Early in my consulting career, there was a ritual on the first day of every new project.
The night before, we’d send keywords to the firm’s knowledge center in Hong Kong. By morning, thousands of pages of faxed documents would be stacked in the copy room. We’d unroll the paper, sort it into binders, load them onto a cart, and wheel it into the client site. That cart was the core asset of a multi-million dollar engagement.
Today, it fits in a single Google search.
The center of gravity keeps shifting
When information was scarce, knowing more was the advantage. The internet ended that game. What mattered next wasn’t how much you knew, but how precisely you could articulate what you didn’t. If you could name the gap, you could search your way to the answer.
AI moves the bar again. Search required the right keyword. AI lets you start with a vague instinct and sharpens the question through conversation. It can even surface tacit knowledge buried inside organizations — why one factory line consistently outperforms another, the customer intuition only one salesperson seems to carry — and turn it into something transferable.
The cart no longer confers advantage. So what does?
The question no one has thought to ask
Jensen Huang put it this way: the long-term definition of smart is someone who sits at the intersection of being technically astute, empathetic, and able to infer the unspoken — “the unknowables.” Not someone who retrieves answers well, but someone who senses what hasn’t been asked yet.
I think that’s the last territory that remains distinctly human. AI already excels at knowing, and at knowing what it doesn’t know. But the questions that don’t yet exist — the ones no one has thought to ask — those still have to come from us.
And yet. We spend our energy on better prompts, sharper searches, faster execution. The work of finding questions no one is asking yet quietly falls off the list.