Leadership and AI: Cultivating Curiosity in an AI-Saturated World

By: Dr. Jaime Goff, Coach, Renogize Professional Coaching

It’s tempting to feel certain when answers are at our fingertips. Ask your favorite AI, and a confident-sounding answer appears in seconds. But AI has blind spots. It reinforces existing perspectives and mistakes plausibility for truth. And it lacks the lived organizational and relational context that leaders and their teams experience every day.

So what does it look like to cultivate curiosity when certainty feels more comfortable? What questions push teams beyond the easy answers? Which are best asked of AI and which of humans?

AI is genuinely useful for summarizing information, spotting patterns, and handling low-stakes, high-volume decisions like scheduling and formatting. The more important questions for leaders are the ones that require human insight, judgment, trust, and values alignment.

Consider the premortem. Instead of waiting until an initiative fails to conduct a postmortem, leaders imagine it’s already failed and ask:

• Imagine it’s six months from now, and this initiative has failed. What happened?

• What are we assuming has to be true for this plan to succeed?

• What are we not talking about because it would make this decision more complicated?

These questions interrupt certainty. They help teams uncover blind spots and think deeply before acting.

That same curiosity shouldn’t disappear when the answers come from AI. Rather than treating AI-generated responses as the end of an inquiry, leaders can treat it as the start of another round:

• What assumptions shaped this answer?

• What’s the strongest argument against it?

• What perspectives aren’t represented here?

Then comes the question AI can’t answer for us: What do we see, know, and understand about our people and our organization that AI cannot?

As answers become easier to generate, curiosity becomes an increasingly important leadership advantage.