Creativity is often a solitary affair, epitomized by the stereotype of the tortured genius alone in a room thinking and experimenting on their own. Indeed, it seems that creativity often is strongest in reflective people with a knack for solitary introspection.
But artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others enable a reflective person to continue in their individualistic pursuit with a partner that asks for nothing and can be called on whenever necessary to help start the brainstorming.
A marketing specialist could provide their favorite AI tool with the goals they seek to achieve at an upcoming new product launch event and then ask for five great ideas for venues and party themes. The marketing professional then would refine and customize those ideas using their own expertise and that of their team.
With AI frequently helping with such tasks these days, I began to wonder how it could be brought into the learning process as part of a creativity exercise.
See What You Can Ask AI
In one of my jobs, I asked the free version of ChatGPT to look at the Website of the publication I managed at the time and to tell me everything about the site that could be hindering search engine optimization and metrics such as the number of unique visitors and time spent on the site. Within no more than a minute, it provided me an analysis that included needed technology upgrades and places where the design of the site could be changed to feel more modern and user friendly.
At that time, it had been 13 years since our last site redesign, so I asked it to tell me two things: the negative impact of any site going that long without a redesign and the negative impact the outdated design likely was having on our site specifically.
From there, my creativity was sparked to consider how, in light of the strong argument in favor of a redesign, I could make changes that would bring the site into the present. For example, I thought we could have an AI tool of our own, so visitors could interact with it more like a ChatGPT or Gemini, asking questions, with high-quality, curated information provided from our own archives of articles. I also decided that instead of a photo panel of multiple articles across the top, a single article could be featured at the top with other articles below, so all it would take for an immediate daily fresh look to the site would be changing out that one top article.
The improvements ChatGPT recommended, in other words, spurred me to think of the solutions I might employ.
Just When You Think There’s No Way to Make it Better…
Let’s say you have a longstanding product or service that has a strong base of loyal customers. You don’t want to mess with the legacy version so many people love, but you also want your teams to start thinking about newer, fresher versions of the product/service.
Rather than simply asking your work groups to think of new ideas, ask them to bring their favorite generative AI tool into the process. The output of an AI tool depends heavily on the question, or prompt, it is given. So unless you dictate the prompt to use (which for the sake of this exercise I would advise against), everyone will ask the question/give the prompt in their own way. And that’s the beauty of it. Everyone in the room will ask essentially the same question in a slightly, or in some cases, dramatically, different way. This will result in a dozen or more different variations on new ideas for spinning off your best-loved product/service.
Employees then could be asked to upload the full list of ideas their specific prompt generated into a shared file. They also could be asked to take what they consider the best of the ideas the AI tool came up with and refine it/perfect it so it makes sense and realistically can be implemented.
Let AI Help Market New Ideas
“How best can I present this new idea to our executive team?” an employee could ask the AI tool. Then, depending on what the employee asked for, AI would something brief such as a bulleted list or something more formal such as a ready-to-go e-mail or a comprehensive presentation including a PowerPoint deck the employee can download and open in Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or Google Slides (by the way, ChatGPT just gave me that information!).
Using a generative AI tool isn’t cheating, being lazy, or taking a shortcut. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. You can train your work teams to use it as a spark for creativity. It provides the spark, and then your employees’ careful refinement and planning can turn that spark into long-term engines of success.
Does your organization encourage employees to use generative AI to jump-start the creative process?