The Missing Middle: Which Human+AI Skills Are You Actually Teaching?

The Missing Middle: Which Human+AI Skills Are You Actually Teaching? explores a gap emerging in higher education. While much of the debate focuses on what humans can do without AI, or what AI might eventually replace, professional work is increasingly taking place in between: humans and AI working together.

Building on Daugherty and Wilson’s concept of the “Missing Middle,” the presentation reframes AI literacy as more than prompting or knowing how to use AI tools. Future professionals need to learn how to train, guide, question, evaluate and correct AI, while using AI to amplify human analysis, creativity and decision-making. Crucially, humans remain responsible for judgement, context, ethics and the quality of the final outcome.

The presentation challenges educators to examine their curricula through a simple question: Which Human+AI skills are our students actually practising? Rather than merely making education AI-proof, we need to make it AI-ready by deliberately designing learning activities in which students develop the capabilities required to become effective Experts in the Loop.

The presentation ultimately shifts the conversation from “Can students use AI?” to “Can students work competently with AI?”, and asks educators to make that capability an explicit learning outcome rather than an accidental side effect of students using ChatGPT.

Foundation: Daugherty, P. R., & Wilson, H. J. (2018). Human + machine: Reimagining work in the age of AI. Harvard Business Review Press.