Business AI

generative AI can indeed boost employee creativity, but the gains are not universal. Specifically, employees with stronger metacognition—the ability to plan, evaluate, monitor, and refine their thinking—are more likely to experience creative gains from using generative AI, because they can use it more effectively to acquire the cognitive job resources that fuel creativity.

For leaders and organizations, this finding reframes the challenge of AI-enabled creativity: to unlock AI’s potential for boosting workplace creativity, organizations must go beyond simply rolling out new tools; they also need to invest in developing employees’ metacognition and promote the thoughtful, strategic use of AI so employees can translate AI outputs into more effective creative performance.

a report from 2024 that found AI can sometimes slow things down because employees have to double-check its work for AI-specific errors like hallucinations, which wouldn’t have been there to begin with if a human had done the work. The report calls these “hidden workloads that negate the benefit of automating outsourcing tasks.”

This can lead to increased responsibilities without increased pay, because AI is billed as a way to make things easier.

A machine can now ingest an absurd amount of scientific literature and treat it like working memory. It can surface connections no human would spot simply because no human can hold that much context in their head at once.

That is extraordinary.

But the machine does not know which connections matter. It finds all of them: the significant ones and the trivial ones, the ones that unlock new treatments and the ones that are statistical lint.

The human who can tell the difference becomes more valuable, not less.

The machine solves. The human selects.

Selection is harder than solving. That is the thing nobody wants to say.