• As AI takes on more repetitive tasks, soft skills may become more critical in the workplace.
• Executives and workplace transformation experts shared which soft skills workers should develop.
• They said problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and creativity are especially critical.

You can't escape the call for soft skills.

As AI increasingly augments repetitive tasks, human connection is becoming more valuable in many workplaces. Even in technical fields, like engineering, developing skills that allow you to collaborate with others can help you prove your worth.

"Equally important are your soft skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork," LinkedIn's VP of Engineering for Talent Solutions, Prashanthi Padmanabhan, recently told Business Insider.

The rising importance of soft skills doesn't mean you need to suddenly become a social butterfly at work — although that might not hurt. Workplace observers have said that extroverted personalities can offer an advantage in the current workforce because human-centered tasks can't be as easily offloaded by AI.

But which soft skills are most important? And how can you highlight the ones you possess when looking for a new job? Business Insider spoke with seven workforce transformation experts, as well as executives from LinkedIn, IBM, and Cisco about the soft skills that will be most important in the AI era.

Read on to learn more about three skills they identified:

1. Problem solving

Your therapist's advice may only be as good as the information you share with them — and the same goes for AI.

Large language models can generate instant suggestions, but it's up to employees to identify the right problems, craft effective prompts, and determine the best course of action based on the insights it spits out.

"Even if AI is helping with consulting work, it's still not so great," said Michael Housman, founder and lead strategist at AI-ccelerator, a firm specializing in AI education and consulting. That means job seekers should work on developing skill sets that are "complementary to what machines are really good at," Housman told Business Insider.

Housman, who is also the author of "Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind)," said that job seekers should focus on developing — and highlighting — their complex problem-solving skills. That means thinking about how to solve complicated challenges with "ambiguous inputs and metrics for success," he said.

Guy Diedrich, Cisco's senior vice president and global innovation officer, told Business Insider previously that critical thinking and problem-solving will become crucial as the pace of AI innovations leads to companies making significant ethical decisions. He said "asking the right questions" about what should be done will be the most important skill humans can develop.

2. Emotional intelligence

Alex King, founder and managing director of ExpandIQ, told Business Insider that self-awareness and the ability to read the room will become increasingly necessary in the AI age.

That involves tapping into your "gut feeling" and understanding situations where you need to lean in or step back, he said.

"People who have those soft skills around self-awareness and emotional intelligence are going to do really well in the future, because that's obviously something AI cannot do," said King, who also served as the former head of global talent acquisition at software-development firm Integrate.

Ruchir Puri, IBM's chief scientist, similarly told Business Insider that while most successful CEOs probably have a high IQ, their success relies more on their ability to connect with others and communicate efficiently, which he refers to as the "emotional quotient" and "relationship quotient."

"The advice I'll give is always be empathetic," Puri said. "Put yourself in their shoes and see why they are reacting the way they are."

That level of awareness also extends to communication and ensuring that there's "clarity" in the way you're expressing ideas.

"Don't just express a concept. Make sure the concept is at a level that they can understand," Puri said, adding that "it's not just what you say; it's how you say it."

3. Creativity and Imagination

With AI augmenting more busy work, many executives have said that there will be more time for "deep work," including expansive thinking and idea generation.

That could be especially true in software engineering. As AI accelerates the process required to launch products and helps solve the issue of "scarcity of developers," Cisco's CPO Jeetu Patel previously told Business Insider that imagination will be "the only constraint."

That means there will likely be a greater emphasis on developing fresh, high-quality ideas.

Terri Horton, an AI strategy and workforce transformation consultant at the boutique advisory firm FuturePath, told Business Insider that creativity is becoming increasingly important. Not only does that mean coming up with unique ideas for how to do your job, but it also includes thinking about where AI can be applied to make work more efficient.

"If we are replacing or removing, let's say, 30% of the tasks that are associated with the role and replacing them with AI, what else can you do?" Horton said. "How can you leverage your creativity to work collaboratively with your functional leader or to help think about how that role can be redesigned?"

LinkedIn's Padmanabhan, told Business Insider that candidates are increasingly using the interview process to highlight their creativity by showcasing a concept they have brought to life.

"If you don't have the coding experience, but you have a brilliant idea in your head — just build something," Padmanabhan said.

• Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said enterprise AI hasn't really even scratched the surface.
• "We're still doing the super foundational," Gomez said.
• He said that once models improve, greater disruption will follow.

AI has already disrupted coding. Finance could be next, according to Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez.

