INTERVIEW | As AI accelerates across the industry, Julia Streets argues that the real differentiator isn’t the technology but the teams shaping and steering it. At PostTrade 360°s conference on 2–3 September, she’ll unpack the people skills that enable firms to stand out.

Post-trade sits on more data than almost any other part of the transaction lifecycle, and while AI reshapes how humans work, the data only becomes a differentiator when a team’s shared insight and critique coordinate the response when things go wrong, or the work needs to scale.

In the age of AI and rapid technological change, the impact of humans (creating it, and being reshaped by it in turn) just appears to grow. It’s a circle: humans build it to improve things, and in doing so, unlock its ability to evolve our way of doing things too.

That’s why, for Julia Streets, Founder and Chair of Streets Consulting whose entire focus is on growth and transformation, the differentiator isn’t the tech itself, or even who uses it. “It’s how humans work to spur differentiation from the very thing that’s reshaping how we think, work, strategise, and deliver,” she says.

Think of the tech as a spring coil multiplier—people are AI’s springboard to the next phase. One person applying the tech changes how they do things. But carrying that forward to the next product or process isn’t down to that person—it’s how a team, working on different problems with different ideas, pivots it onward. The individual brings the differentiation; the team supplies the momentum.

Same people—high-performing individuals, output-focused—using the same tech to do one thing will stay the same. But then the risk creeps in: AI thinking left unchecked, things going wrong, manual intervention needed, stress and burnout rising. The answer is a high-performing team, where tech doesn’t overwhelm but is harnessed to differentiate.

It stacks, then, Streets says —the high-performing team that differentiates in this way. And it’s the development of soft skills that ensures the differential development of the technology, and its sustainability. “We know from leaders and corporates that soft skills in the age of AI really matter,” she says. Think critical thinking, problem-solving, emotional intelligence, teamwork, communication, adaptability and resilience.

Google’s Project Aristotle is one example supporting the case for the team over tech. 

Why now

This isn’t a new argument. It’s the latest round of a fight that’s been running for over fifty years—and it’s worth grounding Streets’ framework in that longer arc, because it’s what makes the claim earned rather than asserted.

“Soft skills” itself was coined by the U.S. Army in the early 1970s, it meant, literally, skills that didn’t involve touching a machine. The term went formal at a real event — the two-day CONARC Soft Skills Training Conference, held at Fort Bliss, Texas, in December 1972 — where they were literally arguing over whether reading a paper map counted as “hard” (touching an object) or “soft” (no machine involved). 

Finance spent the millennium’s opening years betting the opposite way—quantitative firepower as the only currency that mattered. Then came 2008, which forced a reckoning: systematic reviews pointed not just to bad models but to a communication failure at the exact moment clarity was needed most, and to a culture that had normalised risk it shouldn’t have.

A few years later, Google’s Project Aristotle put a number on the same insight. Google went from hiring specialist developers to work on one type of tech and do one job—a model that made sense when only a handful of teams needed deep expertise—to realising that as tech became ubiquitous across the org, differentiation had to come from somewhere else. The method – a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – was used to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. Studying roughly 180 teams, Google found that who was on a team mattered less than how the team worked together, with psychological safety as the single strongest predictor of performance.  

AI is simply the newest, fastest round of the same test. As tech spreads from one part of the firm to everywhere in the firm, the common thread that lets teams scale and grow through that change isn’t the tool anymore — it’s how the team is built.

Julia’s framework, mapped to Aristotle

Streets’ five soft skills map closely to these Project Aristotle’s dynamics, with psychological safety as the foundation the other five sit on:

  • Critical thinking and problem-solving
  • Emotional intelligence
  • Teamwork 
  • Cross-functional communication
  • Adaptability and resilience


Leadership, in this framework, is shifting from execution to influence — relationship management and selective assertiveness (tools like the Thomas-Kilmann conflict model give this real structure) replacing pure command-and-control. That shift has a cost leaders rarely get credit for: carrying a team’s psychological safety, absorbing disruption, staying available to read the room, is real load, and it’s largely invisible on an org chart. Streets is direct that leaders’ mental health and resilience is under-discussed even as burnout pressures intensify—coaching and genuine support for leaders is maintenance for people being asked to lead through constant change. Firms that pour attention into employee wellbeing while treating leader burnout as a given are missing half the equation.

Underneath all of it sits mindset. Streets draws heavily on Carol Dweck’s growth-versus-fixed-mindset research here: organisations that treat disruption as a threat to defend against build brittle teams; those that treat it as something to learn from build adaptable ones.

Two questions for the room

Streets prefers to leave audiences with provocations rather than conclusions:

1. Do you truly understand what defines and differentiates your team? Hybrid work, multi-generational teams, and cross-functional workflows demand real influence and the ability to read the room (not just technical fluency). Reverse mentoring is one of the more underused tools here, she says.

2. Do you know how to build an all-star team, versus a team of all-stars? A room full of the smartest individual contributors isn’t a high-performing team. Project Aristotle’s finding was that the gap between those two things is entirely about how people work together, not who they individually are.

Streets runs two businesses that map onto this exact argument. Streets Consulting works on the growth and transformation of businesses — development, marketing, and communications support across financial services and technology. Productive Avenues is the human side of the same coin: one-to-one executive coaching (she calls herself a “practitioner coach”), one-to-few boot camps for scaling leaders, one-to-many stages and studios, and—since 2025—one-to-all, via SoftSkillingIt.com’s soft skills course, she built specifically to democratise access to this kind of learning. 

The access problem

The point Streets keeps returning to: this can’t just be executive coaching for people who can already afford it. If soft skills are genuinely the differentiator now, they need reaching at scale — school leavers, graduates, apprentices, rising and experienced staff alike, not reserved for the leadership floor. Her closing challenge isn’t just “invest in these skills”, but it’s “look at who’s in the room learning them, and who isn’t.”  And Streets is not alone in her mission, this course has been accredited as the soft skills online course for the UK tech industry by the industry-backed skills body, TechSkills. 

The firms that treat this as a democratised, org-wide capability are the ones building teams that actually catch the spring and pass the momentum on. AI didn’t make soft skills matter more. It just removed the last excuse for treating them as optional.

• For more information about the PostTrade 360° conference 2-3 September 2026 and to register, click here