AI makes answers cheap.Judgment is about to get expensive.
We develop the human capabilities that become more valuable as AI gets better: critical thinking, applied curiosity, and decision-making.
What would change our mind?
Critical
Thinking
Applied
Curiosity
Decision-
Making
Trusted by teams at
GOLIN
Lilly
LinkedIn Learning
Microsoft
A.S. Watson Group
epiq
AMGEN
MERCK
Why Now
Your people have more answers than ever.
They need the skills to exercise better judgment
AI can research, analyze, write, plan, and recommend at extraordinary speed. That makes it easier to produce an answer—and more important to know whether the answer deserves trust.
Someone still has to identify what matters, challenge assumptions, assess information quality, ask the most valuable questions, and decide what to do next.
AI accelerates the work. People still own the judgment.
“These shifts highlight the increasing complexity of decision-making and the need for critical problem solving in a data-driven world.”
Three human capabilities that make better judgment possible.
Critical Thinking
Being smart is a great advantage, but being smart and thinking critically aren’t the same thing.
Critical thinking is a specific way of thinking—and even very smart people may never have been taught what it actually is…and isn't
Critical thinking is also not the same as strategic thinking or creative thinking. Each does a different job. Better judgment starts with knowing which kind of thinking the situation calls for—and how to put that thinking to work. Hint: it’s usually wise for critical thinking to come first, so you don’t build your strategy or creative solutions on shaky ground.
AI can produce a convincing answer in seconds. Critical thinking helps people determine whether it deserves to be believed.
“Critical thinking has never been more important than in the age of AI.” McKinsey ↗
ACL Workshops
Build the human capabilities that become more valuable as AI gets better.
ACL workshops are interactive, practical, and built for teams. Participants work through real questions, assumptions, information, and decisions—not passive lectures.
Critical Thinking
Know what deserves your trust.
Separate trustworthy information from convincing noise. Challenge assumptions, spot flaws in reasoning, and determine whether an answer—from a person, a report, or AI—actually holds up.
Applied Curiosity
Go beyond the obvious.
Turn curiosity into a practical advantage. Ask better questions, uncover what’s missing, challenge the obvious, and deliberately explore perspectives and possibilities that lead to better insights and greater influence.
Decision-Making
Strengthen the judgment behind every strategic decision.
Get clear about what you're really deciding, what matters most, what could go wrong, and which tradeoffs you're willing to make. Because when there isn’t one obvious right answer, the quality of the decision comes down to the quality of the judgment behind it.
Leadership Teams
Managers
Knowledge Workers
Teams Adopting AI
What Teams Practice
Not more information.
Better ways to work with it.
01 Ask questions that reveal missing information and hidden assumptions.
02 Evaluate AI-generated and human-generated claims with greater discipline.
03 Recognize thinking and judgment errors before they shape action.
04 Frame decisions, tradeoffs, and desired outcomes more clearly.
Custom Solutions
Better judgment can take different forms.
Every organization is learning how AI changes the way its people think, work, and decide. We work with teams to identify where better judgment matters most—and explore the right response.
On human judgment“AI-powered tools are only as valuable as the quality of the human judgment applied alongside them.”Deloitte Insights
Systems & workflows
Design judgment into the work.
Structures that put the right questions, checkpoints, and human review into AI-enabled work rather than relying on memory or good intentions.
Learn with ACL
Millions have started with an ACL course.
4M+learners across ACL courses on LinkedIn Learning
Want to bring the learning into the room? ACL turns these ideas into interactive team experiences built around discussion, practice, and application.
The People Behind the Thinking
Becki Saltzman
Founder & Chief Curiosity Seeker
Becki Saltzman is the architect behind widely adopted training tools for critical thinking, applied curiosity, and decision quality. With a background in applied behavioral science and a track record of developing high-impact learning content, she has helped organizations around the world put critical-thinking frameworks into practice.
Her work has also helped shift curiosity from something people simply have to something they can deliberately use—as a practical tool for insight, innovation, and influence.
Becki’s critical-thinking methodology has been tested and refined with more than 4 million learners across industries, roles, and geographies. As founder and Chief Curiosity Seeker at Applied Curiosity Lab, she is the architect of ACL’s core ideas, methodologies, and frameworks and leads their continued development and evolution.
Her work is centered on strengthening the distinctly human capabilities that become more valuable as AI gets better: thinking clearly, questioning intelligently, exercising sound judgment, and making decisions that stand up to scrutiny.
Susan Williams
Director of Client Engagement & Growth
Susan Williams partners with organizations to identify their critical-thinking needs and shape learning experiences that translate Applied Curiosity Lab’s work into meaningful, practical impact.
Susan brings more than two decades of experience building and growing business and leadership content. During nearly 11 years at LinkedIn Learning, she led content strategy and developed major learning initiatives across business and leadership, most recently shaping the strategy for Human Skills in the Age of AI, focused on the distinctly human capabilities that become increasingly important as AI transforms work. Previously, as an executive editor and business publishing leader at Wiley/Jossey-Bass, she worked with influential authors and thought leaders to turn their expertise into enduring books and learning platforms.
Susan helps people and teams think more clearly, exercise better judgment, and make stronger decisions when it matters most.
Barkley Saltzman
Director of Decision Intelligence
As Director of Decision Intelligence at Applied Curiosity Lab, Barkley specializes in turning human messiness—biases, blind spots, assumptions, and noise—into practical approaches that help leaders and teams think more clearly, exercise stronger judgment, and make better decisions.
With a background in behavioral science and international conflict resolution, he designs systems and workflows that make better thinking easier to put into practice, transforms traditional learning into engaging digital experiences, and helps teams use AI to strengthen human judgment.
For ACL clients, that means learning that is practical enough to use immediately, designed to stick, and continually reimagined to set the standard for how people learn, think, and work in an AI-augmented future.
Applied Curiosity Lab
What does better judgment need to look like in your organization?
Tell us what you’re trying to solve. It might be a workshop, a training program, a critical-thinking tool, a digital experience, a workflow, or something we haven’t built yet.