Leaders Trading Certainty For Curiosity, Have The Age Of AI Advantage

By Laurel Donnellan and Sarah Feely (Originally published at Forbes.com)

At Workhuman Live 2026, curiosity was the through-line beneath myriad discussions around leadership, connection, and what it means to remain human in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Although I was unable to attend Workhuman Live for health reasons, my colleague Sarah Feely attended on my behalf in Orlando, Florida, last month.  She returned with thought-provoking insights and reflections from many of the conference’s leading voices on leadership, AI, and the future of work.

For years, Workhuman Live has brought together leaders, researchers, executives, and practitioners committed to building more human-centered workplaces. The event flawlessly fosters a unique and energizing combination of intellectual curiosity, collective optimism, honest conversation, and a shared desire to help humans thrive. 

Information Overload

Technology is evolving faster than humans can comfortably adapt. In the knowledge economy, ironically, as AI gives us greater capacity for curiosity, we are using it to race toward certainty rather than to seek understanding. 

Eric M. Bailey sits at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, communication, and human behavior. Bailey, an international keynote speaker and bestselling author, believes we are living through a dangerous cultural shift. “In a world where information is power,” Bailey said, “we all want to spout how much information we have.” And now, with information instantly accessible, that tendency may only intensify.

As she was speaking to Eric, Sarah wondered: “What is humans’ place in an age increasingly driven by AI-powered certainty, speed, and performance?”

Bailey’s work translates complex neuroscience into everyday human experiences and works to answer these fundamental questions that will lead to better work: 

• Why do people get defensive? 
• Why do teams struggle with change? 
• Why do leaders unintentionally create fear? 
• Why do humans rush to correct one another instead of seeking understanding? 

Curiosity is the Cure

Curiosity will disrupt these negative patterns and matters so much right now. While AI can produce information, curiosity is something fundamentally different. Curiosity necessitates humility. It asks us to tolerate ambiguity longer than is comfortable. It asks us to stay open rather than rush toward certainty. Through research at Compassionate Leaders Circle, we have identified the 7Cs as the core attributes of Compassionate Leadership. Curious is one of the seven as defined as listening and learning proactively.

Sarah had another related and thought-provoking conversation with leadership thinker Abhijit Bhaduri. Bhaduri, the author of seven books and the former GM of Global Learning and Development for Microsoft, has been writing about identity loss in the emerging AI economy. The core thesis in his forthcoming book is that as work becomes increasingly automated, optimized, and anonymized, humans risk losing something deeper than tasks or skills. We risk losing parts of our identity unless we reshape and reconceive our sense of self-worth.

Just like her conversation with Bailey, Bhaduri pointed to the connection between knowledge and identity. For decades, many of us have unconsciously tied our worth to what we know, how quickly we can answer, and how competent we appear. Information became status. Status became identity.

And what a tidal shift we are facing: now AI can access and generate information faster than any human can. Perhaps this is why this moment feels psychologically disorienting for so many of us. The future of work is not just challenging our skills; it is challenging the very places many of us have historically derived meaning, confidence, and our sense of self. 

Curiosity may become one of the defining “durable skills” differentiating leaders of the future. Bailey’s and Bhaduri’s work provides important scientific lenses through which to view curiosity and connection in the age of AI.

In Practice

In the conversation with Bailey, he turned to the challenge of fostering organizational cultures of curiosity and human connection. “We promote what we tolerate,” Bailey said, recalling advice from a former mentor. And unfortunately, organizations often unintentionally create environments that discourage exploration and human connection by implicitly or explicitly rewarding competition, tolerating destructive behavior from high performers, and suppressing emotional expression in the name of performance.  

Lip service is paid to collaboration, empathy, and psychological safety while simultaneously rewarding urgency, sharp elbows, and the quest for certainty.

Curiosity, however, changes the dynamic. It necessitates slowing down, leaning into the unknown, and embarking on a journey of exploration. Bailey reflected on how naturally curious children are before social conditioning teaches them otherwise. “Toddlers experiment constantly and ask endless questions. Somewhere over time, many adults trade that curiosity for certainty.”

At Workhuman Live 2026, conversations about AI ranged from tactical to philosophical and existential. As machines become better at generating answers, will humans continue developing the capacities that create understanding? As Eric C. Bailey and Abhijit Bhaduri astutely point out, we must disentangle answers from understanding and knowledge from our identities. 

Let us become curious and compassionate leaders who pursue exploration rather than exploitation, seek understanding rather than mere knowledge, and respond with questions rather than assumptions.