The convergence of AI tools, remote collaboration platforms, and traditional creative methods demands a fresh approach to ideation.
AI changes the landscape of how we work; we must adapt and leverage AI meaningfully. Adaptability will make you feel more resilient and ready to face the challenges of the future. Define your process or have one defined for you.
The fundamental tools of innovation apply: persuasion, presentation, and storytelling remain constant while our capacity to execute on them expands.
AI amplifies our ability to explore and refine ideas. The fundamental creative process is still the tried and tested, the core principles upon which industries have formed. For good reason, creative ideation tools unlock momentous ideas from yourself and your team. Develop and define your workflows with AI and learn as you go.
Analog is still the boss. Your original input is the key to developing satisfyingly unique output with AI, no matter the stage of ideation. Basic analog tools of design thinking and creativity
Brainstorming 101
A quick primer on brainstorming…
Brainstorming is a process that revolves and iterates around two phases: expansion, where ideas flourish and multiply without constraint, and contraction, where those ideas are thoughtfully refined and distilled.
The beauty of this approach lies in its adaptability—embracing structure and creative freedom allows for ideation sessions that consistently yield meaningful results.
For example, by applying inversion, considering the opposite of what you're trying to achieve, and deliberately breaking established patterns, you can uncover innovative solutions that might otherwise remain hidden.
In brainstorming, there are two fundamentals; the rest is ad-lib, and you decide how creative freedom looks for you. The two fundamentals are expansion and contraction.
As we stand at the threshold of an AI-saturated world, much of the conversation remains trapped within familiar corporate frameworks—efficiency metrics, productivity gains, and optimized workflows.
The prevailing discourse imagines AI agents as sophisticated consultants sitting around virtual boardroom tables, crunching data faster, generating reports quicker, and streamlining decision-making processes.
Whether we’re debating single super-agents versus teams of specialized AI, the underlying assumption remains: AI exists to make our current work more efficient.
While understandable from an enterprise standpoint, this perspective fundamentally underestimates what we’re dealing with.
AI is a transformative technology that deserves nothing less than our fullest investment of human creativity and imagination.
Beyond Corporate Frameworks
The limitations of this corporate-centric view become apparent when we consider what’s being left unexplored. When AI is framed primarily through the lens of cost reduction, performance optimization, and risk mitigation, we’re asking for a revolutionary technology to color within the lines of existing systems.
But AI’s true potential emerges not when it helps us do familiar things better but when it enables us to do things we’ve never imagined possible.
The most profound innovations throughout history have come from those willing to experiment beyond conventional boundaries, to play with possibilities rather than solve predefined problems.
AI deserves this same spirit of creative exploration—not as a servant to productivity but as a collaborator in the grand adventure of human discovery.
The Power of Creative Exploration
When we approach AI with playful curiosity, we discover capabilities no business case could have predicted. This is why play, experimentation, and divergent thinking aren’t luxuries in AI collaboration—they’re necessities.
Through experimentation, we learn that AI can amplify our analytical abilities and our capacity for wild association, unexpected connection-making, and imaginative leaps.
Divergent thinking—the ability to explore multiple solutions and embrace uncertainty—becomes exponentially more powerful when combined with AI’s vast pattern recognition and generative capabilities. These are the mechanisms through which breakthrough innovations emerge, the processes that reveal new ways of thinking, creating, and being in the world.
Pioneering New Forms of Expression
The future belongs to those who understand that AI’s greatest gift isn’t its ability to optimize our existing reality but its potential to help us imagine entirely new ones.
When artists, innovators, and creative thinkers engage with AI as true collaborators—not as tools but as creative partners—they are pioneering new forms of human expression, discovering novel approaches to ancient questions, and opening pathways to innovations that could reshape how we understand creativity, intelligence, and collaboration.
In a world of infinite mystery and possibility, our willingness to play, experiment, and dream alongside artificial minds may be the quality that defines our next evolutionary leap as a species.
The question isn't whether you'll be affected by AI. The question is whether you'll be designing the future or desperately trying to survive in someone else's version of it.
We are currently amidst a rapid acceleration, moving from AI being primarily a tool for augmenting what you do to its increasing capability of automating the job itself. There are warnings that up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be affected within the next one to five years, leading to significant unemployment spikes. Roles like junior software developers, paralegals, and first-year associates are already seeing the impact, and even mid-level coding jobs are predicted to become unnecessary soon.
