Beyond the prompt: The value of human curiosity in the age of AI
Opinion – Week in Focus
The CEO of True & North shares his observations and the experimental approach his company is taking to work with and integrate AI into everyday workflows.
Claude, Chat GPT, Gemini, Co-pilot. By now, you’ve likely used, dabbled, or perhaps even started to rely on the powers of AI.
And despite its early failures, hallucinations, and misunderstandings about where and how to use it effectively, the rate of improvement has been relentless. In 2026, I’d argue that if you’re not using it at all, then something is amiss.
In the world of B2B sales and client leadership, AI is a phenomenal shortcut – particularly when researching a new client or preparing for a meeting. It can summarise an annual report, analyse industry headwinds, or digest a client’s long-form article in seconds.
It grants us a quicker, more in-depth starting point.
The efficiency trap
However, it’s not all gain and no loss. There’s a trap in efficiency.
The “grunt work” of manual research – the hours spent digging into a person’s career path, their specific business hurdles, and their industry’s quirks – serves a biological purpose: it stimulates your curiosity. When you outsource that entirely to a machine, you gain information, but you lose empathy.
And I’m afraid empathy matters more when dealing with clients. It isn’t just a soft skill, it’s a chemical one.
Human decision-making is driven by oxytocin, the hormone that governs how we experience trust.
When you meet someone for the first time, their subconscious is scanning you to decide whether to trust you or not. If they sense the genuine care you’ve invested in understanding them, oxytocin is triggered, and their brain screams yes. Fail to do that, and they hit a chemical nosedive you can’t control.
Given that 95% of purchase decisions happen in the subconscious (Gerald Zaltman How Customers Think), you can’t fight biology. Whatever shortcuts AI offers, you are the one who has to step into the room and establish that bond.
So how do you do it?
At True & North, testing and breaking things are part of our DNA. Our methodology is rooted in Design Thinking – which means we don’t just “use” tools; we prototype. We test, we learn, and we iterate.
I’m not here to write a “how-to” guide on AI. Instead, I want to share my observations and the humble, experimental approach we’re taking right now.
This is a journey, not a destination. We are still figuring out where the machine ends, and the human hand must take over. We’re still learning and will be for a long time.
What is working for us
When using AI, we are mindful of using our own curiosity as guardrails. And if we’re not curious, if we lose our inquisitiveness, then we recognise we’ve outsourced too much.
Where we bring in the machine:
* Find the dots: AI is brilliant at condensing corporate reports, client articles, or industry performance data into digestible themes for us to interpret.
* Join the dots: We ask AI to think with us. “I saw X, and it made me wonder if Bob is an introvert. Why might that be true? Why might my hunch be wrong?” OR “It seems like X is a key challenge for Company X. Why might that be true? Why might my hunch be wrong? What else might be relevant?”
* Asking “what else?” Once we’ve done our homework, we use AI to find the blind spots. ”This is the picture I’ve built of my client Bob at Company X. What am I missing?”
* The specificity of the prompt: The old adage of “sh*t in, sh*t out” holds true. We’ve learned to be incredibly specific: who we are, our personal style, exactly what we are looking for, and what we will use the output for.
What we still do ourselves:
* The nuance of video and audio: We still watch the clips and listen to the podcasts. Observing a mannerism or hearing an inflexion in someone’s voice gives you a clarity of understanding about their passions and who they are as a person that a transcript simply cannot capture.
* Analogue inspiration: Paul Bennett, former CCO of IDEO, recently described his working relationship with AI as having Analogue Inspiration first and then AI enabling him to go deeper.
At True & North, we get a basic understanding before relying on the tool to go deeper. It’s common for an AI to tell you “these are the three most important things” for a company, only to give a completely different answer if you ask the question differently or use a different tool. Or to present a limited number of sources as the full picture, missing something vital.
* Protecting the voice: Your AI tool can help you craft what you say, but it’s not your alter ego tool (yet). We write, re-write, and ask for opinions. We treat it like a colleague who is a great wordsmith, but the final output has to sound like us. It has to pass the BS test.
Learnings for B2B sales and growth
Ultimately, AI is a phenomenal tool for compression, but a poor substitute for connection. It can give us the “what,” but it struggles with the “why,” and it can completely fail at the “who.”
As we navigate this relentless rate of improvement, the challenge isn’t just learning how to prompt better – it’s learning when to put the tool down.
If we let efficiency truncate our curiosity, we aren’t just saving time; we are eroding the very chemical foundation of trust that our business lives on.
By all means, let the machine find the dots. Use it to scan the horizon and map the terrain. But when it comes to joining those dots, and certainly when it comes to stepping into the room with the client you’re working with, remember that only human empathy and curiosity can deliver biological oxytocin.
The most valuable thing you can bring to a client in 2026 isn’t a perfectly executed deliverable or neatly packaged service – it’s the evidence that you actually care, are interested in them as a person and invested in mutual collaboration.
PS – In the spirit of transparency, it would be remiss of me not to state that, of course, I used AI to help me pull my thoughts together for this piece. It helped me structure the observations, but the learnings (and the mistakes) are all mine.
David Clayton is the CEO of True & North