AI Has Made Answers Cheap. Questions Haven’t.
“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” – Peter Drucker
AI gave everyone a Ferrari. Most people are driving it round the car park.
Type anything into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and back comes a confident, polished, plausible answer. That is the magic, but that is also the danger…
The quality of the answer depends entirely on the quality of the question. And most business owners don’t know they are asking the wrong one.
Expertise has moved
A smart person with AI can now produce a decent first draft of a contract, a positioning statement, a sales email, a five-year plan.
What AI cannot do is work out what the actual problem is.
Expertise used to live in the answer. Now it lives in the framing. And framing is where the money is.
The 56p question
A managing director came to us with a marketing problem. His business ran an eco system that cost just 56p a day to run. He wanted us to push that message out into the market.
On paper, sensible. 56p a day sounds cheap.
But I asked him a different question. What is the customer’s frame of reference? Is 56p good value or bad value? Most of the target audience would have no idea, because most of them have no clue what they spend on this right now.
So I asked him. What are they probably spending today?
Around £17 a day, he said.
That changed everything. We did not run a campaign about a system that costs 56p a day. We ran a message that said if you are not running this system, you are losing £16 a day.
Same product. Same price. Same maths. Completely different message.
If we had answered the brief he gave us, we would have written a perfectly competent campaign that landed with a thud. Nobody knows what 56p means in context. Everybody knows what losing £16 a day means.
That is the power of answering the right question.
The trap of the polished wrong answer
Type “write me a positioning statement” into AI and it writes one. Sharp language, neat tagline. You feel productive.
But you did not need a positioning statement. You needed to work out why the right customers are choosing someone else.
Richard Rumelt calls this skipping diagnosis. His first rule of strategy is to work out what is actually going on before you act. AI accelerates the skip.
For a novice, that feels like progress. For an expert, that is terrifying.
Change the question
The job of a good advisor, human or machine, is not to answer faster. It is to make you stop and ask a better question.