Why Cognitive Ability Is the True Passport in the AI Era

Professor Chen Chunhua likens digitalization to a powerful spotlight that connects everything, optimizes processes, and reduces costs by illuminating the "known" within a deterministic framework, building data foundations and system loops.

In contrast, the AI era’s core challenge is the "unknown"; AI’s essence is generation and creation, not just historical analysis. When AI can instantly generate countless answers, human competitive advantage shifts from the speed of finding answers to the wisdom of defining problems.

Thus, while digitalization provides an information highway, the true passport for enterprises today is not data or computing power but a cognitive ability grounded in human insight and value judgment—an "eye" that can see through fog, spot the faint light, and pose genuine questions.

The article emphasizes that many mistakenly view AI as merely a faster, data‑rich version of digitalization, but the two represent fundamentally different cognitive paradigms: digitalization solves known problems by optimizing existing processes, whereas AI solves unknown problems by generating new products, strategies, and services.

To thrive, organizations must undergo a cognitive reconstruction: moving from "seeking answers" to "defining problems," shifting from reliance on past experience to embracing emergent intelligence, and transitioning from control‑oriented tools to symbiotic partners with autonomous AI agents.

In the AI‑driven world, answers become cheap and abundant; the scarce resource is the ability to ask the right questions, a uniquely human skill that cannot be copied.