Every CEO is talking about AI. Every agency is suddenly an AI agency. And in private conversations, many people are freaking out.

In business, there has always been fear. Business attracts plenty of insecure overachievers: smart people who suspect everyone else knows more than they do. But the fear surrounding AI is bigger than anything I have seen before.

Remember digital? When it became a thing, everyone feared missing out. People scrambled to become ‘digital experts’. Along the way, companies pushed out experienced people to hire ‘digital natives’. It was marketing’s first great rush down the tool rabbit hole. It didn’t end well. Businesses moved down the funnel. Forget strategy. Now we had ‘performance marketing’ and little else.

History is repeating itself

SEO (search engine optimization) was yesterday. Hello GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization). Today, everyone is taking an AI course. A whole generation is rushing down the next tool rabbit hole.

But people are missing the bigger story. AI is ending the knowledge economy as we know it, where success meant having the answers.

The knowledge economy went like this. We send you to school to memorise facts. We throw you a test. Get the answer right and you earn your A. Stack enough As and you earn your degree. Take more courses, get more degrees. These degrees become your ticket to a top job, where employers pay thousands for your knowledge. It’s how many people built careers in digital.

But AI has changed the economics of answers.

‘How do we make this banana-shaped car more aerodynamic?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap. ‘Which of these 10,000 images will perform best with our ad copy?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap. ‘How do we create an avatar that sells our product 24/7?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap.

Today, answers to complex questions appear in seconds. Instant. Cheap.

We can’t out-AI AI. We can no longer build careers on having the best answers. On knowing every AI tool. Success in the future comes from asking the best questions – just as great business leaders always have:

• What if beauty wasn’t about models? (Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.)
• What if everyone was an athlete? (Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.)
• What if honesty sold more cars than perfection? (Volkswagen’s ‘Think Small’.)
• What if an engagement ring became a social norm? (De Beers’ ‘A Diamond Is Forever’.)

These are difficult questions. The questions only we can ask.

Yahoo once tried to catalogue the internet — every book, every website — partly by hand. It became clumsy. Slow. Then Google came along and asked a better question: ‘How can we make the world’s information accessible and useful?’ Instead of lists, Google built an algorithm that scaled, learned and stayed simple. Google won because it asked the better question.

AI would have helped Yahoo catalogue the internet faster. Yahoo would still have lost, because it was solving the wrong problem.

AI will make everybody more productive. It will replace dull jobs — and interesting ones. And AI will churn out millions of answers, every day. AI is exceptionally good at average work for average people.

That’s why the most valuable skill in the AI age isn’t AI. It’s asking questions worth answering.

(I wrote a version of this for Marketing Week.)

Many breakthrough ideas begin with existing world crashing into each other:

• Airbnb collided a hotel with a private home and an online marketplace.
• Slack collided chat rooms with email and a searchable knowledge base.
• The smartphone collided a phone with a music player and a computer.

But smashing two things together doesn’t automatically produce a great idea. A toaster combined with an umbrella would certainly be original, but pretty useless (I guess).

Creative collision needs a reason.

Tay Guan Hin has written a book about it. He argues that breakthrough ideas often emerge from tension: two things people want but find difficult to have at the same time. Travelers want comfort but also authenticity. People want more technology but fewer devices.

Once we understand the tension, we stop looking for better versions of the same thing. We stop studying other knives and start looking at toolboxes. We stop studying hotels and start looking at private homes. We start looking for answers in completely different worlds.

Most people ask:
“How can I improve this?”

Creative people ask:
“What else already exists that could resolve this tension?”

Many breakthroughs began with scarce resources:

• When Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded, the astronauts couldn’t fit the Command Module’s carbon dioxide filters into their Lunar Module’s life-support system. So they made an adapter from a plastic bag, cardboard, a spacesuit hose, and duct tape.
• Red Bull couldn’t outspend Coca-Cola, so it built a brand through extreme sports and funny little cartoons.
• Ukraine couldn’t match Russia’s massive navy, so it developed small sea drones, damaging or sinking vessels many times their size.
• Dollar Shave Club couldn’t afford a glossy launch campaign. It spent $4,500 on a funny video instead. The traffic crashed its website and generated 12,000 orders within 48 hours.

More resources make things easier. Scarce resources make us think harder.

Sometimes, smaller budgets lead to bigger idea.

Last night, after a conference keynote, I had dinner. Someone had recommended the restaurant. I hesitated. $350 for dinner is steep, even on a special day. But it was a special day, so I went.

The welcome was warm. The view was stunning. Nine courses promised a memorable evening.

The first dish was nice. The second was nice-ish. The third was mediocre. Courses four and five were dull. By then, something was brewing inside me. Not the food.

Was I really spending a pile of money on an average meal? I could have eaten in a family restaurant. I could have wandered through a local food market. Instead, I had followed a recommendation and gone fancy.

The waitress noticed. “How is everything?” she asked. The useless question no customer can ever answer.

In the friendliest possible way, I admitted that I was disappointed. Everything was fine. For $350, fine wasn’t fine.

Her boss appeared. Then his boss. They apologized, brought me several more equally average dishes, and offered me a discount. Eventually, I made peace with the restaurant. The food wasn’t great, but the people were lovely.

The bill arrived. I added a generous tip. None of this was the waitress’s fault. Then my phone lit up: “You have just paid $32.”

$32? I looked again and called the waitress back. Surely, I had underpaid. “No, sir,” she said. “It’s all correct.”

I had miscalculated the exchange rate. Spectacularly. The dinner had never cost $350. It cost $35—before the discount.

Suddenly, the view looked amazing, the service felt exceptional, the dishes became interesting. I had just eaten the best $35 dinner of my life.

I called the manager, confessed, and apologized to the team. The next day, I went back for dinner.

We usually think satisfaction comes from delivering more than people expect. And it does. But there is another way: ensuring people expect the right thing.

The internet gave everyone a voice. If you want to write a blog that 100,000 people read, you can. If you want to host a podcast that 100,000 people listen to, you can.

That is the good news.

The internet also gave a voice to people with inflated egos, shaky facts, and a good camera. They call themselves influencers. But if you look closer, many of their “facts” belong in the bin.

I call them BinFluencers.

BinFluencers create clutter and drown out the voices worth listening to. To get clicks, they need volume—five, ten, twenty hot takes every week. Every message has to feel fresh and surprising. But fresh and surprising aren’t the same as true.

You’ve heard these:
“Customer experience is the new currency!” Maybe. But tell that to the millions who line up for stripped-back service from Frontier and Ryanair just to save twenty bucks. Experience matters—until you ask people to pay for it.

“NFTs will change everything!” Really? For a while, every brand seemed to need its own NFT collection—digital collectibles recorded on a blockchain. When the market cooled, the gimmicks disappeared. That rare tennis-ball NFT you bought for hundreds now trades for twenty-five dollars.

If you take advice from a BinFluencer shouting market “truths” on TikTok, then repeat those ideas without thinking, you become a chatbot. Chatbots don't build new things. Chatbots repeat—until one day they're replaced by a better chatbot.

When your truth is borrowed, pressure breaks it. When your truth is earned, pressure makes it stronger.

Unfollow the BinFluencer crowd.

Learn from everyone. But believe only what survives your own thinking.