AI models can provide answers, but they lack innate curiosity. The unique and enduring value of humans, especially in fields like journalism, is their ability to ask insightful questions. This positions human curiosity as the essential driver for AI, rather than a skill that AI will replace.
AI has made knowledge—the ability to produce information—cheap and accessible. The new currency is wisdom: knowing what matters, where to focus, and how to find purpose. This shifts the focus of work and education from learning facts to developing critical thinking, empathy, and judgment.
A core principle for developing successful AI products is to focus on amplifying human capabilities, not just replacing them. The vision should be to empower human teams to perform the most demanding cognitive tasks and increase their impact, which leads to better product design and user adoption.
As platforms like AlphaSense automate the grunt work of research, the advantage is no longer in finding information. The new "alpha" for investors comes from asking better, more creative questions, identifying cross-industry trends, and being more adept at prompting the AI to uncover non-obvious connections.
The "generative" label on AI is misleading. Its true power for daily knowledge work lies not in creating artifacts, but in its superhuman ability to read, comprehend, and synthesize vast amounts of information—a far more frequent and fundamental task than writing.
In a world of AI-generated content, true expertise is proven by the ability to answer spontaneous, unscripted questions on a topic for an extended period. This demonstrates a level of domain mastery and authenticity that AI cannot replicate, building genuine trust with an audience.
As AI commoditizes execution and intellectual labor, the only remaining scarce human skill will be judgment: the wisdom to know what to build, why, and for whom. This shifts economic value from effort and hard work to discernment and taste.
AI models lack access to the rich, contextual signals from physical, real-world interactions. Humans will remain essential because their job is to participate in this world, gather unique context from experiences like customer conversations, and feed it into AI systems, which cannot glean it on their own.
ASU's president argues that if an AI can answer an assignment, the assignment has failed. The educator's role must evolve to use AI to 'up the game,' forcing students to ask more sophisticated questions, making the quality of the query—not the synthesized answer—the hallmark of learning.
AI is commoditizing knowledge by making vast amounts of data accessible. Therefore, the leaders who thrive will not be those with the most data, but those with the most judgment. The key differentiator will be the uniquely human ability to apply wisdom, context, and insight to AI-generated outputs to make effective decisions.