Hilton’s chief human resources officer does not think people need to be taught how to code. Speaking with Forbes Editor-at-Large Maneet Ahuja at the 2026 Forbes Future of Work Summit, Laura Fuentes said they need to be taught how to be really curious, because in the age of AI, knowing how to ask the right questions sets people apart.
Her reasoning starts with what AI has made plentiful. Answers are now cheap and readily available, so the answer is no longer the scarce part of most work. The scarce part is the question that is worth asking. In Fuentes’s words, asking the right questions “becomes the premium leadership and professional skill.” She wants the skill built in two places: in the prompt box, where people work with AI, and in real life, where they work with each other. Both depend on the same habit of noticing what has not been asked yet.
The second place shapes who she wants around her. Fuentes says she always looks for people on her teams who will ask the tough questions, the truth tellers who have the courage to challenge things. Courage alone is not enough for her. She also wants the patience to listen, and the audacity to follow through with the change that needs to happen, so that a hard question raised in a meeting leads to a change. Together the three describe a full cycle, from raising the hard question, to hearing the answer, to acting on it.
Her other advice is to double down on the things that make people human. Fuentes named judgment, empathy, kindness and a sense of humor, qualities she says workplaces tend to forget, even though they really matter at work. None of them comes from a prompt, and all of them shape how a team behaves when the work gets hard.
That is where she placed the last skill on her list of things that make people human. Fuentes counts the ability to create joyful experiences for a team as part of the job, especially when everyone is in the muck, the stretches when a plan has failed or the work is hard.
