“If we stop being curious, we stop being useful.”
That’s how Salil Kulkarni put it when we sat down to talk about AI, leadership, and what’s coming next for the workforce. As AI takes over more of the routine work inside organizations, the question I keep circling back to is this: what will actually distinguish the people, and the companies, that keep creating value?
According to Kulkarni, a longtime technology executive and Chief Strategy and Information Officer at Virima, the answer comes down to learning how to think differently.
AI Should Make Us More Human, Not Less
Kulkarni has a habit of translating complicated technology into stories anyone can follow. He grew up talking tech to family members in medicine, so he’s spent years finding analogies that land with people who’ve never touched a server rack. One of his favorites goes back to grade school math.
He remembers when calculators showed up in the classroom. Nobody worried that kids would forget how to add and subtract. Once the calculator handled the basic math, students moved on to calculus, then numerical analysis, then linear algebra. The tool freed the students to work at a higher level.
Kulkarni sees the same pattern with AI in the workplace. When systems can process massive amounts of data in real time and flag what needs attention, employees stop spending their day hunting for problems and start spending it solving them. He put it this way: AI should free people to spend more time on the work that requires creativity, judgment, empathy, and strategic thinking.
That’s the shift I keep talking about with my own clients. The organizations that thrive with AI will redesign work around the strengths only humans bring to the table, on top of whatever they automate.
Curiosity Is Becoming a Business Skill
This is the part of our conversation that stuck with me the most.
Kulkarni’s kids are entering the workforce, and he’s had a lot of conversations with them about what it actually takes to succeed. His advice starts with curiosity. He tells them that if you stop being curious, you stop being useful, because the moment your job becomes the same repetitive task every day, you’ve become replaceable by AI or by anyone else willing to do it cheaper.
From there, he pushes them toward anticipation. Don’t wait to be told what to do. Figure out what your boss needs, what your team needs, and what your company needs before anyone has to ask.
Anticipation is only half of it. The other half is what he does with the itch to fix something nobody asked him to fix. He actually credits his own patents to laziness. He didn’t want to keep doing a tedious task by hand, so when a tool he needed didn’t exist, he built it and moved on to the next problem. For him, that’s the real point of innovation. It’s about being too lazy to repeat yourself, so you solve the problem once and spend your energy on the next one. The patent is just a byproduct.
Industrial-era organizations rewarded people for following the process. AI-era organizations will reward people for questioning it.
The End of Organizational Silos
One of the best stories Kulkarni told me was about his time as CIO and CTO at Caesars Entertainment, where he helped build what became the largest and most valuable loyalty program on the Las Vegas strip.
He was clear that the program came from pulling people from different departments into the same room, including technology, cybersecurity, marketing, analytics, operations, finance, and frontline casino staff who actually talk to customers face to face. That’s how the team learned that a guest from Nebraska might play slots for two or three hours and then head home, or that a guest who looks like a steak lover is actually vegetarian and would rather be sent to the Asian restaurant with a broader menu.
Kulkarni made a point I think a lot of leaders miss: a focus group of customers alone won’t get you there. Customers often can’t tell you what they don’t know they need. Frontline employees can, because they’re the ones watching it happen in real time.
The bigger lesson is about how the work got done. Caesars won by bringing every function into the same problem at the same time, instead of routing it through one department first and handing it off to the next. When technology, marketing, ops, and the frontline staff are all looking at the same customer data in the same meeting, they catch things that a single department working in isolation would miss, like the fact that a guest’s spending habits and a guest’s dietary needs are really the same story once you put them side by side. Kulkarni sees the same thing happening across industries now. As he told me, there’s no such thing as “the technologist” anymore or “the marketing person.” Everyone in the building needs to think like both.
The future belongs to organizations that solve problems across departmental lines instead of inside them.
Better Technology Doesn’t Fix Broken Collaboration
Kulkarni’s world is built around what Virima calls trusted, real-time visibility into a company’s entire technology environment, everything from servers to software to how it’s all connected. He compares it to an MRI for your IT infrastructure. It shows you what’s happening right now instead of what happened an hour ago.
As important as that is, visibility only gets you so far. Technology can surface information. It can flag risk, show connections, and recommend a decision. What it can’t do is build trust between the people who have to act on that information. It can’t create psychological safety on a team, and it can’t make someone willing to raise their hand and share an idea that goes against the grain.
Kulkarni himself pointed to this when we talked about human-in-the-loop decision making. AI can make a recommendation in a split second, but plenty of organizations still keep a human in the loop, especially in industries where the stakes are high and the system is still learning. That human layer only works if people trust each other enough to speak up when something looks off.
Leadership still matters. No dashboard replaces it.
Why This Matters for Georgia Businesses
Georgia is home to Fortune 500 headquarters, a strong manufacturing base, major logistics operators, healthcare systems, a growing fintech scene, and a steady stream of startups. Every one of them is facing the same AI moment Kulkarni described.
Most of these leaders have already made the decision to adopt AI. The question in front of them now is how to prepare people to work differently once the tools are in place.
Curiosity Is the Real Competitive Advantage
Technology has always changed the tools we use. This time, it’s changing the questions leaders need to ask.
As AI becomes more capable and more widely available, the models themselves stop being the differentiator. Companies will set themselves apart by building cultures where curiosity, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous learning become the competitive edge.
That might be the most important thing I took away from my conversation with Salil Kulkarni. It’s a lesson about the people who will shape what AI becomes.
