People in business are scared. And the fear has a name: AI.

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.)