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Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming professional and academic landscapes, offering opportunities for enhanced creativity and productivity. Yet, many struggle to truly harness its power. Jeremy Utley, an adjunct Professor of Creativity and AI at Stanford University, points to a "realisation gap": despite AI's ability to boost speed and quality, many professionals aren't seeing significant productivity gains. Utley's research indicates that the key difference between those who thrive with AI and those who don't lies in a fundamental shift: underperformers treat AI like a tool, while outperformers treat it like a teammate.

Treating AI as a Teammate: A Paradigm Shift

Viewing AI as a teammate fundamentally changes the outcomes you can achieve. Just as you wouldn't discard a human colleague's insufficient work, but instead provide feedback and coaching, the same applies to AI. Give AI feedback, refine your prompts, and guide it towards better outputs.

Crucially, this teammate orientation means reversing the traditional question-answer dynamic. Instead of always asking AI for answers, get AI to ask you questions. For example, professional services staff could ask, "What are ten questions I should ask about this new university policy to ensure comprehensive understanding?" Academics might inquire, "What do you need to know from me about this research proposal to help me refine its methodology?"

A powerful application of this approach is asking AI to help you understand how best to leverage it in your own work. You can instruct a language model: "You're an AI expert. I'd love your help and a consultation to figure out where I can best leverage AI in my role as a university administrator. As an AI expert, please ask me questions one at a time, until you have enough context about my workflows, responsibilities, and objectives, so you can make two obvious and two non-obvious recommendations for how I could leverage AI." This allows AI to evaluate its own potential applications, leading to surprisingly insightful conversations.

Your Contribution Matters: Fuelling AI with Your Expertise

While AI provides processing power, the quality of its output is profoundly influenced by your input. Everyone might access the same models, but the results will differ based on what you bring – your technique, experience, perspective, and even the inspiration you cultivate. The most creative individuals are disciplined about cultivating the inputs to their thinking because they know it directly affects the outputs.

Beyond 'Good Enough': Striving for Exceptional

Creativity is often defined as "doing more than the first thing you think of." AI makes it easier than ever to reach "good enough." To achieve exceptional results, you need to prompt for volume and variation, pushing past that initial satisfactory outcome. Don't settle for the first draft AI provides; ask for ten different versions, then refine and combine the best elements. For example, a marketing professional could ask AI for twenty different taglines for a university event, then select and iterate on the most promising ones.

By shifting your mindset from tool to teammate, actively engaging in feedback loops, allowing AI to ask you questions, and contributing your unique expertise and inspiration, you can truly unleash the transformative potential of AI in your professional and academic pursuits.

This article and accompanying image were written and created with the help of Gemini 2.5 flash model. The prompt for the image was “create an image for this article.” If you would like to know more, please contact sunil.chudasama@warwick.ac.uk

Please refer to the university guidance when using AI.