"Finance will come," Gomez told Kleiner Perkins partner Joubin Mirzadegan on a recent episode of the firm's "Grit" podcast.

Cohere, a Toronto-based AI startup focused on enterprise applications, is already doing some work in the financial sector through partnerships with RBC and TD Bank. Both partnerships are built on Cohere's LLM models. After it closed its latest round of funding in September, Cohere was valued at roughly $7 billion.

Gomez, who co-authored the famous 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" while he was an intern at Google Brain, said that AI's power lies in its ability to augment white-collar work, a view widely shared throughout Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that he's worried that AI could wipe out up to half of entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

"You have to pay them a lot because there's not a lot of these people for the world," Gomez said. "And so there's tons of demand for these people, but there's not enough of those people to do the work the world needs. And it turns out that these models are best at the types of things those people do."

AI's effects are already being felt in software engineering, where powerful tools like Cursor, along with frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT, allow users to "vibe code" software without any specialized coding knowledge. Other industries, including finance, legal, and publishing, are still in varying degrees of the early days of AI disruption.

"It's still so early for the enterprise," Gomez said. "We're still doing the super foundational, super — Summarize this email for me. Summarize these meeting notes for me. It's so basic, low-level. I just think there's so much to be done."

Mirzadegan said the next step of AI is the ability to "augment people."

"I mean, isn't that the whole point of this? We're eating a different part of the market where it's not seats and licenses," he said. "It's being able to actually augment people, actually do the jobs of people in many ways, and that's so much more transformative."

• Pat Santiago moved from Pittsburgh to San Francisco to launch an AI startup with his cofounder.
• They ended up managing hacker houses and focusing on physical community-building.
• Despite challenges such as moving locations, fostering real-world connections drives his success.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pat Santiago, a 28-year-old cofounder of Accelr8, based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Last year, I moved to San Francisco to cofound an AI startup. Living in a hacker house seemed like the best way to make as many connections as possible.

My cofounder and I had an idea for a no-code AI workflow builder and planned to stay in San Francisco for three months, but we decided that running our own hacker house could be more fun. It would also help us build a strong network.

Soon after we decided to move from the separate cities we were in, we began searching for potential hacker houses that we could rent and run ourselves. The operational stress can be intense at times, but I've now got a better grasp on managing it.

We found our first hacker house on Airbnb

I met my cofounder in 2023 because we were both working at Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Those projects fizzled out, and we went on to do other things.

I moved from my hometown of Pittsburgh, and he was in Dallas. San Francisco was always a place I wanted to live because it seemed like the kind of place where people who thought like me were.

We planned to share a bunk bed in one room, and fill the rest with people we found, possibly securing free rent for ourselves in the process.

We looked on Airbnb and found a place that had been converted from a five-bedroom house to a 15-bedroom house. After speaking with the owners, it seemed like it would work. They said we had two weeks to close on it if we wanted a master lease for all the units.

We messaged people on LinkedIn until we filled all the spots in the house

We were frantically sending messages to people on a San Francisco housing directory, LinkedIn, and X. We thought we could definitely convince 15 people to do this in two weeks, and it would be worth it if we did.

We scheduled around 100 calls to fill the first cohort. We made the decision to start the house at the beginning of June. By July 4, we had filled every spot, but some people dropped out, so we continued interviewing until the first move-in day on July 15.

One of my most memorable experiences was when the first group arrived at the house last year.

The pros of running the hacker house

What surprised me the most about moving here was the level of optimism; people are generally optimistic by default.

For San Francisco, the money I'm making from this isn't great, but it's livable. Ideally, as we expand to more buildings and locations, I can create a better financial situation for myself. But for now, it's nothing to complain about because I'm so inspired by doing this.

The biggest motivator right now is seeing the impact our alums make in the world. They're doing some really cool stuff, and I'm constantly getting updates that make me smile.

At the end of summer, we dropped to 12 residents, but I wasn't really panicking because I now know this is just the natural flow of the year, and we've picked back up into the 40s.

The biggest challenge was when we were given a 2-month notice to vacate the first house

Our first house was taken over by a new management company, and they gave us a two-month notice to leave. When I looked for our next spot, I procrastinated because I wasn't even sure if I would commit to managing this house for another year. But I had the hypothesis that a lot of hotels here are vacant, and if I called them, we could get a good deal and fill one.

After we found a building that would work with us, within a day of posting the first advertisement, we had 80 applicants. It was the reassurance I needed because I thought, 'Okay, this is going to work. People love it.'

