By Tracy Reis, head of people and culture, Sleek Events
Every good event person I have ever worked with has been curious. It is the thing that makes someone notice the queue forming in the wrong place, or spot that the moment everyone loved about last year’s show was not on the run sheet at all.
So, when people tell me curiosity is the new essential skill for the AI era, my honest reaction is that it is not new. What has changed is the pressure on it, and how badly we need to organise ourselves around it.
The intersection we are standing at
We build world-class experiences across industries. We spend our working lives at the exact point where innovation meets a room full of people who want to feel something. Our clients are launching the tools reshaping how everyone works, and asking us to make that feel human, memorable and worth getting on a plane for.
The importance for brand experience agencies is that the technology is not replacing the human element. It is enabling it, in every way possible. AI takes the grinding admin out of the day and hands people back the hours where the good thinking happens, and at Sleek, that good thinking, is what really sets us apart.
So that only works if the people using the tech know what a good idea looks like. AI can speed up good thinking, but it cannot tell you what ‘good’ is. That judgement comes from learning, structure and being shown how decisions get made, not from the tools themselves. Which is why curiosity now needs a framework: something that helps people turn what they notice into something they understand, and then into something they can act on.
The assumption the industry keeps making
Somebody is brilliant at producing. So, we promote them. And we assume they now know how to line manage, run a P&L, handle a difficult client conversation, present with confidence and be relentlessly innovative. We rarely give them the tools to do any of it.
We just assume the expertise transfers.
Now we are stacking a new assumption on top: that everyone will pick up AI fluency on their own, in the gaps, somehow.
There is a harder version of this too. The World Economic Forum expects 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030 and now lists curiosity and lifelong learning as rising skills alongside AI literacy.
Meanwhile the routine work that used to teach juniors this business, the running, the version control, the endless spreadsheets, is exactly what AI is taking on. It was never glamorous, but it was an apprenticeship. Let it disappear without replacing it and we will look up in five years with no midweight talent at all.
What we built instead: Sleek Academy
That is the thinking behind Sleek Academy. It is not a course catalogue. It is our attempt to take something we already valued, curiosity, and give it somewhere to go that helps the business and positions our people for success.
In practice, it’s a pick and mix:
• A learning budget where people spend what they need, rather than what we guessed they needed.
• Mentoring and coaching, because the most useful thing in this industry is still time with someone who has done it before.
• Learning from our own Jedi masters is one of our strongest cultural traits, and that generosity in sharing knowledge shows up everywhere – from shadowing across teams so a producer understands commercial pressure, to a client lead seeing what really happens at 2am on a build.
• External speakers, because we love challenging our thinking and hearing from experts that can further spark our growth.
• A book club, the softest thing on the list and one of the most useful. And peer to peer sessions, where the person who found a smarter way to do something teaches everyone else.
What makes it work is that it is funded and part of the week, not something you squeeze in after the client goes quiet.
There are 5 layers to the Sleek Academy, designed to build on capability where it matters most: Onboarding, Fundamentals, Excellence, Expansion and Thrive & Flourish. Each layer supports a different stage of someone’s journey, ensuring development doesn’t trail off the moment the next project lands.
Curiosity is a resource, not a personality trait
The mistake to avoid is treating curiosity as something you hire for and then never feed.
Every agency says it wants curious people. Far fewer create the conditions where curiosity is affordable: unbilled hours, permission to try something that might not work, and a budget with the individual’s name on it.
If you demand curiosity but fund nothing, you are just telling people to learn in their own time. They will. And then they will take it somewhere else.
Learning is now the most reliable retention tool we have. It is also the only sensible hedge in a market where nobody can say which skills will matter in eighteen months.
You cannot forecast that. You can build people who adapt to it. The employee has to bring curiosity, we can’t teach that. But the employer has to build the thing that catches it.
That means leading with kindness and never hiring based on a CV alone. At Sleek, we hire the person, not the paper – and we hold ourselves to the same standard internally as we do for our clients: creating an experience that feels thoughtful, human and designed with care.
Sleek is built around care, around care for our customers, care for the work we produce and most importantly, care for those who produce it.
Growth has to be purposeful, balanced and built in partnership. The employee and employer relationship is a scale, and we are in it together.