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 better judgment—and more intentional ways to develop it.
AI may be able to provide answers, but determining what to believe and what to do with those answers remains a matter of human judgment.
As AI increasingly handles tasks that inform decisions, people have fewer opportunities to develop judgment through everyday experience. Knowing what to investigate, what to trust, and how to choose are skills strengthened through the practice of applied curiosity, critical thinking and decision-making.
Organizations can no longer rely on work experience alone to develop human judgment. They need to create opportunities to practice it deliberately.
“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.
Applied Curiosity
Being curious is a great quality. Knowing how to put your curiosity to work is even better.
Sometimes curiosity is free-range: we follow what interests us simply because we want to know more. Applied curiosity is different. It’s curiosity with a job to do—intentionally directed toward a problem, possibility, or decision.
And we don’t all get curious in the same way. Your Curiosity Archetype offers insight into how you naturally engage your curiosity and where it tends to take you. Understanding your archetype can help you broaden your approach and become more intentional about when, where, and how you put curiosity to work.
Understanding your own curiosity is valuable. Understanding how yours works alongside others' opens up even more possibilities.
Teams can use these insights to recognize what they naturally question, what they might overlook, and how to bring different approaches to bear on a shared challenge.
AI becomes more valuable when people know how to get curious with it—pushing past the first answer, exploring options, and asking what else deserves attention.
What’s your curiosity archetype?
Discover your Curiosity Archetype—and how to put it to work.
Take the Curiosity Archetype Quiz
“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.
Applied Curiosity
Know what to investigate.
Turn curiosity into a practical advantage. Design better questions, uncover what’s missing, challenge the obvious, and deliberately explore perspectives and possibilities that lead to better insights and greater influence.
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.
Decision-Making
Know how to choose .
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 Design better questions to uncover what's missing, challenge assumptions, and explore alternatives.
02 Evaluate evidence, challenge reasoning, and know when AI-generated answers deserve your trust—and when they don't.
03 Recognize thinking and judgment errors before they shape action.
04 Clarify goals, weigh options and tradeoffs, and make wiser decisions.
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
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.
About us
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.