I’ve been learning AI tools this year. Deliberately, with a specific goal: to eliminate administrative and routine tasks on the back-end of my business so I can create more human touch-points. To protect my voice, my thinking, and the relationships that are at the center of this work.
And here’s what I’ve discovered in the process: the faster the technical layer moves, the more the human layer matters.
That’s the conversation most people in industry are missing right now.
Most People are Running Toward the Wrong Thing.
Every week there’s a new article about which roles AI will eliminate, which tools you need to learn, which certifications will keep you relevant. Every time I go on Instagram and LinkedIn, I’m inundated with the latest expert who wants to show me the way and another tech lay-off.
The anxiety is real — I hear it from women across the industry. And I understand it. When the ground shifts this fast, the instinct is to grab onto something concrete – to learn the tech or the tool and stay relevant (or maybe you’re resisting completely, hoping this all goes away).
But most of the advice being given right now is sending people in the wrong direction.
My hunch is, the women who will be most irreplaceable in Pharma and Biotech over the next five years are not the ones who became fastest at using AI tools. They’re the ones who got better at being human and who made sure that was visible.
When technology and AI become a vehicle for faster technical work and it raises the baseline for productivity, what’s left is the human layer.
- The judgment calls that don’t have a protocol (or are vaguely defined)
- The cross-functional meeting where three stakeholders want three different things and someone has to get all three of them to yes.
- The regulatory conversation where the relationship you built six months ago is the reason the reviewer gives you the benefit of the doubt today.
- The VP who calls you first, not because you’re the most senior person in the room, but because you’re the one they trust.
These are not soft skills. They are the hardest skills in this industry. And AI doesn’t touch them.
Humans are Important Now More Than Ever
The pattern I see in my client work is consistent. The women who get passed over — at every level — are rarely missing credentials. They’re missing something more specific.
Their manager knows their work. Their immediate team knows their work. And that’s where their visibility and impact stops.
But advancement decisions, especially at the Senior Manager to Director transition and beyond, are often made in the outer rings. The skip-level who knows your name but not your trajectory. The VP of another function who influences headcount decisions and has a vague impression of you at best. The calibration conversation happening two levels up, where your manager has roughly two sentences to make the case for your readiness and isn’t working with the language you’ve given them.
I’ve sat in those rooms. I know what gets said about people and what doesn’t. Leaders are not reviewing your deliverables quarter by quarter. They are working from impressions, narratives, and what your manager can articulate about your direction in the time it takes to get through twelve other names. Most strong performers have no idea that’s the conversation their advancement depends on — because no one inside the organization has any incentive to tell them.
The women I work with who close this gap do two things. They start communicating their impact in the language that makes sense to a business leader — not just a scientific one. And they build specific relationships, intentionally, with three or four people who have influence over what comes next and who currently don’t know them well enough to advocate specifically. Through genuine, consistent engagement over time.
When AI and technology are swarming us, humans with communication skills, relationship, emotional intelligence and the leadership to govern the robots will become an irreplaceable trait.
The Skills Worth Investing in Right Now are the Ones that Compound.
Critical thinking across ambiguous, high-stakes situations. The kind that happens when a study hits a deviation and the path forward isn’t in the SOP. When leadership asks for your read on a strategic decision and they actually mean it.
Relationships built before you need them. Not broad networking campaigns — specific relationships with people in the outer rings of your career influence. The colleague at another site who responds immediately because you’ve invested in that relationship for two years. The executive sponsor who mentions your name in a room you didn’t know you needed to be in.
Communication that makes people lean forward. Framing your work so a business leader understands why it matters, not just what you did. Knowing how to have the conversations most people avoid because they’re uncomfortable and being the person in the room who will.
Being able to build connection to patients and the deeper reason why, being innovative beyond what is currently know, and being able to lead high performing teams.
These skills compound in a way that credentials and technical skills don’t. Every relationship you build, every hard conversation you handle well, every room you walk into and hold your own, those don’t depreciate. They grow. They get better with more practice and time.
That is the career that holds up.
Through reorgs, market shifts, and whatever comes next. Not because you moved fastest toward the tools but because you invested deepest in the skills that make everything around you work better. The ones that can’t be automated because they require you to be in the room, trusted, and known.
AI is important and I suggest learning about it and being able to stay relevant in the conversation. It’s the biggest shift since computers became the norm from pen and paper. It’s also not the most important thing to lean into during this time.
Keep reading: Your Worthy Career: A Science-Backed Method to Build a Meaningful Career in Pharma and Biotech is built around exactly this — including frameworks for mapping where your visibility stops and how to close that gap strategically. Available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
