the curiosity muscle
Picture this: you’ve got an hour in front of a potential customer. The partners wheel in the room, fire up the slides, and then… spend the first 50 minutes talking about themselves. Background, credentials, office locations, famous customers, global reach, blah blah blah.
The customer nods politely while secretly checking their phone. Then, with ten minutes left, someone finally asks: “So, what challenges are you facing right now?” The meeting ends. The lead partner leaves thinking: “Well, that went really well.”
If you / your firms continue with this approach, you’re dead. The reality is every single element of that first 50 minutes could be delivered by AI today; slicker, faster, and with better graphics. The customer doesn’t need humans to list credentials or recite your history. That’s a LLM search of your website.
What AI can’t do (yet) is be genuinely curious. It can’t notice the throwaway comment, follow up with a “what if” question, or spot the tension in the room when one director rolls their eyes at another. Curiosity is one of the few distinctly human attributes that’s still hard for AI to replace.
Here are three ways to flex that curiosity muscle, in ways AI can’t easily mimic, before a bot eats your lunch. Enjoy.
#1. Ask human, open-ended questions
Closed questions are fine for fact-checking: “Do you have an ESG policy?” or “How many suppliers do you use?”. That’s the kind of stuff you could just as easily ask your AI bot to generate in a polished checklist.
But building trust, sparking collaboration, and uncovering problems? That takes open-ended, human questions:
- “What’s keeping you awake about ESG right now?”
- “What’s been the biggest surprise since the merger?”
These questions demonstrate very human traits. They show genuine interest, they deepen relationships, and they open the door to conversations no slide deck can reach.
#2. Use the ‘what if’ hack
Most pitches, most BD conversations, are about the present: here’s what we do, here are our credentials, here’s what we offer. AI can already produce that drop-in template of you.
“What if” shifts the focus to possibilities:
- “What if you could cut supplier onboarding time in half?”
- “What if disputes were resolved without courts?”
- “What if you had full visibility across all contracts by Monday?”
It moves the conversation away from dry status updates and into co-creating a better future.
#3. Listen for human cues and, most importantly, act on them!
Active listening is a skill, not a default setting. Customers reveal needs in asides: “IT are on my back”, “since the rebrand, morale’s weird”, “we’ve always done it this way”.
Hearing is only half the job. Acting on it is what builds trust. And it doesn’t mean you have to fix it yourself. These moments are prime opportunities to cross-sell and bring in colleagues who can help. A well-timed introduction shows you were paying attention and that you care about solving the whole problem, not just your bit of it.
Final thought
Curiosity doesn’t just make for better conversations, it’s also your moat against automation. Credentials, bios, and facts? A bot can churn those out in seconds. But asking the unscripted question, noticing the aside, leaning in at the right moment? That’s still very human.
So next time you’re in a pitch, ask yourself:
- Am I doing the 50-minute monologue AI could replace?
- Or am I using curiosity to do the one thing AI still can’t?
Your future business depends on choosing the latter.
We’re building a team of voice enabled AI assistants to support you with BD activities and allow you to spend more time being human. Interested? We’d love to chat.
