NEW YORK — Many workers fear machines will supplant them as adoption of artificial intelligence accelerates.

But what if people have qualities both unmistakably human and essential to career success that AI could not easily replace them?

Some workplace experts argue that with more businesses adopting AI tools, soft skills such as empathy, critical thinking and ethical decision-making are worth cultivating to help employees become indispensable.

Across industries and occupations, “the skills that are most resistant to displacement by AI are the ones that are the most distinctly human,” Maria Flynn, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit focused on workforce development, said. “Some of those things are relationship building, conflict resolution, the ability to guide and motivate other people and ethical judgment.”

Even in job listings for technical roles such as IT support, organizations say they’re looking for candidates who communicate well and take leadership initiative, Flynn said.

“We started to use the term ‘durable skills’ and think about them as capabilities that really are durable, in that they hold their value across economic shifts and technological change and labor market disruption,” she said. “And we think, especially now, in this time of AI advancement, that it’s the durable skills that really make a worker genuinely valuable at work, regardless of what tools and technology are available.”

Here are five skills to cultivate based on the areas where experts say humans still hold an edge over artificial intelligence.

Empathy

Interpreting body language and reading between the lines to decipher what wasn’t explicitly communicated are skills that many people find are best performed by humans. They also inform the ability to show empathy, and being sensitive to the feelings of others is a sought-after trait in workers.

Nurturing relationships

Building strong personal ties with colleagues, clients and stakeholders remains a prized skill that experts say artificial intelligence models have difficulty replicating. Salespeople, for example, have files or databases with information they’ve learned about their clients from interacting face-to-face.

Critical thinking

Artificial intelligence models collect information and produce responses but can generate inaccuracies, so it’s important to second-guess its output. Developing deep knowledge about your field can help you notice when the AI-generated results on topics from your industry are incorrect, said Amalia Kaufman, course developer and instructor at the University of California, Irvine Division of Continuing Education.

In a study published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford tested 11 popular AI systems and found that artificial intelligence chatbots were prone to flattering and validating the feelings of users, affirming a user’s actions 49% more often than humans did. Taking a step back and applying critical thinking skills when reading results generated by AI can help combat the tendency for it to be overly agreeable with its users.

Having a conscience

The ability to distinguish right from wrong, or listen to one’s inner conscience, is a skill that is innately human, experts said.

People can build parameters, or guardrails, into artificial intelligence models to help AI agents make ethical decisions, he said. But human input is still required.

Judgement calls

Ethical questions aren’t the only ones that AI is less equipped to handle for now. The capacity to come up with creative ideas and make decisions in ambiguous situations — while mapping out strategies or developing a brand identity, for example — is another important human skill, experts said.

Humans make judgment calls based on a constellation of knowledge and lived experiences, Flynn said. Artificial intelligence draws from a lot of data but doesn’t necessarily work well in gray areas, Flynn said. For now, the ability to see all angles of an issue and add context remains a form of intelligence that people possess to a greater extent than AI, she said.