We priced a private bedroom at $1,500 a month, and that base price has remained consistent, except that we now offer larger rooms or suites as additional options.

Building a strong community is the key to success here

The house does a lot of community events because when we got here, we were going to networking mixers that droned on. Then, I was sitting in the backyard, complaining about just that, and I had the idea for a Mark Zuckerberg-themed rave.

Everyone was cracking up, but then we threw a Mark Zuckerberg-themed rave, and there were no name tags in sight. No one networked, and it was a blast. I was very proud that I'd sparked that.

People try to make community a digital phenomenon, but I think those who are literally shaping the future should be coming together and being physically present with each other.

Community used to mean gathering in a bar, a social club, a church, or somewhere physically present with other people; however, there's a lot less of that in the world now, with the rise of AI and technology.

My major piece of advice is just to be nice to the people you meet and make friends. Doing community events is what keeps me engaged. Leading a group of people out for the night, to the park for a day, or on a hike, I can see the magical feeling I felt when I first moved here through their eyes, and I really love that.

Do you have a hacker house or founder story to share? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.

• AI is changing the nature of search and rewriting the rules for brands.
• It has spawned a cottage industry of AI search experts, though skeptics warn of overpromising.
• The old rules of search still apply in this era, major platforms say, but there are key differences.

This summer, the PR agency Bospar was preparing a major announcement for its client, the AI computer vision company RealSense, when it discovered an awkward problem.

When Bospar asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot for information about RealSense, each one provided a version of the same answer: RealSense was no longer in business.

In reality, the company was on the verge of announcing a spin-out from its parent, Intel, and a $50 million funding round. How could RealSense get top-tier press coverage if the leading AI tools had already written its obituary?

"There's no 1-800 number for ChatGPT if there's an error," said Curtis Sparrer, principal at Bospar.

About half of US consumers are using AI-powered search to evaluate and discover brands, per a recent McKinsey report. In this new era, Google — which has introduced its own AI search features — still dominates the overall search market, responsible for roughly 90% of global search engine traffic, according to Cloudflare.

As the nature of search begins to shift, businesses from travel companies to clothing brands are racing to ensure they show up prominently — and accurately — inside these answer engines.

The trend has spawned a cottage industry. Former experts on SEO (search engine optimization) are now declaring themselves gurus of GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization).

LinkedIn and Meta feeds are flooded with ads from startups, agencies, and consultants saying they have a formula to boost visibility on top AI platforms. There's a huge market for the taking: only around 16% of brands systematically track their AI search performance, according to McKinsey.

The search shifts have also sparked a fierce debate: Can GEO and AEO experts actually deliver on their promises?

"Everyone is going crazy about becoming the next agency — all the side hustlers and snake oil sellers with their tools already on the train and riding the hype," said Kai Spriestersbach, an applied AI researcher, web scientist, and SEO veteran.

Business Insider spoke with SEO experts and three of the top AI search platforms — Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity — to investigate what content optimization looks like in the age of AI. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

The takeaway: Some GEO techniques can help brands boost their visibility in AI-generated answers, but these gains may be fleeting in a fast-changing space where models are constantly retrained and updated. In some ways, GEO is a new label for companies' existing brand-building strategies, which involve a mix of maintaining good website hygiene, a solid PR strategy, and traditional paid advertising to help boost consumer awareness.

One AI visibility tracking tool, Lorelight, recently shut down, with its founder saying that there was no such thing as a "GEO strategy" separate from brand building, at least for large companies.

"There's going to be a lot of people who benefit from implying that they're very good at GEO. And then there's going to be a lot of tech companies, specifically AI companies, who benefit from saying that it's all hogwash," said Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity. "The reality is always somewhere in between."

GEO vs. SEO

SEO, which is largely focused on Google search, refers to the practice of designing web pages and securing links from quality sites to help your brand rank highly on search engine results pages.

The SEO industry is built on more than 25 years of study, experimentation, and some disclosures from the search giants themselves about how the ranking algorithms work. But there are key differences between GEO and SEO.

For starters, the GEO world has far less historical data to build its assumptions on. For traditional search, practitioners can draw on tools like the Google Search Console to see how their sites appear in search results and Google Trends to identify trending terms. AI platforms keep this sort of data much closer to the vest, beyond the occasional blog post, such as a recent study from OpenAI that found people were largely using ChatGPT for everyday tasks, including help with writing and tech support.