This transformation carries real risks, including a potential great concentration of wealth among those who own and leverage the AI, making it harder for a significant portion of the population to contribute economically in traditional ways. This could lead to substantial inequality.
The “train” is moving fast, but it can be steered. Your active engagement, willingness to experiment, and emphasis on finding the intersection between human strengths and AI capabilities are essential steps to navigate this transformation and help steer it toward a future that looks more utopian than dystopian.
Actionable Steps for Professional Survival
Start experimenting immediately with AI tools available to you. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, emphasizes that the window for adaptation is narrow - those who begin learning now will have significant advantages over those who wait. Many powerful models have free versions. Treat experimentation as a non-negotiable part of your professional development.
Map your irreplaceable value. Identify the 2-3 core tasks where your human judgment, creativity, or expertise cannot be easily replicated. Focus on understanding how AI can amplify these uniquely human contributions rather than replace them.
Build AI literacy as aggressively as you once built digital literacy. Just as email and internet skills became non-negotiable in previous decades, understanding prompt engineering, AI limitations, and effective human-AI collaboration patterns are becoming essential professional competencies.
Develop AI-native workflows. Rather than bolting AI onto existing processes, redesign your work methods from the ground up to leverage AI’s strengths. This might mean restructuring how you research, write, analyze, or solve problems to create seamless human-AI collaboration.
Position yourself as a bridge between AI capabilities and human needs. Professionals who can effectively translate between AI potential and real-world applications will be increasingly valuable as organizations navigate this transition.
Opportunity Within Crisis
While acknowledging the potential downsides, AI also holds immense potential for creation and improvement. You don’t have to be a passive recipient of this technology. The professionals who will truly thrive actively shape AI development while building the new economic structures that emerge from it.
Your domain expertise is precisely what AI companies need to make their systems more useful and accurate. The displacement now creates massive opportunities for those willing to construct new markets.
Act now. Shape the tools. Build the systems. Create the markets. Or watch others do it for you.
Artist Lisa Lebofsky Featured in Apple TV's Severance
The artwork featured is by artist Lisa Lebofsky, read on to learn more.
4 Questions for the artist.
We asked Lisa four questions about her artwork and the process of working with the TV series Severance.
1. Can you share a little about the inspiration behind the painting featured in Severance?
A coincidental backstory is I referred to this series of iceberg paintings as my "Severed Icebergs" but went with the less violent-sounding "Melting Icebergs" for the title of the series. The idea was I was severing these icebergs at the tip, isolating them in space, and melting the paint with water in each pass to speak to their fragile and slow demise. I saw these ice islands alone on this death march following their break from their home glacier. I witnessed this specific iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
2. How did the opportunity to have your work appear on the show come about?
They found me! I can't speak to their process, but they contacted me after seeing my work online. I'm not sure what resonated about this specific iceberg, but the original is 48x72 inches and they originally inquired about the original piece. Since it was unavailable, they requested a jpg that could be printed at that scale. Imagine my delightful surprise seeing them choose to print it so small in the show. I think it's rather fitting and more powerful the way they presented it.
3. Were there any particular themes in Severance that resonated with your artistic practice or influenced this piece?
There is so much about Severance that resonates not just with my art but with life. Aside from a clear aesthetic affinity, the show was filmed in several locations where I've lived: New Paltz, the Catskills, Nyack, Newfoundland. The last episode of the second season was way too close to home, and I secured many appointments to come with my therapist. I have to give everyone involved credit because I've rarely seen that portrayed with such respectfully faithful and genuine emotion (I'm being intentionally vague because I don't want to drop any spoilers!). But conceptually, so much of my work is about the separation of the body and mind, the fragility of existence, and strained perspectives of space and our relationships to what is real vs abstract.
4. Finally, what's next on the horizon for you—any projects, exhibitions, or ideas that excite you?
On the horizon- I see what you did there! I have a few projects on the go. I'm working with a group of artists exploring the Watershed of NY as a source of inspiration and sustenance, considering how this pristine land has been historically ravaged and configured for human consumption. Dovetailing off of this project is a new body of work in progress both conceptually and physically: utilizing chroma to cut through an image, disrupting space and the rhythm of the landscape, perhaps as a metaphor for how people engage and interact with nature.
Learn more about Lisa's work and follow her on social media, or click here to check out her available workshops and read more about the artwork featured in Severance.
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