In a generation raised on disruption, Will Anderson chose a different response to the age of AI. Not anxiety. Not certainty, but curiosity.

Somewhere in his middle school years, growing up in Kansas, Will Anderson learned how to think. Not what to think, but how. His classical school ran classes in logic and rhetoric at an age when most schools were focused on getting students to memorize the right answers. He was taught to form arguments, test them against counterarguments, and ask better questions than the ones he started with. It was, by his own account, one of the most important things that ever happened to him.

He did not fully understand why until the age of AI arrived and the people around him started reaching for certainty or fear. Will reached for questions instead.

That instinct has followed him through every chapter since, through the years of coaching and development work that came after the pandemic redirected his original plans, and into his current role in talent and leadership development for Chick-fil-A. He is in his mid-twenties, squarely in the generation that will navigate the age of AI not from the middle of a career but from the very beginning of one. Gen Z faces pressures around technology that earlier generations encountered with more runway behind them. But when you ask Will how he feels about all of it, the answer is the same one it has always been: curious.

The Moment Everything Shifted

He had been tinkering with language models for a while, asking questions, getting answers, filing it away as something like a smarter search engine. Then he found himself watching videos about AI agents: systems that can be trained to run autonomously, continuously, handling tasks around the clock without being prompted. He sat back and felt something shift.

"You could theoretically train a workforce full of these things," he says.

As someone whose entire job is about human talent, the implication was not abstract. Will thinks about people for a living: who to bring onto a team, what a role requires, how to develop someone into a better version of themselves. As he sat with the agent videos, he started to imagine what that work might look like in 2040. "It's not just thinking about which people to bring on the team," he says. "It's, is this a people role, or is this an agent role?" He was not frightened by that question so much as captivated by it, turning it over with the same instinct that his classical education had always rewarded: when something surprises you, get curious about it rather than away from it.

The Right Questions

His classical education keeps coming back to him the way a well-made tool keeps coming back to your hand, something you instinctively reach for. "my education trained me on how to be curious," he says. "It trained me to ask the right questions."

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant argues in his book Think Again (1) that as the half-life of specific knowledge keeps shrinking, the ability to stay curious and keep rethinking becomes the most durable professional skill a person can develop. In a world that changes faster than any fixed body of knowledge can account for, curiosity over closure is not just a personality trait. It is a competitive advantage.

What Grant's argument suggests, and what Will's life seems to bear out, is that curiosity is also the most reliable form of resilience available to us right now.

The people who navigate disruption without being undone by it are rarely the ones with the most information or the most certainty. They are the ones who stay genuinely interested in what is happening, who ask better questions than the people around them, and who hold their conclusions loosely enough to update them when the world changes. Anxiety closes. Curiosity opens. In the age of AI, that distinction may matter more than any particular skill set a person could develop.

Will has built a practical framework around this idea, a way of sorting what AI means for actual work into three categories. First, the things AI should simply handle: administrative tasks, repetitive work that humans have been doing not because they add anything to it, but because it needed doing. Second, the gray area, where AI could reasonably help but a human touch adds something worth preserving. And third, the things we have to keep doing ourselves, the work that cannot be handed off without losing something essential.

"What are the things we have to keep doing?" he asks. "We cannot let AI take over that."

He has been sitting with a related question lately, one that feels more personal. He looks at the AI landscape and notices how much energy is going into building and training the tools, the models, the agents. Very little of the conversation, he says, is about building and training the people who will use them. A tool is only as effective as the human holding it, and for Will, whose work is specifically about developing people, that asymmetry is more than a professional observation. "How can I use my capabilities to train, equip, and grow the leaders entrusted to me," he says, "to responsibly use these tools in ways that promote human flourishing, not human decline?" That question, he believes, belongs at the center of the AI conversation.

For someone in his role, the third category is not a philosophical abstraction. It is the daily work of recognizing something in a candidate that a resume does not capture, coaching someone through a difficult conversation, staying present with a person long enough to understand what they actually need. Those things require curiosity about other human beings. They always have. And Will believes the people who carry that curiosity, grounded in a genuine commitment to human flourishing, need to make their voices heard as the world trends toward becoming AI native. The tools will keep arriving. The question is who shapes how they get used.

Watering the Flowers

Lately, Will has been thinking about what it means to be a knowledge worker in the age of AI, and how to protect something in himself that the technology does not threaten directly but crowds out if he is not intentional about it.

Every morning, he walks to his back patio and waters his plants and flowers, leaving his phone inside, moving slowly through the quiet with just his hands and something living. "It's a very human thing," he says. "It gets away from the stimulation of this technology." Simple as it sounds, he names it as one of the more important rhythms in his life right now.

He talks about spontaneity with a similar quiet conviction. After a recent meeting with a young professionals organization he is involved with, someone suggested staying to watch the championship game, no agenda, no calendar invite, just people lingering and being present. He loved it. "Break the process a little bit," he says. "Let's just hang around. Linger. Be present." And then there are the solo trips to Prescott, a small mountain town north of Phoenix, where he goes every couple of months to hike for half a day with no technology and no agenda. He calls it decluttering the mind.

There is something in these rituals that goes beyond personal preference. Knowledge workers in the age of AI are going to have to become more deliberate about analog experience than any previous generation, not as a rejection of technology but as a form of cognitive maintenance. The overstimulation Will describes is not a minor inconvenience. Researchers studying AI's effect on the brain are finding that sustained dependence on digital tools may quietly erode the very mental capacities we most need: the ability to sit with a problem, to focus without prompting, to think without assistance. The flowers Will waters every morning are not just a pleasant habit. They are, in their own small way, a practice of staying human.

Never Stop Learning

When Will thinks about the future, he finds himself looking into the past. History, he has come to believe, is one of the most useful tools available to anyone trying to make sense of the present moment. Change has always been part of the human story. Things grow, run their course, and get planted again. The cycle is not new, even when the technology is. "We're going be alright," he says, and it sounds less like reassurance than like something he has actually thought through and arrived at on his own terms.

What he is most hopeful for is the thing he believes has always mattered most: that people never stop learning. He is particularly mindful of the generation coming up behind him, Gen Alpha, the teenagers who were born into screens and have never known a world without them. "Let's make sure we can show them what it means to be human, too," he says. Not by taking their devices away, but by modeling something worth modeling. Watering the flowers, staying for the game, climbing a mountain in the quiet, just to remember what it feels like to be present.

Will Anderson is twenty-something years into a life shaped by curiosity, and he is just getting started. The age of AI, with all its uncertainty and possibility, is not the thing that worries him. It is, if anything, the most interesting question he has ever had the chance to sit with.

He intends to keep asking it.

Will Anderson is a talent and leadership development professional based in Phoenix, Arizona. This conversation is part of the Humans & AI: Everyday Stories series by HumanCulture.

Source: (1) Grant, A. (2021). Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. Viking.