Revenge of the History Majors

Or Why Humanities-Trained Leaders Will Win in the AI Era

“What are you going to do with a history degree? Teach?”

Pretty much since the day I declared my major back in college, this was the number one question I got asked about it. And to be fair, for a short time that was my intended path. But over the years, as I got my start in tech sales and then my career progressed in marketing, the fact I have a history degree has always been an odd trivia bit that invited mostly light curiosity or at least something I used to explain my Wikipedia obsession. For all my fellow humanities majors out there, all those who spent their undergrad years in English, history, philosophy, etc. books, but who ended up in very different career paths, I’m sure this sounds familiar.

I have always maintained that my history training was more valuable than the business courses I took in undergrad, in terms of preparing me for my eventual career. What I’m finding ironic today, as we see predictions of mass AI-driven disruption in the job market for new college grads, is that it turns out a history degree (or rather, humanities degrees generally) may be the single best preparation for building a business or marketing career during the coming age of AI.

Some of the most influential voices in AI are starting to argue that exactly that: a humanities education is becoming more valuable, in a world awash in AI, rather than less.

The debate forming right now

Before you hear me out, I want to stress this isn’t just me trying to post-rationalize why I spent two semesters writing a thesis on the 5th-Century BCE Athenian Empire. It’s an active debate that others with far larger platforms are leading. For example:

Daniela Amodei (Anthropic president and a literature major): She recently gave an interview where she argued that AI makes humanities skills more important, not less. Anthropic says they actively hire for communication, empathy, and curiosity, not just technical skills.

Steven Johnson (Google Labs): Way back in 2024 he coined the term "revenge of the humanities" from which I borrowed the title of this post. His argument that the central questions of AI today, such as ethics, philosophy of language, political theory, the history of innovation, all belong to the domain of the humanities yet are becoming paramount in the debate about AI.

Graham Burnett's New Yorker essay ("Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?"): The Princeton historian who acknowledges AI can generate endless monographs, but argues the point of the humanities was never to find answers, it was to pose the right questions. His prediction is that within five years, AI will produce fact-based humanistic knowledge at the push of a button, freeing humanists to focus on what only humans can do. ("Revenge of the English majors" is another solid piece on this).

What’s interesting to me is that much of this conversation stays at the generalized level of "soft skills matter”, which, in my view, is absolutely true but still too vague to derive practical lessons from it.

What AI can, and cannot do (at least for now)

AI excels at description, synthesis, analysis, and pattern-matching across massive datasets. What it cannot do quite as well, arguably, is exercise genuine judgment. And judgment is the skill the humanities trains better than any other discipline. The most pointed critique of the New Yorker essay noted that two critical words were absent: "judgment" and "originality." AI summarizes and synthesizes brilliantly, but doesn’t quite have a grasp on what actually matters in specific contexts that are still the domain of humans (focusing on judgment here, as originality and creative expression with AI is whole different debate).

What judgment means in practice for a marketer:

• Deciding which of five AI-generated campaign strategies is right for your brand, in this moment, given your organizational culture and competitive context;
• Knowing when AI-driven content generation and optimization is leading you towards the bland sea-of-sameness vs. preserving your authentic brand voice and stories;
• Reading a room (a boardroom, a customer community, a cultural moment blowing up social media) and making a call on what tone to strike, how or even if to proceed, in a situation where the inputs are ambiguous, contradictory, potentially risky, and fundamentally human;
• Evaluating whether an AI-generated insight is genuinely novel or just a sophisticated-sounding restatement of the 10,000+ industry best practices the model has no doubt trained on.

This, incidentally, is the essence of enabling leadership — the capacity to evaluate competing inputs and signals, hold productive tension between opposing perspectives, and make contextual decisions about when or how to push ahead. Judgment, not data, is what separates enabling leaders from administrators who simply follow the process, and who are at far greater risk of being displaced by AI. Just like judgement is what currently separates humans from even well-informed AI models.

Back to my defense of the history major

Dredging back up my senior thesis. My thesis advisor, a wonderful if somewhat crusty old professor who had spent some years teaching in Germany - so all our weekly class sessions were over pitchers of beer upstairs are the campus bar, earning him the title “greatest professor ever” - insisted that our thesis not contain any regurgitation of dates or simple facts.

“Assume I know everything there is to know about your thesis topic.” He wanted us spending every word across our 80-page papers articulating, arguing, positioning, defending. And this goes to the great misconception of what a university-level history education actually teaches you.

• It’s NOT about memorization of dates and facts, though I know too many high school history courses may default to that, at the college level it’s about but how to recognize patterns of change across different contexts and eras. How institutions respond to those changes. How societies absorb (or resist) cultural and technological transformation.
• It IS about how to work with incomplete, contradictory evidence. Every historical argument requires weighing sources that disagree or suffer from credibility issues, accounting for bias, understanding context, and constructing a coherent interpretation from often incredibly fragmentary information.
• It IS about how to construct and communicate an argument. Not just what you think, but why, structured in a way that persuades varied audiences who often have their own biases, contexts, and agendas. History, English, philosophy, and so many of the humanities all train this relentlessly.
• It IS about bow to think about systems, not just events. The best history education teaches you to see how political, economic, cultural, and technological forces interact to produce outcomes that no single cause can explain. The study of history is at its core systems thinking, which itself is the foundation of the view of organizations as complex adaptive systems (like in my Disruption-Fluency Framework).

