Banking on Curiosity: Five Questions for an AI Business

"What's the most important quality in a banker today?"

"Curiosity," replies Andrea Tognetti, Executive Vice President, People & Culture at UniCredit Bank Romania, one of the largest banks in the country.

I couldn't resist. "Does anyone here," I asked an audience of businesspeople, managers and bankers at the ImpactSee conference in Bucharest, "remember seeing 'curiosity and creativity' in the job requirements for their role?"

So the penny is dropping even where the big money sits, among the heavyweights running serious organisations. With every passing day, those "heavyweights" sound more and more like multidisciplinary artists from Shoreditch. They talk about imagination, creativity, breaking old habits, and treating experiments and failures as a natural part of management and of life. That's where the opportunities lie, and that's where the risks are.

So what does that curiosity look like in business?

John Deere’s green tractors stopped being just a big engine hitched to a plough a long time ago. Manufacturer John Deere loaded them with cameras and AI and turned them into mobile data-collection stations. John Deere gathers everything (what's growing, how much of it, and where in the world) and sells that information to farmers and to traders on the financial markets. Now its cameras can also tell exactly which plant needs spraying and which doesn't, and the company charges farmers for the areas that went unsprayed and the money they saved. All of it powered by AI.

Ahead of the conference in Bucharest, I put together a whole range of examples like this: radical business creativity, made possible by AI, that turned into an entirely new business engine. It's happening in every field: agriculture, furniture, aviation, energy, and also waste, food and medicine.

Click for the full talk from ImpactSee 2026 in Bucharest

Your creativity, too, can take flight and carry more meaning than ever before. So how do you find the right path?

Here are a few questions anyone can ask themselves:

• Who else might pay for the data our work produces?
• What value is hiding in the materials we already have?
• What could we keep improving for the customer after the sale, and offer as an ongoing service?
• What other problem could we solve for customers who already trust us?
• Which customer outcome could we measure, and charge for on a recurring basis?

The full talk, just 11 minutes long, is waiting for you here, and the slides are here.

And an important credit: the story I opened with was inspired by an idea from the one and only Omri Marcus.