In the Age of AI, Human Curiosity Is Your Superpower

AI is everywhere right now.  It’s writing poems, planning holidays, and even attempting to predict what you’ll have for dinner.  Brands are obsessed.  Every conference slide has ‘AI’ splashed across it in bold.  Everyone’s trying to automate faster, predict more, and make decisions at lightning speed.

But here’s the thing: AI still doesn’t understand people.

It can spot patterns. It can summarise behaviour.  It can even mimic a bit of emotional intelligence (if you squint hard enough).  But it doesn’t feel what people feel.  It doesn’t grasp the weird, messy, often contradictory motivations that drive human decisions, especially in turbulent times.

That’s where human intelligence comes in.

Real understanding comes from getting close to people’s lives, hearing how they think, what they worry about, what they laugh at, what keeps them up at night.  It’s about why they buy the expensive shampoo but budget on dinner.  Why they plan eco-friendly holidays but can’t give up fast fashion.  Why they say one thing and do another.

In short, AI can spot that customers are buying more posh chocolate right now, but only human intelligence can explain that it’s actually about comfort, control, and coping with the world’s chaos.

And we’ve seen this in our own work:

Take the phrase ‘This is very M&S.’  It’s short.  Casual.  Almost throwaway.  But it’s loaded with cultural meaning, a shorthand for quality, heritage, integrity, maybe even a bit of quiet pride.  People don’t explain it because they don’t need to.  It’s a shared understanding.

No AI tool, not ours, not anyone’s is currently equipped to unpick the layers of meaning behind a statement like that.  It’s not about missing data.  It’s about missing context.  Missing culture.  Missing emotion.

Similarly, in our work with a bank, we discovered that one of the fundamental desires of SME businesses is to make progress.  AI told us they value efficiency, speed, and simplicity.  But it didn’t capture their deeper drive to move forward, to grow, to never stand still.  That insight came from our human ability to interpret what wasn’t said, to connect the dots, to understand the emotional undercurrent. 

These examples highlight a critical truth:

AI can be hugely helpful.  But the real gold lies in human interpretation.

It turns out the smartest tool in your business isn’t an algorithm.  It’s human curiosity.