AI and Improv at Work

What the Corporate Landscape Looks Like 

AI adoption in the American workplace has moved from pilot program to operational reality. In McKinsey’s 2025 Global Survey on AI, there is a notable increase of AI implementation within organizations—nearly 9 in 10 organizations use AI in some capacity. Yet, not all AI is utilized in the same way. 

Research analyzing prompts to Claude has found that there is a distinction to be made between AI augmentation and automation. Recent studies suggest that the majority of AI use in the workplace stems from AI augmentation, where the worker handles AI like a collaborative tool, rather than AI automation, where AI handles tasks independently. This leads researchers to believe the value of the human in the loop is not disappearing. It is changing.

Image Source: rudall30/istock

The emergence of this new tool does not mean humans are obsolete, it means that companies value certain skills which are irreplaceable by a machine now more than ever. As the corporate landscape shifts, so do the qualities employers are looking for.

Skills Needed

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on surveys of more than 1,000 employers representing 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters, identifies the skills gap as the single biggest barrier to business transformation. As AI handles more document drafting, data sifting, and basic research, workers will need to lean more heavily on the capabilities machines do not yet offer: judgment, relationship-building, critical thinking, and empathy.

With the emergence of AI, certain uniquely human capabilities are becoming more scarce, making them more valuable. When asked what skills are sought after yet lost, employers said these:

• Active listening and spontaneous communication: the ability to engage, respond, and build on ideas in real time, in meetings, presentations, negotiations, and client interactions

• Adaptability under uncertainty: the capacity to change course mid-task without an instruction manual, especially as AI-driven workflows continue to evolve

• Collaboration and psychological safety: the willingness to take risks with teammates, surface dissenting ideas, and collaborate & share credit rather than protecting individual credit

• Executive presence and storytelling: communicating clearly and confidently to stakeholders, building trust through authenticity and preparation

• Resilience and error recovery: the ability to move through failure productively rather than avoiding risk or shutting down under pressure

Image source: Bloom Growth blog, "Six Essential Soft Skills Every Manager Should Have"

These skills are specific and developable, and the reward for developing these skills is measurable.  The challenge is that most organizations do not have a structured, evidence-

based method for doing so.

How Unscripted can Help

The Unscripted Project uses improv to help others develop those skills. We offer corporate workshops, and have successfully run them at companies such as McKinsey, Bain, Comcast, and Wharton. The workshops are up to 60 or 90 minutes, and can be done virtually or in person. Every paid workshop directly funds free improv programming for public school students in Philadelphia and New York City.

Students and members of the workforce can greatly benefit from improv practice. Improv is not just a performance skill, it develops crucial, wildly applicable, soft skills.

• Yes, And: participants practice accepting what a colleague puts forward and building on it, rather than redirecting or dismissing. This is the structural foundation of collaborative communication, the skill employers consistently identify as scarce in AI-era workplaces.

• Adapting to uncertainty: every exercise is designed to be completed under time pressure with incomplete information. Participants develop the capacity to make decisions and keep moving without an instruction manual, directly applicable to client-facing work and fast-changing project environments.

• Comfort with making mistakes: the explicit workshop framing establishes that errors are not failures to hide but material to work with. participants make and recover from mistakes in real time, in front of others, and are cheered for it. Over the course of a session, failure stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like information. This builds the psychological safety that research consistently links to high-performing teams and makes the kind of creative risk-taking that drives innovation feel possible.

• Comfort with public speaking: participants regularly speak, perform, and present in front of their peers throughout each session. Because the stakes are low and the environment is supportive, the experience builds genuine confidence in public speaking and spontaneous communication rather than just simulating it.

The WEF Future of Jobs Report identifies resilience, flexibility, and agility as the fastest-growing skills differentiating growing from declining roles. It also identifies the skills gap as the primary obstacle to corporate transformation. Unscripted for Teams addresses both in a single structured intervention: it builds the specific capacities employers report they cannot find, through a facilitated experience that requires no prior knowledge, no materials, and no equipment.

The two most differentiated workshop offerings for corporate clients are the general Team Building workshop and the Presentation and Leadership Skills workshop. The former is the broadly applicable entry point, designed for new hire orientations, team offsites, and any group looking to reduce social friction and build camaraderie. The latter focuses explicitly on executive presence, rapid pivoting, and giving and receiving feedback, and is open to any team or individual looking to sharpen those skills. This provides a fun and light hearted approach to building soft skills, while also bringing the team together.

To learn more, please visit our website at www.unscriptedproject.org. To sign up for a workshop, send us an email at info@unscriptedproject.org.