If you’ve ever spent an afternoon with a five-year-old, you know the drill.
“Why is the sky blue?” Because of how sunlight scatters. “Why?” Because blue light has a shorter wavelength. “Why?” Because… physics. Go ask your mother.
Kids don’t stop at the first answer. They don’t care if the question sounds dumb. They keep pulling the thread until they hit the bottom or until the adult runs out of patience.
AI never runs out of patience. And yet most business owners I talk to ask it one question, get a mediocre answer, and decide the whole thing is overhyped.
I think two things are getting in the way: Dunning-Kruger and fear.
The Dunning-Kruger Problem
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the well-documented tendency for people with limited experience in something to overestimate how good they are at it. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you assume there isn’t much to know.
Here’s how that plays out with AI. Someone types “write me a marketing email,” gets back something generic and stiff, and concludes AI writes generic, stiff emails. Case closed. They tried it.
But they didn’t really try it. They asked one question and treated the first answer as the final answer. That’s like hiring a consultant, listening to their opening sentence, and walking out of the meeting.
The people getting real value out of AI aren’t smarter. They just know the first answer is a starting point. They ask why it wrote it that way. They ask how it would change it for a specific audience. They ask what it’s assuming. They push back. They keep going.
The less you’ve used AI, the more confident you probably are that you’ve already figured out what it can do.
The Fear Problem
The second thing is quieter, and I think it’s the bigger one.
Adults are afraid of looking stupid. Somewhere between kindergarten and our first job, we learn that asking “why” too many times makes you look like you weren’t paying attention. So we stop asking. We nod. We pretend we understood.
That habit follows people straight into a chat window. Even though nobody is watching, they hesitate. They don’t ask the follow-up because it feels like a basic question. They don’t admit they didn’t understand the answer. They take what they got and move on.
There’s also the other fear: that if AI can do the thinking, what exactly are you for? That one makes people keep it at arm’s length, testing it just enough to confirm it isn’t a threat.
Both fears lead to the same place. One shallow question, one shallow answer, and a conclusion that the tool isn’t worth the effort.
Ask Like a Kid
Here’s the shift. Treat AI the way a five-year-old treats a patient adult.
Ask how. Ask why. Then ask again.
- “How do I reduce employee turnover?”
- “Why would that work for a 15-person company?”
- “How would I actually roll that out next month?”
- “Why might my team push back on it?”
- “How do I handle that pushback?”
Five questions in, you’re not looking at a generic listicle anymore. You’re looking at a plan built around your business, your team, and your objections. The AI did most of the heavy lifting. You just refused to stop asking.
No question is too basic. AI doesn’t roll its eyes. It doesn’t tell anyone you asked what an API is. The only person keeping score is you.
The “Within Reason” Part
I want to be clear about where this stops, because I’m not interested in overselling it.
AI can do an enormous amount of the thinking, but it can be confidently wrong. It doesn’t know your clients, your history, or the thing your best employee mentioned in passing last Tuesday. So the questioning has to point both directions. Ask AI why, and also ask yourself whether the answer makes sense.
The judgment stays with you. The legwork doesn’t have to.
The Bottom Line
The people falling behind on AI aren’t the ones who lack technical skill. They’re the ones who asked once, felt smart enough about it, and stopped. Or the ones who were too worried about looking foolish to keep going.
Be the five-year-old. Keep asking. Worst case, you learn why the sky is blue.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
