Many fear that artificial intelligence (AI) heralds the end of creativity. But perhaps it is not an end, but rather an evolution that this latest addition to the human technological toolkit brings to the creative process.

At a first glance, the ability of generative AI to render images, videos, words and programming code appears to be taking the “art” out of human hands. What becomes apparent upon deeper examination is that, instead, generative AI is lowering the barrier to creativity, making the creative act itself available to more people than ever.

“I am not creative” is a commonly heard phrase in the business world. This is a self-limiting belief likely reinforced from old memories of broken pencils, smeared paint and off-pitch karaoke nights that mistake the process of creativity with the insight of creativity. To be creative is to have a point of view and an idea worth sharing. Simple as that.

If generative AI tools are lowering the barrier to creativity, how might it also raise the bar? As more people come into their own relationship with an easier-to-render creative process, what new insights are ready to be expressed by those among us who have never, until now, believed they were capable of expressing a creative idea?

In businesses, leaders play a critical role in empowering their team members to bring their unique perspectives to bear. Alongside hiring and project management, one of the greatest areas of long-term impact a manager can make for their company is the development of intellectual capital for the business. Money is a means of exchange for business, but ideas are the real currency.

Think of all the ideas lost in the shuffle of hectic schedules that you can recall coming up in brainstorms or casual conversations during team meetings that in the context of generative AI could be quickly captured and converted into memos and presentation slides. The back of the napkin has come alive. With AI, that napkin has eyes that can turn a rough sketch into a professional grade blueprint.

What skills do teams need to accelerate their creativity and ideation with these new tools at their disposal?

Here are some basic skills to share with your team to help them learn how to integrate AI into their processes at work and achieve greater creativity and innovation as a result.

Introduce yourself.

Tell the AI tool who you are and share a bit about your unique point of view and your professional goals. Your human experience is where your creativity comes from. An AI is a universally adaptable tool, but it lacks its own experience. This is both its strength and its weakness. For it to be an effective assistant, it has to know how to focus its output toward your needs. Your humanity is the context it needs to get you results.

For example, if someone’s a travel agent asking an AI to help them with “flights,” they’re probably talking about airplanes. If they’re a bar manager asking an AI to help them with “flights,” they’re probably talking about beer.

Some AI tools have the ability to remember who you are over the course of multiple conversations. This helps you to build a relationship and get into even more nuanced areas of creative collaboration. It’s not just about making sure AI understands the correct context. Understanding the correct context is the foundation of generating insightful ideas.

Ask AI to fill in the empty spaces.

A principal artist works with quite often is called “negative space.” It’s rooted in the idea of creating with what isn’t there just as much as what is. In the workplace, many smart teams follow this concept by ending their brainstorm meetings with a few moments to contemplate the question, “what are we not thinking of?” to make sure that edge cases for the strategy are being thought through. Still, teams miss unknown unknowns easily and often. AI can help with that. Before taking a plan to your stakeholders or to a client or to the market, practicing the proposal to (data secure) AI and asking it “what are we not thinking of?” is a great way to look past the limitations of your own biases and available information to truly stress-test an idea.

Distill your creativity down to the best with AI.

An open secret from the creative world is that it takes fertilizer to make flowers. One great idea tends to emerge from many bad ones. Drafts upon drafts filling up notebooks and hard drives are an essential part of the creative process. Often, it is difficult to know whether a fresh idea is good the moment it’s created. It must sit a bit. The excitement must fade. Building a robust relationship with an AI that knows who you are, what your goals are, and the various stakeholders you offer your creativity to offers you a partner in the process of distilling your training ideas down to their best. Let it sort through the compost!

Here’s an example. Let’s say your goal is content development. Give yourself a full week of a sprint to develop as many content ideas as you can. Sketch out those ideas in an environment your AI can understand – be it a written document or visual environment it can read. Give each idea a distinct title and any other categorization type that suits your needs. At the end of the week, you might ask your AI to “rank this week’s content development ideas by the biggest potential market” or “rank these ideas by the lowest potential production cost”.

Whatever the criteria for critique, the information processing power of an AI can distill your open creativity down faster than you can. Knowing that support will be there, you will find that your creativity can expand even further and help you deliver more impactful training solutions.