The Most Valuable Skill in the AI Era

Moving Beyond Technical Expertise to Strategic Insight

I have been teaching “Information Systems Development” at the university for over ten years. During this time, imparting programming skills has never been a challenge, but the project topics chosen by students have consistently been a source of frustration. Year after year, students keep recycling uninspired topics like “Secondhand Book Trading System,” “Campus Secondhand Goods Trading System,” and “Library Seat Reservation System.” The issue isn’t their technical abilities — it’s their struggle to identify and understand genuine user needs.

Consider this: in an era where AI has already taken over, our perception of valuable skills has undergone a subtle transformation. In the first half of 2024, I was still teaching students to use Deepseek and Open Interpreter for conversation-based programming, enabling them to leverage intelligent assistants to help write code. By the second half of the year, tools like Windsurf Cascade and Cursor Agentic allowed product managers with no programming skills to easily create apps that reached the top of the paid app rankings, such as “Kitty Light Pro.” The rapid proliferation of technology has made solutions no longer scarce; instead, the ability to keenly capture, explore, and define “real needs” from a sea of technological…