"You don't know how people are looking for brands and services right now," within AI chats, Spriestersbach said.

There's also the personalization factor. The front page of traditional search generally looks the same for everyone, though Google offers options to tailor results. Now, companies must try to make their brands shine in unique and deeper conversational searches. Answers can vary wildly for different users based on how they've configured their preferences and their chat histories.

Further complicating things: Platforms are regularly retraining their models, which can dramatically change how a brand shows up from one day to the next, said Tim de Rosen, cofounder of GEO auditing firm AIVO Standard.

While many GEO companies offer services like dashboards that analyze a subset of user prompts, most of what's being measured isn't reproducible. The different ways users ask questions and how models respond — plus the data they're drawing from — are all in a constant state of flux, de Rosen said, which makes results "inherently unstable."

The platform view

Major platforms say the key principles of SEO still apply in the age of AI. Similar to SEO, AI systems rely on fresh, highly ranked, and trustworthy content, said Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager for Microsoft Bing.

"Be skeptical of shortcuts," he said.

Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose "track of the big picture."

"Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?" he said. "That's what we want to reward."

Sullivan shared an example of popular advice from SEO/GEO experts that could soon go stale: that large language models favor bite-sized content.

"Maybe they've seen that this seems to work in some edge cases in some places," but the model will inevitably change, he said. "All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term."

What is new, Madhavan of Bing said, is that companies must think about optimizing for inclusion in a synthesized answer, rather than simply a list of links on a search results page.

"Think beyond keywords to user intent, question‑answer structure, and machine‑readable cues that make your content easy to parse," Madhavan said.

How companies are navigating GEO

As the GEO industry takes shape, companies are proceeding with caution and seeking guidance from multiple practitioners.

Vineet Mehra, CMO of fintech company Chime, said marketers often make the mistake of working with one tool or agency.

"We try to use multiple companies to create a little bit of competition," he said. "You see who's going to customize their product road map for you, who is innovating faster than the other."

The PR agency Bospar also determined that bringing together a patchwork of solutions was better than relying on a single consultant or GEO platform. They ultimately traced RealSense's premature "death" to a 2021 news article that had misrepresented a restructuring, which then snowballed when it was discussed on platforms like Reddit — an important source of content for training large language models.

Bospar sought a correction from the original publication and made changes on RealSense's website, including an FAQ section addressing the closure rumor. The agency also encouraged RealSense executives to actively participate in trending robotics and AI conversations on social media to demonstrate their thought leadership.

While AI visibility tools like dashboards are in their infancy, Bospar's tactics should be familiar to anyone handling a company's reputation in the digital era.

"It's pretty early days in GEO and AEO for anyone to raise their hands and declare themselves as an expert," Bospar's Sparrer said. "I think that's a little rich at this point considering how new the science is."

Here are some key pieces of GEO advice from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity

Google:

Sullivan said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search.

"Plenty of sites succeed because they don't do SEO, or hire SEOs," Sullivan said. "They don't think about it because they're just focused on making great content."

General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, ensuring Google's search crawlers can actually get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, especially as AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core.

AI formats are also getting better at multi-modal queries — a user might ask "what's in this video?" for example.

"If you've still been a text-only kind of player, more images and videos may help you. But they would have helped you anyway," Sullivan said.

Microsoft:

Madhavan said the fundamentals of SEO are still critical, including structure and freshness signals that make content easier for AI to consume. This includes using Q&A sections, sitemaps, and schema, a code that helps search engines understand your site, as well as adopting IndexNow, a protocol that lets search engines know when your site changes.

Stylistically, Krishna also suggests lists and tables instead of long walls of text, and advises keeping punctuation simple, including avoiding em dashes and symbols.

Perplexity:

With the shift from SEO to GEO, "the biggest mistake you can make is to just try and transfer your understanding apples to apples," Dwyer said — and a lot of the companies offering GEO services are doing just that.

Dwyer said he's also been advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old-fashioned brand marketing. AI removes the "friction" of search and lets people buy things just by asking for them. As a result, building a strong brand will become increasingly important, he said.

The offers and details on this page may have updated or changed since the time of publication. See our article on Business Insider for current information.

• For Love & Money is a column from Business Insider answering your relationship and money questions.
• This week, a reader no longer wants to sell her starter home, as she and her husband had once agreed upon.
• Our columnist reminds her that it's not about who gets their way — it's about sharing a life they love.

