A creative director stares at a blank page at 8:07 a.m., coffee cooling beside a half-finished brief. Ten years ago, that page would have pulled in a crowd: copy, art, strategy, maybe a junior team to feed the room. Today, the room can fit in a laptop, and the first sparks arrive in seconds.
A massive new experiment from the University of Montreal points to a clear turning point: generative AI now beats the average person on certain creativity tests, even with older models such as GPT-4 that are over a year out of date. The implication for creative work feels immediate.
Older Models Already Match The Average Brainstorm
GPT-4 already performs strongly on structured idea-generation tasks, and the study’s scale makes that point hard to dismiss. Researchers compared leading systems to more than 100,000 people and found that some models exceeded average human scores on divergent linguistic creativity, using the Divergent Association Task. In plain terms, a machine can now produce plenty of original-feeling options on demand, especially when the task rewards variety and semantic distance.
That is exactly what many professionals ask for during early-stage ideation: names, angles, taglines, hooks, framing, counterpoints, and starting structures. An older model can flood the table with options, then your judgment selects the few that fit brand voice, audience reality, and business constraints. That workflow already compresses hours into minutes, and it shows up in everyday behavior. My recent LinkedIn poll, which captures more recent models, illustrates that reality: 70% of respondents reported their primary use case for gen AI as research, analysis, and brainstorming.”
The key shift for leaders sits inside that word “primary.” When brainstorming and related creative activities become the dominant use case, the tool is no longer a novelty. It becomes part of the operating system for creative work. Teams that once depended on a large volume of human draft labor start to depend on orchestration: prompt craft, iteration discipline, and a sharp creative brief. Indeed, the University of Montreal study showed that with better prompting and directions for the model, its creative output substantially improves. Creative leaders already tune humans by context and constraint. They will tune models the same way.
Newer Models Become True Creative Partners
Assistants generate options after direction. Partners push back, reframe, and expand the search space with you. Newer models move toward partnership because they sustain longer threads, track intent more reliably, and generate richer alternatives across formats. The study extends beyond word lists into creative writing tasks such as haiku, plot summaries, and short stories, and it still finds AI matching or exceeding average human work in some cases. That matters for professional output because modern creative rarely lives in a single lane. A campaign needs narrative, product truth, performance variants, visual direction, and platform adaptations.
Partnership also changes the emotional rhythm of creative work. The hardest part often involves momentum: the dead zone between the brief and the first compelling direction. A model that can generate ten plausible campaign territories, then remix the best three into sharper versions, keeps the creator moving. You provide taste, ethics, positioning, and audience empathy. The model provides relentless iteration. That pairing raises the “creative watts” per person.
The study also underscores a ceiling for older models where top human creativity stays ahead, especially on richer work like poetry and storytelling. In practice, that ceiling becomes a map of where human advantage concentrates. The premium shifts toward high-level concepting, tonal mastery, and the ability to connect a brand to culture with precision. Those skills resemble direction more than production. As models improve, the human role grows more like a showrunner than a room full of scriptwriters.
This is where staffing changes show up. A single creative lead equipped with multiple AI collaborators can cover territory that once required several specialists for first drafts. The work still calls for humans, yet the leverage per human rises. Fewer people can ship more finished creative, and that reality ripples through agencies and in-house studios.
The Creative Org Chart Shrinks And The Bar Rises
The Mad Men image of a packed room has always been partly theater. The real engine has been a small number of people who frame the problem well, spot the surprising angle, and shape the final artifact. AI makes that truth operational. Instead of assembling a full room to generate breadth, one person can simulate breadth through multiple model “personas,” each tuned to a role: contrarian strategist, emotional storyteller, ruthless editor, and audience advocate. The new creative team becomes a human lead plus an ensemble of AI brainstorming partners.
The study’s top-line pattern supports this future: average performance rises, yet peak human creativity stays distinctive, especially among the most imaginative participants. For professional readers, that translates into a simple career equation. Routine ideation and first-pass drafting become abundant. Taste, originality, and synthesis become scarce. Scarcity drives value.
Organizations will respond with new process design. A creative lead can run tighter loops: brief, generate, evaluate, refine, test, and ship. Fewer handoffs reduce drift. Brand consistency improves because the same director guides more output. Speed increases because iteration happens in minutes. Budget reallocates from headcount toward talent density, tooling, and review.
The practical challenge becomes governance: quality control, originality standards, and responsible use. Partnership demands a stronger brief, clearer constraints, and sharper review instincts. It also demands a human who understands audience reality, business goals, and brand stakes. AI can generate abundance; it cannot own accountability. The creative leader owns the call.
Creative work is entering an era of compression. Older models already handle much of the early ideation workload, and newer models accelerate toward true partnership. That combination boosts creative productivity so dramatically that a smaller number of creatives can cover more ground, with higher expectations for judgment and originality. The future looks less like a crowded bullpen and more like a single high-leverage creator running an AI-powered studio, shipping better ideas faster and setting a new standard for what “creative capacity” means.
About the Author
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky was named “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with Generative AI. He serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his two most recent ones are Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams and ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Will Africa Test Check or Speed Beijing’s Plans to Globalise the Yuan?
By Barbara Kelemen
China is utilising Africa as a strategic testing ground for yuan internationalisation to challenge US dollar dominance and potentially bypass Western sanctions. While lower transaction costs benefit African debt management and international trade, the strategy faces risks from the yuan’s limited convertibility, domestic Chinese economic imbalances, and escalating US-Sino geopolitical tensions.
As part of efforts to expand its economic influence worldwide and strengthen its financial resilience, China is seeking to internationalise the yuan, increasingly using Africa as a testing ground for the ambitious strategy.
Attempting to vie globally with the US dollar is risky for Beijing as it could undermine its own economic model and restructure power dynamics in the country. Broader adoption of the yuan as a settlement currency might also leave China’s African partners – governments and companies alike – facing economic headaches.
China has long-standing, substantial economic ties with Africa, which, for Beijing, makes the region an optimal testing ground for its currency strategy. China is a significant lender and major trading partner for several countries on the continent. Its engagement is in part driven by a desire to source African commodities, such as critical minerals and agricultural products, but it is also credited with overseeing massive infrastructure development. The latter is linked to China’s ