The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 identifies creativity as one of the top skills employers say they need most in the years ahead. That finding may surprise you considering the creative powers of AI, particularly generative AI (GenAI). The technology can already write code, compose content, draft strategies, and produce artifacts that rival the work of the most talented humans. Over time, GenAI’s capabilities promise to become even more impressive.
Given GenAI’s creativity, what role is left for us humans in the creative process? And how should organizations think about the future of creative work?
IT and business leaders need to address those questions as they build workforces that can thrive alongside accelerating AI adoption. The answers lie in understanding creativity, the difference between human and AI creativity, the ways they complement each another, and how organizations can optimize human and AI co-creation to make it a competitive advantage.
Defining creativity
Creativity can be a slippery concept. At its core, though, creativity is about producing something both novel and valuable regardless of domain. It can result in a technology breakthrough, a new product design, a compelling marketing campaign, or a breathtaking work of art.
You don’t have to be an artist or “creative type” to be creative. Scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians can be just as creative as poets, sculptors, painters, and dancers. In the IT department, creativity can be expressed by automating a process to eliminate tedious manual tasks, solving a complex problem under a tight timeline and budget, enhancing a user experience to improve productivity and reduce help desk calls, and countless other activities.
Finally, creativity is a skill that can be developed, not a trait you’re born with or without. “My research shows that we all have roughly equal creative potential,” wrote Dr. Robert Epstein, creativity expert and senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. According to Epstein, “creativity is an orderly and predictable process,” meaning it can be “engineered—and that all of us can realize the enormous creative potential lying within us.”
Human vs. AI creativity
AI clearly demonstrates forms of creativity. Large language models and generative systems can produce outputs that surprise even experts, from unexpected breakthroughs in science to original artwork that blurs the lines between human and machine art.
“Standardized creativity tests, traditionally used to measure human creativity, have been adapted to evaluate the outputs of generative AI,” wrote Dr. Jennifer Haase and Prof. Dr. Sebastian Pokutta. “The results are striking, with AI-generated content sometimes matching or even exceeding human performance in tasks that measure everyday originality and elaboration.”
Hasse and Pokutta go on to note that “AI-generated outputs have proven so convincing in practical scenarios to even fool experts in whether content was created by humans or AI…one of the most substantial possible benchmarks. This evidence underscores the argument that generative AI tools possess inherent creativity, characterized by their ability to autonomously produce novel and valuable output and pass the test of being indistinguishable from human output.”
But the creative mechanisms are different. Humans bring context, lived experience, and emotion to creative work. We can connect dots across domains, empathize with unspoken needs and desires, interpret meaning and make ethical judgments based on our unique perspectives.
GenAI creativity, on the other hand, is computed using algorithms, large datasets, and processing power. AI learns patterns and structures from training data to generate new outputs. While it can produce highly innovative results, GenAI creations are bound by existing data. And GenAI cannot independently experience or interpret emotions, culture, or context.
“AI does not replace human creativity and understanding; on the contrary, it entirely relies on them,” wrote Bernardo Kastrup, founder and CEO of AI silicon company Euclyd. “Its value resides solely in stretching, leveraging the re-use potential of human production, not replacing it. AI amplifies the reach of human productivity; it doesn’t render it redundant. All meaning and all creativity discernible in the outputs of AIs are human meaning and human creativity…Artificial Intelligence ultimately is human intelligence.”
Creative collaboration with AI
Working successfully on creative projects with GenAI means leveraging its strengths as well as our own. Let GenAI process vast amounts of data, identify patterns, generate novel combinations, produce iterations and variations, and execute repetitive or technical tasks. Meanwhile, you can provide the creative vision, ensure cultural and emotional resonance, make intuitive leaps and connections, and evaluate and refine the GenAI output.
In practice, here’s how you can divide and conquer creativity with AI:
- Idea generation. Use AI to brainstorm quickly and explore ideas you might not consider.
- Creative drafting. Let AI handle first drafts of designs, content, or proposals, freeing you to refine and improve.
- Feedback loops. Let AI analyze creative work and offer suggestions to help you iterate faster. Provide your feedback on AI output to help the AI improve its results over time.
- Skill development. Use AI to teach techniques for creative writing, design, or coding.
This division of creative labor—letting humans and AI do what they do best—fosters hybrid intelligence. According to Dr. Cornelia C. Walther, a visiting scholar at Wharton and director of global alliance POZE, this new type of intelligence “represents the synergy between AI’s speed and analytical rigor and [natural (human) intelligence]’s depth of insight. Organizations and individuals can harness solid data-driven capabilities by uniting both and still honor essential human values, ethical reasoning, and collective stewardship.”
One caveat before moving on: human-AI collaboration doesn’t always produce optimal results. “On average, human–AI combinations performed significantly worse than the best of humans or AI alone,” according to a meta-analysis of 106 human-AI performance studies published in Nature Human Behaviour. Researchers also “found performance losses in tasks that involved making decisions and significantly greater gains in tasks that involved creating content. Finally, when humans outperformed AI alone, we found performance gains in the combination, but when AI outperformed humans alone, we found losses.”
Cultivating human creativity
AI creativity will no doubt improve over time through the efforts of Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and other AI vendors. Your creativity, and the creativity of your colleagues, can be improved through effort as well.
Dr. Epstein, the creativity expert, identifies four core competencies that you can develop to cultivate your creativity:
- Capturing. Record new ideas as they occur. Fleeting thoughts and inspirations can be developed into creative solutions or innovations. Epstein suggests using notebooks, voice recorders, or digital apps to jot down ideas immediately. The key is to have a reliable system in place to ensure that no idea is lost, regardless of its initial perceived value.
- Challenging. Question the status quo and take risks. Challenging involves pushing boundaries and not being afraid to make mistakes or face failure as you pursue new ideas. This competency asks you to habitually embrace uncertainty and reframe challenges as opportunities to learn and grow.
- Broadening. Expand your knowledge and have more experiences. Exposing yourself to diverse ideas, cultures, and disciplines enhances creative thinking. Here, Epstein recommends that you read widely, explore new hobbies, travel, and interact with people from different backgrounds to fuel creative inspiration.
- Surrounding. Create an environment that promotes creative thought. This includes your physical workspace, social interactions, and cultural atmosphere. Incorporate natural light, inspiring artwork, and flexible furnishings in your workspaces. Promote a collaborative corporate culture that encourages people to share and develop new ideas.
By focusing on these four core competencies, individuals and organizations can systematically enhance their creative capabilities, leading to more innovative solutions and a more dynamic approach to problem-solving.
Creating the hybrid future
The rise of GenAI doesn’t diminish the need for human contributions to creative efforts. If anything, that need is magnified. Machines can generate, but only humans can judge, contextualize, and give meaning. For IT and business leaders, the future of creative work means cultivating human creativity within your organization and designing processes that let you divide and conquer creative work to ensure your people and your AI systems can do what they do best.
