Ask most people what AI has changed about their work, and they will tell you it has made answers faster, cheaper and easier to reach. That is true, but it has quietly changed something else too. When answers are abundant, value shifts to the questions being asked and the people who know how to ask them.

For years, curiosity has appeared on almost every list of leadership qualities we admire. It was the “nice to have”: the trait we praised in others and rarely built a strategy around. I think that era is ending. AI is rewiring how we think and work, and curiosity is moving from a desirable personal quality to a genuine strategic capability.

I have written before about why curiosity matters to how we lead and grow our people. My conviction has only deepened since: what has changed is the context. The competitive edge for insight, innovation and research professionals will no longer come from access to the most powerful tools, because AI has levelled the playing field. Instead, it will come from knowing which questions to ask, which assumptions to challenge and how to spot the faint signals others walk straight past.

The evidence has been building for a while. Harvard Business Review’s work on the business case for curiosity found that curious teams make better decisions, make fewer errors and innovate more, because they resist the pull to the obvious answer. That instinct matters more, not less, when a machine can hand you a confident answer in seconds. AI is extraordinary at giving us the average of what already exists. Curiosity is what pushes past the average.

That distinction ran through the conversations I had this year. At the MRS AI Powered Insights conference, I argued that too many teams have started to treat large language models as idea-generation shortcuts, asking the machine to find the next big opportunity for them.

Large language models are trained on what has already been said: lean on them to think for you and you get plausible sameness. The breakthrough still comes from a human being curious enough to explore things differently and ask different questions to challenge the status quo.

At Cannes Lions this year, the same theme surfaced from a different angle. The industry gathers to celebrate creativity, and yet so much of the work is strikingly alike. We know from our own database that two-thirds of the ideas we test won’t build a brand’s long-term meaning, and a third won’t drive its difference. AI will happily accelerate more of the same.

What separates work that grows brands is not more output; it is a sharper, more curious question at the very start about what is genuinely, meaningfully different. This is where many organisations are about to make an expensive mistake. Faced with AI, the instinct is to invest almost everything in the technology, the platforms and the licences. All necessary. But the return on that investment is capped by the quality of the questions your people bring to it.

A brilliant tool in incurious hands just gets you to mediocrity faster. Put it in the hands of someone who keeps probing and won’t accept the first answer, and it becomes a genuine advantage.

What does this look like in practice? It means rewarding the person who asks the difficult question in the meeting, not only the one who arrives with the tidy answer. It means protecting time for exploration, even when every efficiency gain tempts us to fill it with more delivery. It means treating comments like “why do we assume that?” as an important challenge, not a delay. And it means upskilling people to approach AI with the right, curious mindset from the very start of every process.

Curiosity has always been the quiet engine behind the best insight and innovation work. What has changed is that AI has stripped away the excuse. When answers were slow and expensive, you could compete on access to them. Now that they are instant and everywhere, the only durable advantage left is human: the discipline to ask a better question than everyone else, and the courage to keep asking when the machine has already offered you something that seems good enough.

That, to me, is the real opportunity of this moment. Not to hand our thinking to AI, but to let it clear the ground so the most human thing we do can finally take the lead. In a world overflowing with AI-generated answers, the organisations that win will be those that cultivate the most curious people. Curiosity is the advantage. It is time we started treating it like one.

Dr Nicki Morley is global managing director innovation solution at Kantar