What does Generative AI (GenAI) excel at? And which tasks are best left to people? As digital technology becomes mainstream, more and more companies are asking these questions.
But if they seek answers that focus solely on productivity gains or cost savings, they risk overlooking GenAI’s potential for increasing human creativity and innovation.
GenAI’s real promise lies in its ability to amplify what humans excel at, such as critical thinking, high-level strategizing, and team management, while reducing the repetitive, low-value tasks that hinder this crucial work.
Positioned in this way, digital technology is far from a threat to people’s employment. It’s actually the key to improving them.
Companies must move from isolated, standalone GenAI experiments to cohesive, human-centric strategies
Microsoft research shows that 84% of professionals say using AI makes them more creative, while 83% enjoy their work more.
“Every position in an organization has this element of ‘I have to do it because it’s my job’ and ‘I want to do it because it’s my job,’” says Jeff Chow, chief product and technology officer at Miro, the Innovation Workspace .
“AI will unlock much more of the ‘I want to do it because it is my profession’ [element]”, he adds.
The potential for automation extends far beyond supporting routine tasks and serving as a source of creative inspiration. GenAI can provide a constant stream of new ideas to help people break through creative blocks.
While not every AI-generated idea deserves to be pursued, the sheer volume and variety of suggestions can propel a product or project in an innovative new direction, or encourage teams to refocus on the core problem they are trying to solve.
“When teams get really deep into something, they can start going down rabbit holes,” says Chow. “Sometimes they lose context, and AI is actually very useful because the context is very broad.”
Becoming an AI-first organization
To realize these benefits, companies must move from isolated, standalone genAI experiments to cohesive, human-centered strategies that drive enterprise-wide ingenuity.
Miro’s journey to becoming an AI-first organization shows how this can be achieved. Transparency and a bottom-up approach have played a key role in integrating the technology into existing workflows and habits across many functions and departments.
For example, the company regularly sends a newsletter that investigates how people experiment with AI. Employees are also encouraged to share AI wins on a dedicated Slack channel.
“It’s about saying, ‘This really saved me time’…[but] we also “failed” an AI channel, because it’s really important to keep things light, like, “Hey, here’s something I didn’t expect,” says Chow.
This culture of light-heartedly celebrating failure drives more natural and organic adoption of AI tools and techniques. “We take a disruptive technology and lower the threat of fear…[because] you need to integrate it into the critical workflows that people already are [collaborating on]” explains Cho.
In addition to developing its own AI strategy, Miro has embedded AI into its workspace platform. Miro AI can turn ideas on a canvas into short summaries, summaries and diagrams, reducing what used to be hours of work to seconds.
Moreover, it can also be a brainstorming partner, with the ability to develop topics in mind maps with questions or ideas. Crucially, there is no need to change tools as this is all done on one canvas.
Now users can also cluster sticky notes by theme or sentiment with one click. “We call these little things micro-profits, and they are quite valuable,” says Chow. “It is the first exit on the way to access [more] creativity.”
Innovate with speed
All of these features are designed to create faster, more collaborative workflows. Where previously a product manager might take a week to create a product briefing after a kick-off call, he can now generate one as soon as the call-off call ends. Crucially, this means that feedback can be collected when the project is still fresh in the minds of stakeholders.
“We thought customers would say, ‘This is great, we’re going to let AI generate a product briefing and that will take us to the next phase’ [of the project]’ says Chow. “But they discovered that the real value was in the higher quality feedback loops, just like they did [product managers] were able to deliver the assignment to the employees for review within a day instead of a week.”
In short, maintaining the creative energy behind a collaboration is often just as valuable as saving time. Chow points to another example of how this plays out in practice, pointing to Miro AI’s ability to quickly synthesize canvas ideas into a wireframe prototype.
“For the designer, it becomes more of a collaborative, cross-functional task. It’s a visual collaboration that helps you get customer feedback faster. The classic feedback loop where you make a prototype and say, ‘Does this appeal to you? Does this work?’ it will probably take a week or two, while here it would take a day [or less].”
Rather than simply speeding up time to market, teams use the compressed timeframe of these feedback loops to run more product iterations with customers.
“They say, ‘We’re going to use that time to tweak, refine, tweak, refine, refine, etc.’ The level of innovation is increasing.
Specialized AI agents (called AI Sidekicks) have also been introduced to the Miro platform. They help you deliver your best work by providing feedback and suggestions on your presentation or by suggesting next steps from a retrospective. These agents give you a fresh perspective from a product leader, agile coach, or from the experts at the Product Marketing Alliance.
“Most teams aren’t fully funded: there are competing priorities and other things that lead to micro-level gaps,” says Chow. “…[So] Maybe the product leader is not available, but you can call on an AI agent to think along and help brainstorm.”
It doesn’t replace the human worker, he explains. “But if you haven’t had much time with it, or have to go back to the drawing board after a meeting, it can help to speed up the collaboration process.”
For leaders looking to innovate and thrive, it’s not about whether AI can do things better than humans, but how it can be applied to enhance human creativity – redefining what’s possible for their teams.
Learn more about how Miro helps organizations leverage the power of AI at every stage of their work