Dear For Love & Money,

Seven years ago, my husband and I bought a cute little starter home in a good school district. We agreed that this was a temporary step toward building enough equity to get some acreage and a larger house sometime in the next 10 years.

A realtor friend recently gave us a "guesstimate" of our home's current value, and it was much higher than we'd imagined. My husband has begun reminding me of our plan to get land, but I no longer want to sell our current home. It may be a "starter home," but it's big enough for our needs, our kids are doing really well at their school, and getting any real acreage in our same school district wouldn't make sense financially.

I've told my husband that I would rather use our improved financial situation to refinance our current house into a 15-year mortgage, pay it off sooner, and make this our forever home. He is acting like I've deeply betrayed him by changing my mind, and like us not buying land could mean divorce.

But buying land with a house we can afford would mean miserable commutes for both of us, our kids would go to lower-rated schools and have to make all new friends, and financially, we'd be stretched too thin.

I just think he needs to be flexible and understand that not all dreams are meant to come true, and that sometimes it's wiser to be grateful for what we have.

Sincerely,

Loving It, Not Leaving It

Dear Loving It,

Contentment is key to life satisfaction, but dreams fuel growth. In your case, it sounds like you've realized that you're more than happy with the life you've created in the home you once thought you'd be eager to leave behind, while your husband still has his heart set on upgrading, as you two previously agreed upon. Having two people — one who finds meaning in their contentment and another who finds purpose in their dreams — can be a dynamic balance.

Finding this balance will hinge on hearing and deeply considering your husband's perspective as thoroughly as you do your own. It's worth noting that you both once agreed to upgrade and buy land one day. Your husband didn't change his mind; you did. It's natural that he would feel betrayed by your removal of a long-term plan from the table like this.

I'm sure you've imagined your husband getting "his way" — selling the house, withdrawing your children from their schools and friends, and taking them to whatever far-off place in the sticks that still offers affordable acreage.

I'd challenge you to imagine — or even better yet, ask your husband — how he'll experience you getting "your way" as well: every home repair he'll slog through on a house he tired of years ago, the Saturday mornings spent indoors thinking about how he could be outdoors on his own land, and never getting to pass the acreage to his kids once he's gone.

At the same time, circumstances change, and sometimes plans need to adapt. Neither of you should accept a life so fully against your will. Because it's not about you getting "your way" or your husband getting "his way" — it's about sharing a life you love and building that dream together.

For a moment, forget about buying land or keeping the house, and return to the fundamentals. Together, create a list of the practical priorities you both consider in your decision-making. Things like consistency for your children, inheritance, getting outdoors, saving or investing money, commute times, hosting family and friends, good schools, and whatever else you both value. Once you have these listed, make two copies and privately rank the list before sharing your answers with one another.

As you compare results, remember there is no right or wrong — only individual values. Find your commonalities and view your differences as opportunities for compromise. For example, you may find that you both rank active lifestyles high and hosting low, and you can build your shared vision from there. Maybe while your husband wants land, he has no intention of considering anything outside your current school district. Or perhaps you'll realize you don't mind buying a new place as long as you do it with a 15-year mortgage instead of a 30-year one.

Make your proposals to each other with open minds. Hear your husband out if he argues that pulling the kids from their school will be worth it when they're playing in the creek and spending half the day climbing trees. Let yourself imagine he's right, and see how it feels. Ask him to do the same when you pitch scenarios about what makes more sense to you.

Rather than allowing yourself to become increasingly attached to staying put, you should seriously explore what sticking to the original plan and finding land could look like. If there truly is nothing affordable that fits your lives, reality can be the bad guy, not you. If your husband's right and you find an affordable home on land that aligns with your shared priorities, you may remember why you used to like that plan so much.

As impossible as it feels sometimes, in the 15 years I've been married to my husband, I've found that respecting each other's dreams and discovering shared goals makes even the steep compromises of marriage survivable. Later, they're almost always the best decisions of our lives because we made them together. The main thing is remembering that in relationships, winning is not getting your way; it's growing closer. You once shared this particular dream of land ownership, and you've always loved the dreamer. Don't forget that.

Rooting for you,

For Love & Money

Looking for advice on how your savings, debt, or another financial challenge is affecting your relationships? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

• Two MIT dropouts have raised $2.7 million for police tech startup Code Four.
• Code Four uses AI to generate reports from bodycam footage.
• Here's the pitch deck the Y Combinator graduates used to raise their seed round.

Two 19-year-old MIT dropouts have raised $2.7 million in seed funding out of Y Combinator to arm police officers with AI.

