Illustration by Shonagh Rae

I’m calling out all of my innovation colleagues. Stop using AI for ideation. 

I’m getting frustrated hearing about the amount time [and tokens] wasted using AI to generate the next big idea, when in reality your people, the market and your customers are bubbling over with innovations of every stripe – new business models, new products and services they’d wish you’d make and new efficiencies, right down to the vendor relationships and supply chains that are obvious and apparent them and invisible to you, because you’re not asking questions. 

So what does AI for ideation actually scream? Insecurity. Doubt. Uncertainty. 

AI can now generate a hundred ideas before your coffee gets cold. What it can’t generate is conviction. That’s the gap executives don’t want to admit and the by-product is even more detrimental. The more AI accelerates ideation, the more disconnected teams feel from the ideas they’re asked to execute. Innovation doesn’t happen because a model produced an option, it happens because people believe in a direction and choose to move together. 

If you haven’t noticed yet, AI is still not a great motivator of the people. 

Belief is built by people through storytelling. Not a slide of AI-generated bullet points, but a narrative that explains why this path, why now, and why it’s worth the disruption. When you tell that story well, you’re not just presenting an initiative, you’re closing the distance between a leadership decision and the people who have to live it and even more importantly, spread it. 

It feels to me like we’re letting AI eat innovation. We’re getting lazy, and worse yet, we’re actually being pushed and pushing our people there, whether through token maxxing or just the crush of the headlines that feels like you’d be an idiot not to use AI on each and every task, when collaborating and storysharing would get you there in twice the time but 10x the commitment to the idea and its execution. 

Have You Ever Dealt With This? 

Your organization has more AI-sourced ideas than it knows what to do with, a good 30% of which are either boring incremental innovations or ones that will just get put on the whiteboard with zero-ownership or advocacy? Adoption is slow and engagement is thin. The bottleneck isn’t ideation anymore. Its connection to the work, the outcomes and the pride in the original idea. 

Look, we’re not going to do away with AI in the innovation space and we shouldn’t. But how we talk about it and how we get people to move on the ideas that ARE valuable, requires a better story that feels ground in our humanness if you actually want the humans to invest and get the job done.