Entrepreneur Lucy Wark’s keynote address at Tropical Innovation Festival

Being in a relationship with AI, using it to build soft skills and AI-proofing your career were some of the topics discussed at a women’s business luncheon.

Being in a relationship with AI, using it to build soft skills and AI-proofing your career were some of the topics discussed at a women’s business luncheon in Cairns on Tuesday.

As a part of the Tropical Innovation Festival, the luncheon, held by the Cairns Business Women’s Club, featured a keynote address by entrepreneur Lucy Wark.

Ms Wark is the co-founder of Fuzzy, a career start-up, NORMAL, a sex education company, and Grapevine, a platform for workers in tech to share their stories of harassment and provides practical guidance.

Noting the biggest use of AI in 2025 is personal and professional support, Ms Wark touched on the increasing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT for companionship, saying she believed there was a place for people to use AI to build relationship skills, rather than have AI “relationships”.

“I think there’s a case for (AI) genuinely helping people build skills and intimacy or helping solve things like the loneliness epidemic … giving people the ability to practice how to talk to someone, then feel confident enough to actually go up to someone in real life,” she said.

“However, AI tools … are not built to have needs of their own like a real human, they are built to meet your needs.

“Relationships involve compromise and honesty and vulnerability... if you are developing relationship skills or developing a relationship with something that fundamentally doesn’t have needs and will tell you what you want to hear, you’re not actually engaging in what we would see as a relationship.

“I think we’ll see increasing volumes of (AI companionship) and increasingly complex and thorny ethical questions coming up because of it too.”

Ms Wark with NORMAL co-founder Georgia Grace. Picture: Ryan Osland

Ms Wark’s business Fuzzy runs courses led by guest experts on building soft skills such as negotiation and structured problem solving for career growth.

She said she was inspired to create Fuzzy after leaving a consulting firm that prioritised soft skill development and entering the start-up space, where she discovered “most people were making it up as they went”.

“It’s much harder to learn soft skills than it is to learn technical skills,” Ms Wark said.

“If you’re learning how to solve a maths problem, you go into the textbook, you learn the theory, do a couple of practice problems.

“With negotiation, it’s actually very easy to read theory – but until your heart starts racing and your palm starts sweating and you’re in those race-like conditions, it’s actually very difficult to build that skill meaningfully.”

Ms Wark discussed the common idea that AI and soft skills are at odds with each other, explaining how Fuzzy encourages the use of AI to improve the development of “human” skills in the workplace.

Cairns Business Women's Club president Sarah Debono speaks at the CBWC business lunch at the Benson Hotel. Picture: Brendan Radke

“A lot of people ask, ‘So how do I AI proof my career?’. I think the core idea behind that is that AI might outperform us at writing email copy, at writing code, but it can’t replicate our emotional intelligence or our judgement or our ability to influence others,” Ms Wark said.

“I broadly agree with that idea, but I think that actually the picture is a little bit more complicated and interesting than just a bright line between technical skills and safe human skills.”

Ms Wark said Fuzzy promoted the use of AI in their courses, encouraging participants to use it as a “coach” or a “reality simulator” to fast-track their learning.

“When we are doing the negotiation course, we will say to people – when you’re starting to anticipate counter arguments from the other side, use ChatGPT. It probably won’t get you to 100 per cent, but it will get you from zero to 60 per cent so much faster so that then the effort that you’re applying can actually be used in much more effective ways,” she said.

“Soft skills can be learned and deployed much more effectively with artificial intelligence.”

Originally published as Entrepreneur Lucy Wark’s keynote address at Tropical Innovation Festival