Kevin O’Leary: CEOs who blindly pursue AI are ‘dead in the water’

Investor and Shark Tank personality Kevin O’Leary said CEOs who blindly pursue AI are “dead in the water”. But the winning formula, he said, is pairing AI with storytelling and critical thinking. 

On Wednesday, in a post on X, O’Leary wrote: “In business, it’s about critical thinking and communication, period.”

He shared the comment alongside a clip from a recent Fox News appearance, where he discussed the renewed relevance of liberal arts degrees in the age of artificial intelligence.

Technical fields like computer science—once considered the safest bet for a stable, high-paying job—are increasingly on shaky ground. Rather than a specific set of technical skills that could become obsolete tomorrow, employers are now hunting for talent who can think critically, creatively, and contextually—the soft skills liberal arts majors have in spades. 

“Liberal arts graduates can certainly cut through the noise,” O’Leary agreed on X. “But the real value is in the ability to tell a story, paired with AI talent. That’s where the smart money is going. Everything else is noise.”

Storytelling has emerged as a core skill over the past year, with U.S. job postings referencing “storytelling” doubling over the past year, according to LinkedIn data cited in The Wall Street Journal.

“The number one inflation is creators, like storytellers, writers that actually have AI talents,” O’Leary said in the clip. Those employees who once earned $48,000 a year, now are commanding $600,000 salaries, he said. This increased value can be measured through customer acquisition, according to O’Leary. 

“If you can prove that you can change a company’s ability to acquire more customers, you can measure that every week, and you can pay them a portion of the profit you make off a new customer,” he explained in the Fox interview. “That’s the new model.”

That model only works, he elaborated, if companies maintain focus on value-execution. “I don’t care if you have a liberal arts degree or an MBA; if you can’t tell a story that actually moves the needle on customer acquisition, you’re worth zero,” he wrote alongside the clip. 

The same is true on the flip side. “If you’re a CEO and you’re just pushing a button to generate garbage, you’re dead in the water,” wrote O’Leary—or drowning in workslop, resulting in both time and money down the drain. 

“That’s why I only look at it as a tool,” O’Leary said in the interview. “But the people that actually manage it are very valuable.”

As we enter the era of the AI-augmented workforce, companies are experimenting—some with more success than others. 

Take Buzzfeed’s recent woes as a teachable moment. The media company’s full-throttle pivot to AI in 2023—just a month after shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News division—hasn’t panned out as planned. The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released this month, and said last week it has “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a business.

The lesson is clear: The most successful companies won’t be those who resist AI or submit to it blindly. It will be those who can leverage their workers’ strengths, integrating human creativity and critical thinking with AI’s speed and scale. 

“The challenge isn’t the technology,” as O’Leary wrote. “It’s the execution.”

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