CEO George Cheng and CTO Dylan Nguyen cofounded Code Four, which is police radio lingo to indicate that a situation is under control. They say their technology reduces paperwork, allowing officers to spend more time in the field.

The startup uses AI to generate reports from bodycam footage that can be used in court or for record-keeping purposes. Code Four can also redact footage and reports for records requests and generate transcriptions and summaries from video interviews and security footage.

"The public safety and the government space is always kind of behind the curve in terms of getting the latest technology, even though these folks are some of the hardest working and most passionate about their mission," Nguyen told Business Insider.

While the duo knew they wanted to build in an impactful sector, they are aware of the concerns surrounding the use of AI in policing. Cheng said that while Code Four uses AI to generate preliminary drafts of reports, officers review and edit them for accuracy.

Cheng and Nguyen met during high school on the international science fair circuit, and both ended up at MIT, where they decided to build a company together. Ultimately, they dropped out as freshmen to attend Y Combinator.

They also plan to participate in the second cohort of the Palantir Startup Fellowship next year.

AME Cloud Ventures led Code Four's seed round, with participation from Pathlight Ventures and Webb Investment Network.

Cheng and Nguyen plan to use the funds to grow their team, which consists of four employees, split between engineering and sales.

Cheng said Code Four works with 25 police departments and makes money via a subscription model, which starts at $30 per officer a month.

Here's a look at the pitch deck Code Four used to raise its seed funding. The deck has been edited so that it can be shared publicly.

It was kind of cute when Aaron Terrazas' retired parents first started gifting him and his siblings various items and trinkets they'd accumulated from their travels over the years. But the little handoffs pretty quickly crossed into very annoying territory. "It just became more stuff that filled up our homes that we didn't need or have space for," Terrazas, a 40-year-old economist in Seattle, says.

While he understands that this is perhaps his parents' way of showing love, he had to explain that these objects were their memories, not his. If they gave him things he didn't want, he finally said, he'd refuse them. That knickknack his mom sent would go right back in the mail to her. The family made a rule: The only gifts allowed are ones that can be eaten or consumed. Terrazas' parents abide by it "for the most part," he says, but "sometimes they need a reminder."

Terrazas is not alone: the baby boomer stuff avalanche is upon us. Just as boomers and the Silent Generation are expected to pass on some $100 trillion in wealth to younger generations in the coming years, as I wrote last year, they're also expected to pass down the mounds of possessions they've accumulated over their lifetimes. Ideally, Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa would downsize well in advance, but alas, life is not ideal — the issue is often dealt with in a tizzy, in the midst of a medical emergency or after a person has passed.

Older generations sometimes engage in a trickle of giving, gradually passing possessions to family members . It can be nice to offload some important things, especially while people are still around to explain their stories and significance. But it can also lead to some uncomfortable encounters, where family members fight over coveted items, things start to disappear, or, more often, parents and grandparents discover that their prized possessions are not prized by their offspring.

"I do encourage my clients to ask their kids or whoever they want their stuff to go to, 'Are there things you want?'' says Connie Tromble Eyster, an estate planning attorney in Colorado. "A lot of the time, the response from the kids is, 'I don't want anything.'"

---

The delicate dance around family dynamics of inheritance and gift-giving among generations is an awkward one for a multitude of reasons, perhaps most importantly, that nobody really wants to think about their ultimate demise or that of their loved ones.

"We act like we're immortal, and we're not," says Kevin C. Martin, an estate attorney in Washington, DC. He's seen "beautiful meetings" with families talking about who wants what and why, whether to put it in wills or to deal with it in the present day, "but not everybody is comfortable doing that."

A lot of the time, the response from the kids is, 'I don't want anything.'

As part of her work as a professional downsizer and the owner of the Downsizers in North Carolina, Elizabeth Hirsh has been a part of a lot of difficult conversations. In them, she talks a lot about what she calls "the psychology of letting go." She asks clients to interrogate why they're so insistent on keeping something or making sure someone in the family takes it. Does this silver your mother left to you really speak to you? Do you worry that if you get rid of it, your mother's memory won't be kept alive? Did you hold onto it out of guilt that you're now inadvertently passing on to your daughter? Or, does giving it to her just feel like the easiest option — for you?

"We talk a lot about the cost of carrying things on," Hirsh says.

