In the AI Era, the Most Valuable Engineers Are Those Who Can 'Translate' Rather Than Just Code

#SkillsInTheAIEra #Engineer #SalesVsTech #SpringWageOffensive2026 #RealWages #Reshoring #EconomicSecurity #InternationalStandards #Zawa4Channel

📌 What you will learn in this article

• Why the skill that increases in value in the AI era is not just 'technical ability,' but the 'ability to translate technology into the language of other departments'

• How Mitsubishi Electric's standardization strategy, spring wage increases, and the reshoring of antibiotics are actually connected by the same structure

• Why relying solely on 'programming' is no longer enough for the skills individuals need to hone

🔌 Trivia Hook: USB is convenient not just because the technology is amazing

The reason USB is convenient is that the ports are standardized.

It is so obvious that we tend to forget, but that wouldn't be possible just because 'the technology was good.' It only becomes 'convenient for anyone to use' once manufacturers agree on standards, parts are mass-produced, peripheral manufacturers get on board, and the sales side finds it easier to explain.

I think the same applies within a company.

No matter how talented an engineer you have, if it isn't communicated to sales, it won't reach management. If it doesn't fit into systems or standards, or can't be implemented in the field, any one of these issues will result in technology that is 'amazing but unprofitable.'

The talent that will increase in value in the AI era is not just the person who writes code the fastest. It is the person who can translate technology into the language of sales, management, systems, and the field.

Today, I will explore that 'translation ability' from four different angles.

Chapter 1: 'Bad blood' isn't about personality—it's a structural problem of misaligned evaluation metrics 🔍

It has long been said that technical staff and sales staff are like 'cats and dogs.' Whether in the IT industry or manufacturing, this divide exists regardless of the sector.

This is often dismissed as 'lack of communication,' but that is not the essence of the problem.

Sales is evaluated by revenue. Engineering is evaluated by quality and delivery deadlines. If the KPIs they are looking at are different, it is impossible for them to reach the same conclusion. Furthermore, their very identities are different. Sales thinks, 'We are the ones creating the numbers,' while engineering thinks, 'We are the ones creating the value.' It is structurally impossible for people with different goals to make the same decisions.

▼ The difference in 'what sales and engineering are looking at'

          ┃  営業            ┃  技術
━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 KPI      ┃  売上・受注数    ┃  品質・納期遵守
 言語     ┃  顧客価値・競争  ┃  制約条件・再現性
 時間軸   ┃  今期の数字      ┃  中長期の品質
 恐怖     ┃  失注            ┃  技術負債
 誇り     ┃  数字を作った    ┃  価値を生んだ

Here lies a **'gap between numbers and reality.'**

According to the RENGO (Japanese Trade Union Confederation) tally for the 2026 spring wage offensive, the overall average wage increase rate is 5.09% (third tally). Small and medium-sized enterprises with fewer than 300 employees also maintained a high level at 5.00%, with the wage increase portion (base pay equivalent) for SMEs at 3.68%, exceeding the overall average of 3.58%. Even in the RENGO Fukuoka tally, the 5.41% for SMEs exceeded the 5.25% for large corporations.

If you look only at the numbers, it seems like "small and medium-sized enterprises are also doing their best."

But what is the reality? The proportion of companies implementing "defensive wage increases"—raising wages despite no improvement in performance just to secure talent—has reached 60.1% of companies that implemented wage hikes. In 2025, there were a record-high 397 bankruptcies due to labor shortages. In other words, the contradiction of "employees quitting despite wage hikes" and "companies going bankrupt because they raised wages" is happening simultaneously.

Why do they quit? It's not the salary. It's the feeling that "my work is not being fairly evaluated." For engineers, even if they silently complete unreasonable projects brought in by sales, it is the sales figures that get the credit. This structural sense of unfairness is at the root of turnover that wage hikes cannot fix.

Chapter 2: Engineer Skills in the AI Era = "The Power to Translate" 🔄

Here, I will enter the discussion on "skills for engineers that are effective in the AI era," which was also in the Nikkei headline.

According to Leverages' "IT Human Resources White Paper 2025," about 40% of companies hiring IT talent responded that "the skills required of engineers have changed with the advent of generative AI." And the number one skill that has become more important was "communication skills" at 48.3%.

