SAN DIEGO—Deep human interaction is what sets us apart from computers and can't be replicated with technology, so humans will never be obsolete in the workplace, Fortune's senior editor-at-large Geoff Colvin told attendees at MBA CREF/Multifamily here earlier this week. Colvin presented a general session entitled “Talent is Overrated—Unexpected Truths of Great Performance” during the financial conference.

Colvin started out by talking about some recent headlines having to do with technology eliminating human jobs by doing them more efficiently and less expensively. The premise used to be that client-facing jobs are safe, but it's growing clearer that computers are becoming better all the time at the tasks that we used to consider only for humans—e.g., driving cars, arranging mortgages, even playing chess. Therefore, now, even relationship jobs are vulnerable to technology. So, is any job safe?

Fortunately, it's not as bad as it may sound. One company whose business is cleaning offices found that the employee traits most crucial to its success were not efficiency and thoroughness, as one might assume, but instead optimism and empathy—two uniquely human traits not easily found in or translatable to technology. Colvin also pointed out the high number of companies whose CEOs have recently announced retirement without a successor—and how that had a volatile impact on the companies' stocks. This was not always the case, so clearly, the human element has become even more important to these businesses.

In figuring out where humans fit into the technology equation in business, Colvin said we must not ask what computers can't do because this changes over time. Ask instead what people do better than computers. Ask what humans are driven to do, what we're hardwired to do. What makes us more valuable is managing what takes place between human beings—the deep human interaction that makes us valuable as humans, including empathy, discerning what another person is thinking or feeling and responding in some appropriate way; creative problem-solving together (it has been shown that teams are effective because of their social responsiveness to other team members and being able to read one another); and storytelling, which is surprising because we haven't traditionally valued storytelling in business—we value charts and graphs. But our value is in telling a story—that changes people's minds.

What companies want in employees is relationship building co-creativity and brainstorming, cultural sensitivity and the ability to manage diverse employees, said Colvin. The difference between high-value and low-value workers is their ability to be empathetic and collaborative, even in jobs that may not seem collaborative in nature.

An incorrect assumption is that computers cannot do emotional tasks. But even if they can do them, we are different from computers because we're hardwired to do things with other humans. Colvin said being in synch with someone is literal—when you connect with someone, the same parts of the brain light up. It's when facing another human that this magic happens; it disappears when you're back-to-back with another person. When we connect, we unconsciously mimic the other person's posture and tone of voice. This builds trust, as does shaking hands. In fact, the closer we are physically to another person, the more we communicate with them, which emphasizes the point that digital connectedness may actually damage human skills—Facebook use has been shown to be associated with a decline in empathy.

Colvin points out that we can all get better at the skills of deep human interaction. The next steps are to model the behaviors by communicating at the richest level (in person), running toward rather than away from the human issues at the foundation of problems and being candid in talking about them. He suggests not dominating meetings and trying not to let anyone else do so and defending the culture ferociously. “Success is not just about what you know, but increasingly about what you're like,” said Colvin. “You've already got what it takes; now, release it for all it's worth.”

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What Can Humans Do That Computers Can't?

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