Baby boomers grew up in an era where it was expected to accumulate as much as possible; they were collectors. They were also raised by parents who grew up in the Great Depression and were disinclined to give up the few things they had. So when it comes time to shed their worldly possessions, boomers sometimes need a gentle reality check. Like it or not, there are things that are irreplaceable — photos, awards, diplomas — and other things that are commodities. Asking a family member to take anything requires time and effort, whether that means them finding a place for your favorite knicknack or you paying hundreds of dollars to ship an unwanted bedroom set cross-country.

Hirsh says clients often need to be reminded that when they do give things away, they don't have a say after the fact about what the recipient does with them. "It can't be a conditional gift," she says.

As much as boomers need to accept some hard truths, their kids do too. She reminds sons and daughters that as long as their parents abide by the "out of my house, out of my control" rule, it's sometimes easier to just take the thing and move on. Kids think they're being selfless by declining gifts and don't realize their parents may receive that as hurtful.

I almost need my mom to say, 'You don't have to keep that anymore, honey.'

Jeffrey and Elaine Karr, septuagenarians who live in California, don't think they're too overloaded by possessions, and they've already started passing some important things down to their niece and nephew, whom they jokingly refer to as their "rent-a-kids." They donated their wedding china, gave their niece and nephew some jewelry so they could refashion the stones if they wanted, and shipped Elaine's silver to her cousin to replace a stolen set. As much as they say they're not too attached to their stuff, Elaine admits she's saving some heirlooms, including a needlepoint her deceased mother made, in the garage that she's not quite sure what to do with.

"It will never go out to be displayed. What am I going to do with it? And what will my niece do with it? I should let it go," she says. "I almost need my mom to say, 'You don't have to keep that anymore, honey.'"

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Some of the anticipatory offloading older people do can be much more complicated, financially, than deciding whether a loved one wants dishes or souvenirs.

Gerry W. Beyer, a law professor at Texas Tech University, warns clients they have to be careful about giving away anything of value — say, a coin collection, or art — because of taxes. In most cases, capital gains taxes mean it makes sense to hand things down after death since heirs can use the stepped-up cost basis, meaning they're only taxed on the difference between the value at the time they inherited the item and what they sell it for, not on the appreciation over the original owner's lifetime. Say your grandfather bought some art for $100 in 1960, and it's now worth $25,000. If he gifts it to you before he dies, and you turn around and sell it for $30,000, you have to pay taxes on all $29,900 worth of gains — the difference from the original purchase price and the final sale price. But if it's passed on to you after he dies, the value resets to $25,000, so if you go on to sell it for that $30,000, you'd only be taxed on the $5,000 gain, not the other $24,900 in appreciation that occurred during his life.

It's a similar story with putting children on house deeds, which some parents may think is a good idea. When the house sells, the kid will be on the hook for a higher capital gains tax than they would have otherwise — not to mention that if the kid winds up in financial trouble, creditors could try to take the house.

Unless you're extremely wealthy so that it wouldn't make any difference, you've got to be careful about giving cash to kids and grandkids.

People can give up to $19,000 to a single person each year without having to report it to the IRS, and for the vast majority of people, except the ultrawealthy, paying inheritance taxes isn't an issue. But attorneys still warn against people giving too much of their cash away to loved ones while they're still alive — once that money's out the door, it's generally not coming back.

"Unless you're extremely wealthy so that it wouldn't make any difference, you've got to be careful about giving cash to kids and grandkids. First of all, it can absolutely cause jealousy among the kids unless you give everybody the same amount," Beyer says. "And then things can change. You could be diagnosed with a serious disease, you could have a loss not covered by insurance."

Many attorneys I spoke to for this story flagged concerns about elder abuse and shady financial maneuvering that leaves older people on the short end. Sometimes, that looks like a will being altered when someone isn't about their wits. At other times, it can involve possessions slowly disappearing over time without it being clear where those things are going. It's often unclear whether strangers are taking them or family members, or if items were given away intentionally or not.

"These types of things, believe it or not, unfortunately happen regularly," says Elizabeth Garlovsky, a trust and estates attorney in Illinois.

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Human beings place a lot of importance on their possessions. We're prone to the endowment effect, where we place a higher value on things we own. We associate things with memories, people, and feelings. We can also tend to be a bit of a selfish breed. Inheritance, including passing down objects when someone is still alive, mixes all those impulses together. Money and possessions aren't personal on their own, but in context, they're among the most personal things there are.

Garlovsky tells me conversations with clients about getting rid of their stuff go well about one out of 10 times she has them. "If they're still living in their homes, they like looking at their things, they like their furniture the way it is, and they don't have, frequently, the energy or even sometimes maybe the ability to dig through the boxes in the basement," she says.

