# The Power Skills Moat | RISEUP AT WORK LLC

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- Published at: 2026-05-21 13:00:00 UTC
- Updated at: 2026-05-21 13:00:00 UTC

## Author
Dr. Deepak Bhootra

## Subject
RISEUP AT WORK

## Content
Why human readiness is the asset AI cannot commoditize, and why we are building RISEUP@work to compound itWhy this matters for investorsIn Episode #6 of the RISEUP@work, our career development show on NowMedia TV, I sat down with Jasmine Davis, founder and CEO of Pretty Talk LLC, for an hour to discuss a question that sits underneath our entire thesis. What happens to a workforce when AI absorbs the technical work, and the only thing that separates one professional from another is human readiness?Her answer and mine point to the same place. The capabilities the market dismisses as soft are about to become the most valuable skills a professional can own. We are building RISEUP@work to be the system that develops them and compounds them across a career.Watch the episode here: https://youtu.be/GVlIecxO9uUJasmine built her practice out of years inside the juvenile justice system, working with young people that most institutions had already given up on. Today, she develops confidence, character, and communication in young people, with a particular focus on young women, through what she calls brave conversations. Pretty is her acronym for the character qualities she trains. When someone who has spent a career restoring agency to people at the hardest end of the pipeline tells you the same thing the labor data and the analysts are telling you, the signal is worth sharing.What we coveredSoft skills are mislabeled. They are power skills. I have never liked the word soft, because it implies optional, and the reality is the opposite. I told Jasmine that technical skills are transmutable. You can move from Excel to Google Sheets and barely break stride, as long as one human capability remains intact: teachability. The skills that actually determine a career are the ones the market underprices because it calls them "soft" decide a career are the ones the market underprices because it calls them soft. Jasmine reframes them as power skills, and that single relabel is the whole game.AI is the forcing function. I put the paradox to her directly. We are told AI is being built for humanity, so why is humanity losing jobs to it? The honest answer is that AI is collapsing the value of pure technical execution. When the task work is automated, what remains is human: judgment, communication, empathy, the ability to hold a hard conversation, and to keep the relationship intact. Future work is not only about technical skill. It is about human readiness. That is not a comforting line. It is a statement about where durable economic value is moving.The foundation is laid long before the desk. Most of the market assumes career readiness begins at the first job. It does not. As I said on the show, the foundation is not laid at 21. It is laid at 14, sometimes 12. The corporate world does not teach you these capabilities. At best, it sharpens the ones you already brought to the fight. Jasmine sees the same gap from the other side. By the time someone reaches the workforce, the absence of confidence and communication is already years old. The implication for us is direct. A career operating system that only switches on after the job offer is starting too late.The gap is real, and it is not what employers think. Jasmine pushed back usefully on the lazy version of this narrative. She does not think younger workers communicate badly. She thinks they communicate bluntly and honestly, and then get penalized for it inside a workforce that now spans several generations with very different rules. The real gap is emotional intelligence in the moment, the ability to express what you feel without being run by it. She named the three capabilities she tells every person entering the workforce to invest in. Adaptability, including the discipline to adjust your attitude as well as your tasks. Empathy, captured in a line I will keep using: it is not what is wrong with you, it is what happened. And communication of the unglamorous kind, eye contact, presence, the phone face down.Self-doubt into self-leadership is an inside job. The most investable idea in the hour was Jasmine's framing of leadership. Every leader, she said, recognizes what they need help with. Self-doubt is not solved by external validation. It is solved by sitting with yourself, naming the gap, and building the specific capability to close it. That is a product description. It is exactly the loop our diagnostics, journaling, and coaching are designed to run.Why this is the RISEUP@work thesisStrip the conversation down, and it is our investment case in plain language. The technical layer of work is being commoditized by AI. The human layer is not, and it is becoming scarce at the exact moment it becomes essential. The professionals who own confidence, communication, and emotional intelligence will earn more and last longer than those who only own tools, and almost no one is building the system that develops those capabilities and tracks them over time.That system is RISEUP@work. We are a longitudinal career operating system, longitudinal meaning a platform that walks alongside a professional for years rather than selling them a one-time course or a single coaching session. The R.I.S.E.U.P. Career Diagnostic Suite surfaces the exact gaps Jasmine describes. The AI Interview Simulator and the resume and LinkedIn tools turn human readiness into reps instead of theory. The Voice Journal and our stage-based cohorts give people a place to sit with themselves and their peers to do it alongside one another, at a price a professional in the Launch Stage of a career can actually afford. Tools teach you to do a task. RISEUP@work builds the human being doing it, and keeps building across the Launch Stage, the Foundation Stage, and the Dividend Stage of a career.This is also the line between us and the rest of the field. LinkedIn shows you jobs. Coursera sells you courses. A general AI assistant answers a question and forgets you the moment you close the tab. None of them owns human readiness as a longitudinal outcome. We do.We are building this with conviction and with proof. We have 985 beta participants, our first paid revenue is already in from both the United States and India, and we are heads down on our platform launch in July, 2026.How you can helpThe highest-leverage thing you can do right now is a warm introduction to another investor who backs founder-led, AI-native consumer software. Every quality introduction shortens the path to launch.And if there is a professional in your life in the Launch Stage or Foundation Stage of a career, send them to riseupatwork.com so they are among the first to join the waitlist when the platform goes live.Thank you for your support.Dr. Deepak BhootraFounder and CEO, RISEUP@work