You’ve probably used AI to get quick answers to fairly straightforward questions, such as, “What are some tips to improve my time management?” or “Can you suggest a catchy title for my report?” But if you’re only using AI in this way, you’re just scratching the surface. With proper guidance, AI can actually improve the quality of your thinking — unlocking new levels of creativity, problem-solving, and self-improvement. But first, you have to know how to ask the right questions.
Most people use AI as a glorified search engine, but the real power of the technology lies in its ability to lead people to insights, assess options, and choose a course of action. As we’ve written before, one of the major ways AI can assist organizations is by analyzing processes and practices over time, helping identify ways to increase efficiency, safety, or cost savings. Another way AI can help organizations is by improving the thinking of their employees in real time, which we’ll explore in this article.
Two types of thinking
Generative AI (GenAI) can assist with two types of thinking that are essential for problem-solving and decision-making:
Divergent thinking is a creative process that allows us to generate a wide range of ideas. Similar to brainstorming, divergent thinking is a free flow of thoughts without judgment. The purpose is to generate as many ideas as possible while exploring new and different possibilities, angles, and perspectives. This type of thinking involves cognitive flexibility.
For example, maybe you want to go somewhere new for vacation. You could perhaps come up with 5–10 possibilities on your own, while AI could suggest hundreds of destinations.
Or let’s say you want to come up with ideas to liven up your team meetings — everyone always seems bored and disengaged. You think of three or four ideas yourself, but AI comes up with 300 or 400 more ways to add fun to your meetings!
Convergent thinking is a focused, analytical process that narrows down many ideas to the best solution. Convergent thinking involves systematically evaluating and comparing options to identify the one that best satisfies specific criteria. This type of thinking involves precision and focus.
It would mean narrowing down your list of new vacation spots to those that best fit your time constraints, budget, and interests. With AI, you could filter the possibilities by distance, cost, or even number of swimming pools to instantly rank the options, which would require hours or days on your own, even if you could find all the information.
Or maybe you’re not sure which fun activities would be most suitable for your team meetings. You ask AI what you should consider to make the decision, and it suggests several factors such as goals, team size, budget, and company culture. You decide that team bonding is the most important goal of the activity and ask AI to filter its previous results based on that criterion.
The two types of thinking go hand in hand. If you practice only divergent thinking, you’ll end up with a dazzling spectrum of possibilities with no direction or focus. On the other hand, if you use only convergent thinking, you’ll be highly focused but severely limited in your creativity and outside-the-box thinking.
AI can augment both types of thinking, especially when we find ourselves at an impasse. Perhaps we’re too close to a problem or too set in our ways, and we can’t see beyond the usual solutions. Or maybe we have plenty of ideas, but we’re having trouble deciding which one is most likely to succeed. AI can help overcome both of these mental roadblocks.
Human-AI strategic thinking
The real power of AI is in helping us have our own insights rather than just telling us the answer to a problem. An AI tool can use divergent thinking to come up with possibilities we might not have considered previously — and thereby spark other ideas we normally wouldn’t have.
In this way, AI can generate powerful insights in our brains. Insights — or aha moments — trigger a dopamine release, producing a feeling of excitement that energizes and motivates us to continue working to solve a problem.
Although insights are rewarding and motivating, not all of them are worth pursuing. What seems like a great idea may turn out to be wildly impractical when you consider the logistics. But GenAI can help assess our insights, evaluating the pros and cons of each against specific criteria, such as cost, time for completion, or likelihood of success. By considering the pros and cons of each option, we can make an objective decision that’s less prone to bias.
Augment, not replace
Many people worry that AI will eventually replace humans, rendering the need for human thinking obsolete. But a more constructive way to think about AI’s potential is that it will augment, not replace, the human brain. AI can help humans generate a kaleidoscope of creative new ideas and then narrow the spectrum to select the best one, accelerating problem-solving and innovation.
In this way, AI can lead humans to insights and then help translate those insights into action. But the energizing feeling of having an insight — and the motivation it brings to take action — remains, at least for the foreseeable future, a uniquely human experience.
