In the age of AI, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has some very human job-seeking advice for his two teenage daughters.
It boils down to: You might soon be managing an AI bot, but that doesn’t mean you should become robotic yourself.
Speaking at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in Singapore on Wednesday, Sunak said it’s “critical” for people to master “AI literacy skills” so they don’t lose their role to someone who is proficient with AI.
Alongside using AI tools, he said his advice to his daughters is to develop “human-to-human interaction” skills such as empathy and critical thinking.
“We’re never going to lose the importance of being able to think, to reason, to question critically, so I think those skills will be incredibly important for our young people to develop,” said Sunak, who added that his view on skills and the job market is informed by the work of Stanford economists as well as LinkedIn data.
“And so I’d make sure that my girls spend time developing those skills as they grow up,” he added.
Sunak’s comments come as tech leaders, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that AI could squeeze the entry-level job market for white-collar workers. Since his tenure as UK prime minister ended in July 2024, Sunak has taken on advisory roles at Microsoft, Anthropic, and Goldman Sachs.
The former prime minister also joined a growing crowd of people predicting that workers will have to learn how to manage teams of AI agents, which are software programs that can autonomously handle tasks.
“Everyone, whether you’re a new graduate or a senior leader, is going to have to get used to managing a team of agents,” he said, adding that the “age of agents will come relatively quickly.”
He said that “very young graduates” will have to understand what it means to manage a team of AI agents, such as how they divide up tasks and how to verify the accuracy of the work they do.
“It will require, I think, a mindset to just keep learning and keep curious,” Sunak said.
While prime minister, Sunak hosted the UK’s first AI Safety Summit in 2023, which attracted politicians like then-US Vice President Kamala Harris and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
Speaking at the Bloomberg event, Sunak said it’s not incompatible for countries to adopt AI quickly and safely. He advocated for hands-off regulation of AI and said governments should instead work with AI labs to evaluate the technology’s risks.
