As AI becomes faster and more capable, more teams are at risk of losing the one thing AI can’t replicate: curiosity. Here’s CEOs can rebuild the conditions for genuine human thinking.
A few months ago, I watched a strategy head for a global consumer brand drop a 40-page, AI-generated competitive analysis into a leadership meeting. It was synthesized overnight and more thorough than her team could have produced in two weeks. The room went quiet, though not because anyone disagreed with the findings. The team members had spent their careers being rewarded for finding the right answer, and now it had arrived before anyone sat down. All that was left to do was react.
One senior director said what everyone was thinking: “So … do we just agree with this?”
That moment is playing out in organizations everywhere. A November 2025 Wharton survey of more than 800 senior leaders found that 82 percent use generative AI weekly and 43 percent already worry it’s eroding their teams’ skills as adoption climbs. That’s the tension underneath the excitement: Teams are leaning on AI faster than they’re building the judgment to use it well.
In optimizing for execution, most organizations trained the curiosity out of their people. The technology simply made it visible, but curiosity is the one thing AI can’t replicate.
Why expertise became the enemy
Experience, track record and pattern recognition form what I call the River of Thinking. The longer someone has worked in an industry, the faster that current flows, matching new challenges to old solutions. It’s efficient, often correct and, by definition, incapable of producing anything genuinely different.
AI learned from the same river. It was trained on published thinking, historical data and accumulated best practice. Ask it to analyze a market, and it hands the river back faster and more confidently than any analyst could, which is a ceiling as much as a capability. Another Wharton study found that while AI improves individual ideas, teams that rely on it generate ideas strikingly similar to one another, shrinking the variety that drives breakthrough innovation. As Christian Terwiesch, co-director of Wharton’s Mack Institute, noted, “If you rely on ChatGPT as your only creative advisor, you’ll soon run out of ideas, because they’re too similar to each other.”
To discover the 3 decisions CEOs make and model daily, and how to lead in the space AI creates, read the full article on Chief Executive.
Photo credit: AdobeStock/Chief Executive