For anyone in business, and certainly in marketing, look back across your career. These skills - pattern recognition, working through ambiguity, developing context, understanding bias, creating persuasive narratives, systems thinking - likely have been more consistently valuable to you than any specific technical or business skill you've acquired along the way.

AI makes the humanities practical for business

The most common knock on humanities degrees was always: "Sure, it teaches you to think, but what does it actually teach you to do?" The implication was that without technical skills, any insights you could develop stayed theoretical. You needed CompSci majors, engineers, analysts, and other functional specialists to translate your judgment into action, your context into product.

My argument is that AI is upending all of that. AI can do, and often does faster and more effectively than any human could hope to match. So in a world where execution is becoming commodotized, knowing how to think is rapidly becoming the critical human skillset.

Some examples of what I mean by that:

• The rise of vibe coding means a history major with vision can now build a working market intelligence tool on their own (ahem, a small self-promotion). Not just describe what it should do, or come up with a generalized idea and go hunting for a developer, but actually make it. The gap between "having the idea" and "building or doing the thing" has largely collapses, thanks to AI. But it’s the human in the loop who first needs to identify the opportunity based on their personal insight of the wider market context, the politics, the pain points, the patterns of needs.
• AI-powered analysis means a leader who understands what questions to ask can now get rigorous quantitative answers without needing to write SQL queries, build pivot tables, or understand R or Tableau. The humanities major who knows what the data should tell them, and what questions to ask and why, is now more dangerous than the analyst who knows how to pull data but doesn't know what matters.
• Content and creative orchestration means the person who understands narrative, voice, cultural context, and brand meaning can now direct AI tools to produce at scale while maintaining the judgment about what's right that AI alone can't provide.

Humanities-trained minds aren't just "the people who ask the right questions" anymore (though yes that's always valuable). They're increasingly the people who can take those questions all the way to execution, using AI as the bridge between insight and action. The combination of humanities judgment + AI execution capability is genuinely new, and it changes the value proposition of liberal arts university education fundamentally in my view.

The marketing strategist of tomorrow could, and probably should, be filled by someone with formal humanities training. Someone with deep strategic, cultural, and market literacy, and while yes possessing AI fluency, not solely technical AI expertise - the latter skills are incredibly perishable anyway, as fast as AI platform development is progressing.

The best data analyst I’ve ever hired had a masters in psychology and no formal analytics training. She knew how to interpret how people think, how to understand context, and how to apply that in a practical setting (and yes, knowing how to work with large datasets was also helpful). Those fundamentally human and non-technical skills are what set her up for long career in analytics.

The counterargument

To level set, I’m not saying technical, business, or marketing education isn’t helpful. It absolutely is. Humanities graduates still face higher early-career unemployment than their STEM peers, even though things are looking a bit tough for computer science grads at the moment. But the labor market hasn't caught up to the rhetoric yet; it's still the early days as companies grapple with what AI means.

"Soft skills matter" is easy to say but hard to hire for, and many organizations still default to credentials they can measure (degrees, certifications, technical assessments), or assume they can quickly tap into leadership training to level up those soft skills.

A humanities background alone isn't enough. Steven Johnson (Google) himself acknowledged you still need technological fluency, i.e. the ability to work with and understand AI tools, even if you're not building them from scratch. The winning combination is humanities depth plus technical and/or functional (business, marketing, etc.) literacy, not humanities in isolation.

There's also a risk of romanticizing humanities educations while ignoring that not all university-level humanities education is equal. Not every History, English, PolySci, etc. program is churning out amazing strategic minds rooted in critical thinking. Your mileage may vary when it comes to the strength and quality of the underlying program, but it's that the skills generally cultivated by a rigorous humanities education are becoming more valuable in an AI world.

And that’s the ultimate point

This combination of deep humanities training that develops judgment, empathy, systems thinking, context analysis, and understanding of bias, paired with learned fluency in AI tools and technology, is the profile that will define the most effective business and marketing leaders of the coming “AI decade”.

Way back in high school, I was blessed to have a history teacher - Mr. Halstead - who didn’t just recite dates from a textbook. He created a class called “War & Peace” which was described as a semester-long study into the fundamentals of human nature, largely through the lens of conflict. A lofty goal for a bunch of 17-year-olds. For example we spent weeks learning about and debating the 1968 My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, one of the darkest chapters in US military history. Not debating if it was wrong or not, but why it happened, how the contexts of the time contributed to it, what it said about human biases, groupthink, and more.

That one class probably prepared me more for my eventual career in business than all the MBA courses I eventually took, as it taught me about human nature and how to understand, analyze, and contextualize. With the benefit of hindsight, it probably also prepared me more for the age of AI than almost anything else in my education.

So don't sleep on the history majors. A humanities major paired with solid AI fluency may just be the “magic” skillset of the coming AI age.