. Skill number six, repurposing and multi-format synthesis. So basically, you take one idea and you turn it into 20. The 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 three 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 LinkedIn post, into an Instagram, real. 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 the skill since day

one, 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, it 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 Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI, put it when I asked him about what I should be teaching my kids. It's still important to be good at learning knowledge from first principles yourself and not depending on the sort of AI tutor leading you through. 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, you know, 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 slowly and it's always on tap, you know, 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, you know, 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. I love this idea. Learning how to learn.

With some friction, not everything handed to your instantly. It's 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, prompting and 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. 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, one hour, one tool. That's all it takes to begin. And the people who start now will be the ones leading the next decade. If you want to stay ahead in the AI era, follow Silicon Valley Girl podcast on your favorite platform. New episode every week on AI careers and how to not get left behind.