【Personal Experience: Discovery Type】
I'll be honest. When I saw this number, my first thought was, "Here we go again." People have been saying "from now on, it's all about communication skills" for 20 years. AI comes along, and it's communication skills again. Is that all it comes down to? However, as I read through the @IT analysis and the World Economic Forum's "Future of Jobs Report 2025," the content was completely different. Keywords like "upstream processes," "requirements definition," and "business understanding" appear repeatedly. "Isn't this exactly the same as the 'ability to draw out what the customer really wants to do' that veteran SEs were talking about 20 years ago?" Only the labels have changed; the essence is the same. The only thing that has changed is that the risk of being replaced by AI for those who lack that ability has become concrete.

@IT's analysis (January 2026) on the "four new roles for engineers in the AI era" shows that the engineer's job is shifting from "someone who writes code" to "a professional who directs AI to build and operate systems." It is not that the amount of work is decreasing, but rather that the center of gravity is shifting.

▼ Changes in Engineer Time Allocation

               ┃  2024年        ┃  2026年モデル
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╋━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 コーディング  ┃  約60%         ┃  大幅減
 設計・判断    ┃  少なめ        ┃  約70%（判断＋レビュー）
 AI指示出し    ┃  ―            ┃  新規追加
 品質・安全    ┃  少なめ        ┃  拡大

What is actually needed for this "judgment" is the contextual information that the sales side possesses, such as "what are customers struggling with?" and "what is the market looking for?"

In other words, the "communication skills" required of engineers in the AI era are not "the ability to speak pleasantly." It is the "ability to translate between technology and business contexts," which is exactly the "ability to verbalize requirements" that has been talked about for a long time.

Here lies the structure of scale failure. There are engineers who possess "business translation skills" as an individual skill. But there is almost no company that has standardized and replicated this as an organization. Just having one talented super-SE is not enough to spread AI adoption across departments.

What really works are probably these four things.

▼ Four Translation Skills That Increase in Value in the AI Era

❶ The ability to translate technology into decision-making units for non-technical staff
❷ The ability to coordinate by showing the interests of different departments on the same board
❸ The ability to read systems, standards, and regulations to design a winning path
❹ The ability to not just end with documents, but to see things through until they work on the front lines

What increases in value in the AI era is not a "superhuman who can do everything." It is someone who has a specialty but can connect with adjacent specialties.

I would like to ask one question here. In your workplace, how often do you see scenes where technology and sales are speaking the "same language"?

Chapter 3: Strong companies don't stop at "making good products"—they create the rules themselves 🏛️

Looking at this at the corporate level, Mitsubishi Electric's moves are easy to understand.

Next to the legal department on the 11th floor of their headquarters, there is a 30-person unit called the "Industrial Policy Liaison Office." It is a specialized team responsible for lobbying overseas authorities such as the EU. Mitsubishi Electric "anticipated" and responded to the EU Cyber Resilience Act, which will be fully enforced in December 2027—a regulation that had FA equipment manufacturing staff screaming, "24 hours is absolutely impossible." They got involved from the international standard formulation stage and wove their own technology into the standard.

In official documents, the company explains that over 600 people, including those in key positions at international standardization organizations such as the IEC Vice Chair, are involved in rule-making. Furthermore, regarding CC-Link IE TSN, they incorporated TSN technology, which is being standardized by the IEEE, into the industrial network field and successfully obtained international standards at an early stage.

They are attempting to break the classic pattern of Japanese companies—'winning in technology but losing in the standards war'—through lobbying activities.

This is not just a story about large corporations. The same can be said for individual conduct. People who lament, 'I have such advanced technology, so why am I not being evaluated?' often do not understand the 'rules of evaluation' within their company or industry.

This is where 'translation' becomes necessary again.

▼ The 'Chain of Translation' that turns technology into profit

Laboratory technology
　　⬇️
Translate into the language of intellectual property
　　⬇️
Translate into the language of standardization
　　⬇️
Translate into a winning strategy for sales
　　⬇️
Translate into material for investment decisions in mass production

Only companies that can make these connections can turn 'amazing technology' into 'profitable technology'.

