Ernst & Young is putting $100 million behind something that says a lot about where work is headed.

The firm is creating new incentives for employees who demonstrate what it calls more “human” skills, including adaptability, innovation and judgment. KPMG has been reworking training around critical thinking and judgment, while PwC is emphasizing empathy and creativity alongside AI skills.

This caught my attention because it runs against a lot of the anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence.

There’s been so much conversation about what AI will replace, which jobs will disappear, and which technical skills people need to acquire in order to stay relevant.

All of that matters for sure.

But I think there’s another question that may matter even more: What becomes more valuable when information becomes almost impossibly abundant?

For most of my professional life, knowledge carried a premium. Lawyers, physicians, accountants, consultants and other professionals spent years accumulating expertise. A lot of what clients paid for was access to information they didn’t have, along with someone who knew where to find the rest of it.

That advantage is disappearing quickly. We now carry access to more information than we could possibly absorb. AI can pull together research, summarize complicated material, identify patterns, draft a report and help us explore possible solutions in a fraction of the time those things once required.

And much of it is free.

That doesn’t make expertise irrelevant. Far from it. But it changes where the real value lies.

The important work increasingly comes after the information arrives.

Someone still has to decide what matters and what doesn’t. The answer that looks compelling on the screen may rest on a bad assumption. A recommendation can be technically sound and still make no sense given the realities of a particular business. The numbers may point one way while experience suggests there’s something important they aren’t capturing.

That’s critical thinking; that’s judgment.

It’s developed through experience, curiosity, mistakes and the willingness to think beyond the obvious answer. AI can inform that process and make it better. I use it that way every day.

But judgment can’t simply be outsourced.

Neither can understanding people.

You can walk into a meeting with impeccable data and completely miss what’s happening in the room. A client may ask one question when something very different is worrying them. An employee may say everything is fine when it clearly isn’t. Sometimes the most important thing a leader does is notice what hasn’t yet been put into words.

That ability becomes especially valuable when everyone has access to increasingly powerful tools.

I don’t think the lesson is to resist AI. Quite the opposite. Use it. Learn it. Let it take work off your plate that never required your highest abilities in the first place. Let it help you become faster and better informed.

But don’t mistake access to powerful technology for the thing that will distinguish you.

When anyone can generate the report, the value shifts toward knowing whether the report is any good.

When everybody can access the information, value comes from making sense of it in the context of a real problem.

And when technology makes more of our work efficient and automated, being able to connect deeply and genuinely with another human being becomes increasingly rare.

That, I suspect, is what EY and the other large professional firms are recognizing.

The future belongs neither to people who ignore AI nor to those who simply become good at prompting it.

It belongs to people who can use these extraordinary tools without surrendering the human capacities that make the tools useful in the first place.

In the age of artificial intelligence, standing out doesn’t mean becoming ever more technological.

It has everything to do with becoming more human.