In an age of AI, the hardest skills in financial services have nothing to do with numbers.
The phrase “soft skills” has an unlikely birthplace. The term was coined by the US Continental Army Command (CONARC) in 1968, as part of its *Systems Engineering of Training* doctrine, to describe “job-related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper.” The word “soft” was simply the contrast to “hard” — meaning the physical hardware of warfare: tanks, weapons, machinery.
The irony is layered. The Army’s original emphasis was on the *importance* of these skills — they recognised that certain human qualities made military leaders more effective, above and beyond any ability to manage machinery. Somewhere in the five decades since, that emphasis got lost, and “soft” acquired entirely different connotations: fluffy, unmeasurable, optional. In financial services, where rigour and quantification are cultural currency, that perception can be particularly stubborn.
What We Mean When We Say “Soft Skills”
Today, the machinery of financial services is a keyboard, a computer screen, and a mobile phone. Where the value is created is in the soft stuff and not just the software that lives within the hardware. Indeed, software coding would appear to be being largely subcontracted to AI.
Soft skills, by contrast, are contextual, relational, and stubbornly resistant to any equivalent of a professional exam
Soft skills encompass a broad range of psychosocial capabilities applicable across all professions: critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, professional communication, leadership, creativity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. There has also been some unsuccessful effort to rebrand them as ‘power skills’. In financial services specifically, they manifest as the ability to explain a complex portfolio strategy to an anxious client, to navigate a difficult conversation about underperformance, to influence a room without a slide deck, or to build the kind of trust that keeps a relationship intact through a volatile market.
These are not peripheral competencies. Research from Carnegie Foundation, and Stanford Research Centre found that soft skills account for 85% of job success, with technical knowledge responsible for only 15%. More recently, a 2019 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report found that 92% of talent professionals and hiring managers indicated that soft skills are as crucial as, or even more important than, technical skills. These figures could make great headlines, although the distance from the research samples to, for example, your organisation may be considerable. I feel they should only be taken as a guide at best.
If They’re “Soft,” Why Do So Many High Performers Struggle?
The competence paradox is real. Finance attracts individuals who have succeeded precisely because of their ability to master rule-based, analytically rigorous disciplines. Technical expertise can be learned, tested, and certified. Soft skills, by contrast, are contextual, relational, and stubbornly resistant to any equivalent of a professional exam. The research consistently points out how important they are in times of change.
A contrasting Harvard Business Review article back in 2007, though, suggested that hard skills of aggressiveness and speed of decision-making were more important than the softer skills of relationship-building. However, this article (with the “ahead of its time” word ‘Trump’ in the title) admitted that its sample was based on organisations which were funded by venture capital or private equity. Your organisation may be different.
Yet many high performers receive little or no formal development in these areas. Some research suggests that only around 10% of corporate training is effective — often because organisations invest in the training event itself, without building the internal culture and ongoing practice needed to embed new behaviours. You cannot fully develop presence, influence, or emotional intelligence from a one-day workshop and a PDF summary.
When AI Changes the Equation
Artificial intelligence is reshaping financial services at pace — and it is doing something unexpected to the soft skills conversation. It is simultaneously making technical skills more commoditised and human skills more scarce and more valuable.
According to a McKinsey report in 2018, nearly 50% of tasks in communication-heavy roles could be automated using AI technologies. By 2026, we are forming a clearer view of this. Drafting client emails, summarising meeting notes, producing first-draft reports — these tasks are increasingly handled by AI tools. The risk is what might be called the delegation trap: as professionals outsource routine communication to AI, they get fewer opportunities to practise the underlying human skills, and those muscles begin to atrophy.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 — drawing on data from over 1,000 companies representing more than 14 million workers — found that technology skills in AI, big data and cybersecurity are expected to see rapid growth in demand, but that human skills such as creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility will remain critical. The report also found that 39% of core workforce skills will be transformed or become obsolete by 2030, with 63% of employers identifying the skills gap as their primary barrier to transformation.
For financial services, the practical implication is pointed. AI can draft the pitch. It cannot read the room. It can generate the analysis. It cannot build the trust that determines whether a client acts on it. As one analyst observed, human work will likely shift more toward positions that require the soft skills AI cannot replicate — precisely because those skills are what create socially valuable outcomes in collaboration with AI.
What Good Looks Like — and What to Do About It
The encouraging truth is that soft skills are learnable. They require deliberate practice, honest feedback, and the kind of immersive, scenario-based development that mirrors real professional situations. For financial services organisations, the business case is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
The WEF identifies leadership, social influence, talent management, and analytical thinking as among the top ten growing skill needs by 2030. Seven out of ten companies now consider analytical thinking essential, alongside resilience, flexibility and agility, and leadership and social influence — which together make up the top three core skills employers expect to prioritise.
The firms that will build competitive advantage in this environment are not those with the best AI tools — those are available to everyone. They are the ones whose people can communicate with clarity, persuade with integrity, and lead with confidence in the moments that matter most. In a world where machines handle the technical, the human becomes the differentiator.
It turns out the US Army was right all along. These skills were never soft. They were just hard to measure, they still are — and harder still to develop without taking them seriously.
Phil Ingle MBA (Cranfield), FCIPD, FRSA, FPSA, ALIBF is an independent training and development consultant. He trains in soft skills which some describe as hard.
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References – https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/power-skills-rebranding/
https://www.acr-journal.com/article/download/pdf/1312/
https://hbr.org/2007/12/in-leadership-hard-skills-trum?autocomplete=true
https://research.com/advice/ai-automation-and-the-future-of-business-communications-degree-careers
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
