Will AI dull your team's creativity? A study of 125 high-tech firms found the opposite.

There is a worry that surfaces the moment AI becomes genuinely useful. If the machine drafts the copy, sketches the design and suggests the answer, does your team slowly stop thinking for themselves? Does the creativity that made them valuable quietly waste away from lack of use? It is a reasonable fear, and worth taking seriously. It is also, according to the firms that have leaned in hardest, mostly the wrong way round.

Here is what the evidence says. A 2024 study in the Journal of Open Innovation surveyed senior leaders, chief executives, chief technology officers and board members, at 125 US high-tech firms across software, hardware, biotechnology and telecommunications, and asked what AI had actually done to their people. The headline finding is the reassuring one: AI adoption significantly enhanced employees' innovation, creativity and, most tellingly, their willingness to experiment. It also sharpened decision-making, producing more accurate and timely calls. In the organisations that used it well, AI did not hollow out human creativity. It gave people more room, and more nerve, to use it.

How does AI make people more creative, not less?

By removing the friction that quietly kills creative work. Creativity is not only the first spark; it is the willingness to try, fail, and try again, and that willingness is expensive in time, effort and ego. AI lowers the cost of the attempt: draft ten openings, test five directions, model a scenario before you commit real resources to it. When trying something is cheap, people try more things, and more attempts is precisely how creative breakthroughs happen.

Notice the study's own word for the gain, sitting right alongside innovation and creativity: experimentation. That is the tell. It is not that the machine supplied the ideas; it is that people, freed from some of the drudgery and the fear of wasted effort, took more creative risks. This is the same shift behind the end of business as usual: the repetitive load moves to the machine, and the distinctly human work, imagining and daring, gets more of the person's attention.

Doesn't relying on AI make people intellectually lazy?

It can, and that is the fork in the road. AI can be a crutch that thinks in your place, or a partner that lets you think bigger, and which one you get is set by how it is deployed rather than by the tool itself. The firms in the study saw enhancement because they used AI to augment their people and paired it with responsible, ethical deployment. Hand someone AI so they can skip the thinking, and creativity dulls. Hand them AI so they can extend the thinking, and it grows.

It is the same truth as why you cannot out-hustle the machine: the value was never the grunt work, it was the imagination and judgement the grunt work was crowding out. Clear the grunt work with care, and you get more of the human part, not less.

How do I get the creativity dividend rather than the atrophy?

By deploying AI in the way the high-performing firms did: as an amplifier of people, held to a few deliberate habits.

1. Frame AI as a creative collaborator, not an answer machine. Ask your people to argue with it, extend it, and reject its first output, rather than accept it. The creativity is in the pushback.
2. Make experimentation cheap and safe. The measured gain was in experimentation, so protect the time and the permission to try things that might not work.
3. Keep the human as the author. Let AI draft and explore; let the person decide, shape and own. Authorship is where creativity actually lives.
4. Deploy it ethically and in the open. The study ties the benefit to responsible AI use, because trust is what lets people lean in rather than quietly work around it, the same reason behind why so many AI strategies fail.
5. Reward the boldness of the attempt, not the tidiness of the output. If you only praise the polished result, people stop taking the swings that AI just made affordable.

What does this ask of me as a leader?

To meet the fear with a decision rather than a shrug. AI does not have to hollow out your people's creativity; deployed with care, it amplifies exactly the human things, imagination, the nerve to experiment, and judgement, that no machine supplies. The evidence from 125 firms reads like a permission slip: lean in, but lean in as amplification, not replacement.

Your work is to make sure your people meet AI as a bigger canvas rather than a smaller box. Give them the tool and the room in the same breath, protect the freedom to try and fail, and keep them as the authors of the result. Do that, and the creativity you were afraid of losing is the very thing that grows.

About the author

Thomas Green

British technology futurist, AI keynote speaker and advisor. Thirty years across enterprise technology and AI strategy, helping leaders navigate the future of work. The futurist who died.