The Growing Importance of Soft Skills in Medical Education in the AI Era: Balancing Humanistic Care and Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence transforms clinical practice, medical education needs to incorporate soft skills to ensure patient safety, support transparent decision-making, and uphold ethical accountability. This narrative review synthesizes evidence from MEDLINE, Scopus, Google Scholar, and grey literature, organizing the findings into seven thematic areas that cover curriculum integration and teaching methods. The results indicate that soft skills enhance patient adherence, satisfaction, safety, trust, and shared decision-making. They also strengthen physicians' professional identity, confidence, collaboration, ethics, and resilience while reducing burnout. Additionally, soft skills enhance system-level outcomes, including collaboration, resilience, safety, and public trust. Experiential, reflective, and competency-based pedagogies demonstrate the strongest impact, while AI-enhanced tools provide complementary value. Despite definitional ambiguity, fragmented curricular adoption, and limited longitudinal implementation, research highlights that key competencies—communication, emotional intelligence and empathy, pro-fessionalism, teamwork and collaboration, and critical thinking with reflective practice—operate as an interconnected and synergetic system. Reconceptualizing soft skills as an interconnected system, reinforced by cognitive, affective, humanistic, behavioral, and sociocultural mechanisms, advances theoretical clarity, supports programmatic assessment, and enables the integration of AI-related literacies, including data governance, algorithmic transparency, bias mitigation, and digital professionalism. Ultimately, excellence in medicine relies on harmonizing biomedical expertise and AI capabilities with humanistic and cognitive competencies to ensure that technological innovation strengthens, rather than undermines, the ethical and humanistic foundations of medical practice.