Leadership guru Katie Anderson makes an interesting point. She writes, “Most of us were rewarded in school for having the answer and promoted early in our careers for being excellent independent contributors. Having the answer is what got us here. But the same instinct that made you successful can undermine your impact as a team leader, executive, or coach.”[1] Her advice to executives is simple: “Your job isn't to own the thinking. It's to own the thinking process.” This advice is particularly applicable for business executives in the era of artificial intelligence (AI). Nearly a decade ago, futurist Kevin Kelly wrote, “Today we have rapidly improving technology to answer our questions. … Very soon we’ll live in a world where we will be able to ask the cloud, in conversational tones, for free, any question at all. And if that question has a known answer, the machine will explain it to us, again and again if need be.”[2] He was correct. Today’s large language models are incredible. Kelly’s prediction that in the future answers would be cheap but questions would be priceless has become a reality.

When Answers are Cheap

Eric Johnson, Chief Executive Officer at SurveyMonkey, agrees with both Anderson and Kelly. He writes, “AI can deliver polished responses in seconds, but leadership still requires understanding what questions to ask.”[3] Back in 2017, Kelly predicted, “The role of humans, at least for a while, will be to ask questions.” He added, “To ask a great question will be seen as the mark of an educated person. A great question, ironically, produces not only a good answer, but also more good follow-up questions! Great question creators will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new industries, new brands and new possibilities that our restless species can explore. A good question is worth a million good answers.”

In many ways, the future described by Kelly is already here. “We’re living through the most answer-rich moment in human history,” explains Johnson. “AI can generate something polished in seconds. Some of it still makes my jaw drop.” You can almost sense the “but” in his statement. He adds, “But there’s a growing risk inside companies that I don’t think leaders are talking about enough: Fast answers can create the illusion of understanding. Increasingly, organizations are mistaking speed for insight.”

Recent headlines have highlighted concerns about AI hallucinations and AI slop. That means asking the right questions is only part of the process. Ensuring AI provides trusted answers is another part of the process. Futurist Mark van Rijmenam writes, “Intelligence is becoming almost free, and it will end up everywhere. When the thinking costs almost nothing, the scarce thing is no longer knowledge. It is judgment, deciding what to ask, what to trust, and what a machine must never settle alone.”[4]

Questions, Curiosity, Creativity, and Judgment are Priceless

In the wake of the wave of recent layoffs credited to companies adopting AI, there has been a lot of fearmongering about AI making humans obsolete. I like the comparison consultant Sangeet Paul Choudary makes about the introduction of photography and today’s concerns about artificial intelligence. Choudary observes that when photography was introduced artists were concerned they would be put out of work. However, Choudary observes, “Over time, photography freed painting from its representational obligations. Painters no longer had to compete with the camera in copying reality. Instead, they could focus on the subtleties that early cameras couldn’t capture. The play of light, the texture of perception. New interpretations of the familiar. … AI today is the camera. It won’t kill creativity or knowledge work. It will reinvent it.”[5] He explains that photography “collapsed the cost of generating answers” (i.e., creating realistic images), just like AI has collapsed the cost of generating answers today. And, he notes, “You could get the most realistic portraits without hours of effort on the part of the artist.” Choudary posits that we might never have enjoyed paintings by impressionsts, like Monet and Degas, had photography not changed art forever.

César Soto Valero, a Senior Data Scientist at SEB, agrees that human creativity has become priceless in the age of AI. He explains, “AI has made answers abundant and general knowledge intuitively accessible. However, current AI models still struggle to figure out how to apply, synthesize, and adapt existing knowledge to create something genuinely new.”[6] He adds, “AI has shifted our focus from trying to find answers to thinking about what and how to formulate the right questions.”

Marketing Strategist Aditee Bhargava insists that, in today’s answer-rich environment, “credibility is getting easier to fake.”[7] She adds, “Answer quality depends heavily on question quality. … When information becomes this cheap to produce, judgment becomes the genuinely scarce resource. Not the ability to generate an answer. The ability to interrogate one.” Van Rijmenam agrees that judgment is scarce. What worries him is the possibility that judgment will get scarcer as entry-level jobs are eliminated and replaced by AI. He explains, “Judgment is grown, not downloaded, and it is grown on the junior rungs firms are cutting to bank the savings. Automate the beginners away, and the pipeline that produces the seniors goes with them.” He believes business executives should be asking, “Where will our organization grow the judgment AI cannot supply?”

That’s a good question. Johnson reports that, in most companies, curiosity — the foundation of good questions and creativity — is neither rewarded nor encouraged. He explains, “In our recent report on curiosity in the workplace, 95% of workers described themselves as curious, yet only 30% said their workplace strongly rewards curiosity. Many organizations reward immediacy more than reflection.” Like so many other experts, Johnson concludes, “AI can produce the appearance of clarity very quickly, but leadership still requires judgment, context, and the ability to recognize which questions are worth asking before moving forward.”

Concluding Thoughts

The humans who will become the AI Age’s Einsteins and Picassos will be the ones who are most curious, the ones who ask the best questions, the ones who demonstrate the greatest creativity, and the ones who exercise the best judgment. Enterprises should do their best to foster those qualities in their employees. Johnson concludes, “In a world where answers are cheap and easy to generate, competitive advantage increasingly comes from the questions workers ask, the assumptions they challenge, and what they notice that AI missed.” On the other hand, companies should guard against employees who let AI do most of their thinking. Journalist Nat Rubio-Licht reports employees offloading their thinking to AI might be happening more than you think. She writes, “AI might be causing us to forget how to think for ourselves. Recent research from the University of Pennsylvania found that AI users were often willing to accept flawed AI reasoning, readily incorporating it into their decision-making with ‘minimal friction or skepticism.’ The research documents the rise of ‘cognitive surrender,’ a phenomenon in which users adopt AI outputs while ‘overriding intuition… and deliberation.’”[8] There is obviously a balance that must be found between human judgment and AI usage. Answers are cheap. Judgment is priceless.

Footnotes

[1] Katie Anderson, “Own the Thinking Process, Not the Thinking,” IndustryWeek, 28 May 2026.

[2] Kevin Kelly, “With AI, Answers Are Cheap, But Questions Are The Future,” KK.org, 6 March 2017.

[3] Eric Johnson, “AI is making answers cheap. Curiosity is priceless,” Fast Company, 16 June 2026.

[4] Mark van Rijmenam, “When Answers Cost Three Cents, Judgment Gets Expensive,” Synthetic Minds Newsletter, 10 August 2026.

[5] Sangeet Paul Choudary, “When answers get cheap, good questions are the new scarcity,” Substack, 6 April 2025.

[6] César Soto Valero, “When Answers Get Cheaper, Questions Are Gold,” cesarsotovalero.net, 14 August 2025.

[7] Aditee Bhargava, “When Answers Get Cheap, Judgment Gets Expensive,” The Noise Tax, 2 August 2026.

[8] Nat Rubio-Licht, “The cost of letting AI think for you,” The Deep View, 5 April 2026.