The path of least resistance can feel like simply putting it off — who among us enjoys cleaning out our homes, let alone contemplating our impending deaths? And if they think there will be conflict in the family over who gets what, in terms of money or property, people might rather incur the wrath once they're no longer around to be on the receiving end of it. There's also only so much people can give away while they're still around.

"Ahead of time, they're not giving away all of their stuff, they're maybe just giving away some of their stuff, so all the cards are not on the table," Eyster says.

You don't want Grandma sitting alone in an empty house. Still, you can try to encourage grandma to make specific lists of who gets the grandfather clock and diamond ring and kitchen hutch later — assuming anybody wants it.

As for what to do, most downsizers advise saying no to storage units — if you don't want that furniture now, you won't want it after incurring $10,000 in storage fees. Attorneys say to talk about who gets what early and have the uncomfortable conversations that need to be had. Just because something doesn't stay in the family doesn't mean it can't find another happy home. At some point, many people will find themselves in a sort of intergenerational stuff limbo — the older generations want to pass their things on, the younger generations don't want most of it, and everybody feels bad about it.

For the older people: If your niece does say yes to that costume jewelry you give her over the holidays, don't ask next year what she did with it. For the younger people: You can say no, especially if it's a big thing, but maybe you just want to say yes and make a quick trip to Goodwill to drop it off in the New Year.

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Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• President Donald Trump hosted a White House dinner for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
• The dinner was attended by nearly 50 American CEOs and executives from different industries.
• The guest list included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Business leaders, including Elon Musk and AMD CEO Lisa Su, joined a dinner with President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House on Tuesday.

The guest list, shared by the White House, included members of the Saudi government and royal family, as well as almost 50 US business executives. Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo also attended.

The dinner was the Tesla CEO's first public visit to the White House since his bitter feud with Trump this summer, following Musk's departure from his role as leader of the White House DOGE Office.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev were on the guest list, but it is unclear if they attended the event.

Here is a list of US executives who attended the high-profile dinner.

• United Airlines flight 869 made an emergency landing because of a burning smell in the cabin.
• Passenger Vincent Goh sent goodbye messages to his friend when he saw smoke billowing from the plane.
• After the emergency landing, he had a hearty meal and a glass of red wine to unwind.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Vincent Goh, a 25-year-old working in the Bay Area for a Cantonese publishing house, who was on United flight 869 when it made an emergency landing at SFO. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I was on my way to Hong Kong for business, just as I had done three times in the past six months. But smoke coming from the plane had me thinking this would be my last flight.

The flight was already very delayed. I was one of the last to board.

It was then delayed for another hour. The crew said the plane was overweight, and they were taking luggage off it.

I was glued to my phone after takeoff, with my headphones in. I started getting a bit hungry, so I looked up, but I didn't see a flight attendant bringing out the food.

Then I looked to my left to look out the window — I was in the middle seat — and saw lots of smoke coming out of the plane. It looked crazy.

As soon as I saw that, I took off my headphones and I started listening to the crew. The pilot said something about smoke and that the plane would be returning to SFO.

Passengers around me were talking to each other and looked anxious. I heard a person say in Chinese, "Are we fucked?"

I sent my friend in San Francisco what I thought would be my last message. I told her how to contact my family. I never talk to my family, but if something happened to me, I told her to contact them.

I was sitting very close to the gas tank. Imagine taking off your earphones, hearing that there is smoke coming from the flight, and being able to see the smoke it's releasing. I was terrified.

We got back to SFO soon after, and people immediately stood up when the plane landed. The pilot told them to sit down.

We got off the plane OK. But I could not find any information counter for United, so I wandered around the airport for an hour, then ended up going to the United lounge for answers.

I was given a $15 meal coupon as compensation. If you've eaten at SFO, you know $15 is not enough for a meal here. I decided to get a good meal after the ordeal — fries and a chicken sandwich, with a glass of red wine, which came up to $35 after redeeming the voucher.

I've been waiting for the next flight for three hours. It keeps getting delayed.

I'm not in a hurry because it's not an urgent trip. It's Thanksgiving, so I took some time off for myself and decided to fly in ahead of schedule.

But if it were another trip with a tighter schedule, it might have really affected me.

Representatives for United Airlines told Business Insider that the flight, a Boeing 777 aircraft carrying 336 passengers and 15 crew members, returned to SFO "to address a burning rubber smell in the cabin."