Creation Beyond Curation: Combining GenAI with Human Wisdom

When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in the 1860s, his intention was to create a safer way of handling highly explosive materials for use in mining and construction. In the name of progress, he identified a way to build faster and open new frontiers.

Of course, we know where this story is headed. Nobel’s invention was repurposed for destruction on the battlefield. Horrified by what his creation was being used for, he devoted his fortune to the Nobel Peace Prize, rewarding those who advanced science, literature and peace.

This story is a powerful reminder that technology itself is not the danger; it’s how we use it. Just as dynamite can either create new tunnels or be used for human destruction, the use of generative AI (GenAI) can either increase our human wisdom or diminish it. As Nobel found, we could have a tool that becomes one of regression rather than progress. In the case of GenAI, regression will be the result of overuse and excessive outsourcing.

This thinking is not new. MIT (2025) published a study which showed ‘cognitive debt’ - participants who outsourced to GenAI demonstrated lower neural connectivity and disengagement when reverting to thinking for themselves. A Harvard Business Review (2025) article revealed that GenAI increases productivity at the cost of intrinsic motivation, especially when AI was not available. It is increasingly clear that we risk losing important muscles if we allow GenAI to do the heavy lifting.

We have seen this tension first hand at OnTrack International. We believe GenAI is a fantastic enabler: it can curate information, filter insights and improve workflow at pace. OnTrack International was a pioneer of remote working long before Covid, and, in this regard, GenAI has become a valuable personal assistant to anyone working from home - ‘someone’ to check in with, to validate or challenge thinking.

Wisdom enables us to make judgements based upon knowledge, experience and understanding. It comes from lived experience and deep contextual understanding, and from the inherited knowledge of those who have come before us. When students use GenAI for their revision and essays, can they share their workings as part of the process? Do they know how they got to that point? Will school assignments become the mirror image of each other, produced from the same search criteria and language patterns? Will younger generations lack unique thinking because their frame of reference is a historic perspective trawled from the internet?

Importantly, the answer to these questions is not necessarily yes. The risk comes when the path of least resistance is so attractive that it causes our thinking to become lazy. Overreliance on AI will gradually replace our capacity for rationality and reasoning. Delegating judgment and decision-making to technology will inhibit our ability to use these key characteristics of humanity.

An example from the world of L&D consultancy illustrates this point. To win a project, a consultancy must prepare a proposal that outlines how it can add value to the company it is supporting. If every consultancy in the running uses GenAI to create their proposal, there will be little differentiation in the proposition. If we all ask the same question with the same contextual criteria and framing, we all get the same outputs.

L&D consultancies will effectively turn their services into a commodity purchase, based upon price rather than the value of the actual outcome delivered. It may even be the case that GenAI creates a proposal that the consultancy does not have the capabilities to deliver!

At OnTrack International, we work with an exceptional team. But even we can be drawn into apparent time-saving and efficiency measures, at the cost of connecting with a new thinking opportunity that would add the greatest value to our clients. For example, we have used GenAI to quality check a proposal that had been produced via time-intensive meetings and analysis; a proposal that was thoughtfully tailored to the client’s needs and prepared with specific language to reflect these. GenAI reviewed this document and produced something undoubtedly well-sequenced, but ultimately benign. The proposal had lost its very essence. And this essence is often the determining factor for the client; it is what communicates to them that we really understand them.

Our exceptionally talented team of business practitioners, business psychologists and behavioural scientists can decode what brilliance looks like. They can create approaches that are unique, special and beyond anything that would be created using AI. They consider the context we are in today, the client’s specific needs and then – using lived experience and wisdom - question what will make a significant difference for them, rather than repeating what has already been said.

To bring together what already exists, GenAI has immense value. The invention of the internet provided access to such a myriad of information that we initially became overwhelmed with it, struggling to identify what was credible and useful. We needed some intelligence to make sense and bring order; to source valuable knowledge from the ocean of trillions of data points.

AI has provided us with a way of organising and sequencing information to make it usable. It enabled the curation of valuable content and structured a narrative to a degree and relevance we have never seen before. It can automate processes, projects and systems. It educates, enlightens and enriches our understanding of multitude views of the world.

But to create beyond what has already happened, we need new thinking, new ways and new solutions. The rapid changes in intergenerational diversity, global economies, geopolitical events demand it.

Only when combined with human wisdom can GenAI help us leverage the power of technology and launch us into new thinking, new solutions and relevant innovation.

Only then can we create beyond curation.