Chapter 4: Even if you bring back the base, there are no people—The 'physical wall' posed by reshoring 🏭

Another arena where translation skills in the AI era are being tested is reshoring.

A symbolic example is the move by Meiji Seika Pharma. In December 2025, the company resumed production of '6-APA,' a starting material for penicillin-based antibiotics, at its Gifu plant for the first time in about 30 years. This is a project to domesticate raw materials that were almost 100% dependent on China, from the perspective of economic security.

By 2028, they aim to build a drug substance production system with Fujifilm Toyama Chemical and Otsuka Chemical, and aim to supply purely domestic antibiotics starting in 2030. They were able to build new facilities by investing tens of billions of yen.

But the problem is people.

The company's strength is that the Gifu plant 'has many experienced workers and operators who have been involved in drug substance manufacturing, and the know-how has been preserved.' In this factory, which started operations in 1971 and manufactured penicillin drug substances until 1994, the production strains, large-scale culture equipment, and above all, experienced personnel still remained. It was only possible to restart because there were people who knew the manufacturing process from 30 years ago. If this had been 10 years later, there is a possibility that even if the equipment could be built, there would be no one to operate it.

【Experience: Hypothesis Collapse Type】
'If we raise wages, people will stay'—this is a hypothesis held by many managers. However, although real wages in February 2026 remained positive at +1.9% year-on-year, looking at the content, the downward pressure on prices due to gasoline tax cuts and electricity/gas subsidies contributed significantly. If crude oil prices soar due to rising tensions in Iran, it could sink back into negative territory. There is a considerable gap between a 5% nominal wage increase and the actual feeling of take-home pay. Furthermore, the percentage of small and medium-sized enterprises with a wage revision rate of less than 1% increased by 5 percentage points from the previous year. Wage increases alone will not keep engineers, nor will they advance the succession of technology. This hypothesis was collapsed by data.

Here, we can see the **'process by which ideals die in the field.'**

AI can create meeting minutes. It can help with demand forecasting. It can also analyze process data. But it cannot build the fermentation tank itself, nor can it replace wastewater treatment equipment.The core of the value that remains in the AI era is the person who can connect and operate software and hardware, systems and the field, and profitability and supply responsibility all together.

Even if 'reshoring' is put forward as a policy, if the human resources to support it are not cultivated, it will be a pie in the sky. Some companies will likely fall into a situation where they use subsidies to build only facilities, but the operating rate does not increase in the end.

What keeps engineers connected? It is sales feeding back customer voices by saying, 'Your work has this kind of meaning.' It is management showing convincing criteria by saying, 'Your evaluation axis is this.' The wave of wage increases to come should not be read as a mere economic story, but as a phenomenon where'a price tag has begun to be placed on the scarcity of human resources who can act as bridges'.

In your organization, is a fair price being placed on 'technology translators'?

📝 Summary

1. The disconnect between sales and engineering is not a matter of individual compatibility, but a structural issue of evaluation metrics. Even with a 5% wage increase, 60% of it is defensive. Numbers alone do not motivate people.

2. The true essence of engineering skills in the AI era is 'translation ability'. It is not about the speed of writing code, but the ability to convert technology into business value and translate business needs into technical specifications.

3. Mitsubishi Electric's standardization, the spring wage negotiations, and Meiji Seika's return to domestic production all point to a 'shortage of talent who can connect and drive things'. People who possess expertise while being able to connect with adjacent fields—as AI spreads, what will be in short supply at the end is not code, but translators.

A word from Zawa4 only. 💬

'Sales vs. Engineering' is often talked about as an eternal theme, but there is no longer time to be so leisurely. In an era where AI writes code, the 'translation' that only humans can do—converting technology into business value and translating business needs into technical specifications—is overwhelmingly lacking on both the sales and engineering sides. If you just change the signs to 'domestic return,' 'wage increase,' or 'AI implementation' without addressing this shortage, the workplace will not function. Numbers do not lie, but numbers alone do not move people.

*This article was delivered from the analytical perspective of the Zawa4 Channel. It is also explained on Stand.fm.

#SkillsInTheAIEra #Engineer #SalesVsEngineering #SpringWageNegotiations2026 #RealWages #DomesticReturn #EconomicSecurity #InternationalStandards #Zawa4Channel