Remaining Distinctly Human in an AI-Shaped World: Insights from SUAD

The MCM department had the pleasure of participating in the recent Brighton College Abu Dhabi and YOUthConnect Hub Forum held on Saturday, 3 October, at Brighton College Abu Dhabi. It brought together students, educators and professionals to explore a question that is becoming increasingly important: what can young people still do and build that machines cannot?

Dr. Ivana Beveridge participated in the panel titled “Building Enduring Expertise” moderated by Cathy Cribben-Pearse, Founder of OakTree Mentoring, along with Khawla Barley, Founder and Executive Director, Goals UAE, Dr. Vivek Kakar, Director of ECMO Program and Vice Chair for Quality, Safety and Patient Experience, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, Mark McCarthy, Registered Nurse and senior healthcare leader with a focus on digital health and AI, Alex Kamara, Executive Director of Transformation, Ethara and Sebastian Page, Group Data Protection Officer, Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA).

What makes human expertise valuable in the age of AI?

As artificial intelligence increasingly performs tasks that once depended on specialized knowledge and expertise, the question is no longer simply what AI can do, but what makes human expertise valuable when knowledge becomes increasingly accessible.

During the panel discussion, we contributed to this conversation by exploring the future of professional skills and the capabilities that will distinguish exceptional professionals. Two questions in particular opened up a broader discussion: what will distinguish an exceptional human professional if AI can increasingly replicate knowledge and technical skills, and how important is it to work with people who think differently from us in a world where technology increasingly personalizes what we see and hear?

We shared our perspective on the future of expertise that the future of expertise is not simply about knowing more, but about knowing how to make sense of what we know.

What makes expertise distinctly human

AI can process vast quantities of information, identify patterns and generate increasingly sophisticated outputs. Human expertise involves deciding what matters, interpreting information in context, questioning assumptions, recognizing what is missing and connecting knowledge to situations that are often ambiguous and require negotiation between various tensions. This is where skills such as emotional intelligence, cultural intelligence, critical thinking and interpersonal communication become particularly important. This is also where intuition comes in – not as something mysterious, but as a capacity developed through experience.

The goal of emphasizing the human in the loop is not to create a competition between human judgement and technological capability. Effective professionals will need to understand when and how to work with AI while retaining responsibility for interpretation, judgement and decision-making. The ability to collaborate with technology without simply accepting its outputs will become an increasingly important form of expertise.

This also changes how we think about meaning making. Meaning is not a fixed object contained within information. It emerges through interpretation, context, experience and interaction. Turning information into intelligence requires more than processing information: it requires understanding what information means in a particular situation, for particular people and for particular purposes.

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

The quote from Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood connects to the second topic: why the ability to think with people who think differently from us is so important, precisely because it takes us outside our own comfort zones.

Digital technologies can make it increasingly easy to remain within familiar information environments, or echo chambers. Personalized feeds can reinforce what we already think, and algorithms can make our existing preferences feel increasingly natural and self-evident. Yet some of the most valuable ideas begin precisely when we encounter something that challenges our assumptions.

Working across differences, whether cultural, professional, social or intellectual, requires curiosity, active listening and a willingness to reconsider our own perspective. It means accepting that disagreement is not necessarily a problem to be eliminated. Sometimes the most productive conversations begin with a difference that makes us pause, question and look again, and allow us to stay with the tensions, rather than repeatedly seeking to resolve them.

Developing the skills that will matter most

For young people preparing to enter a rapidly changing professional environment, developing future-ready skills is not just about acquiring new technical capabilities. It is about developing the capacity to question, interpret, communicate, collaborate and create meaning.

The challenge for education is not to compete with AI on the grounds of information or technical performance. It is to create opportunities for young people to develop human capabilities that allow knowledge to become judgement, information to become intelligence, and difference to become a source of new thinking.

These are not simply “soft skills”. They are increasingly part of what it means to be an expert.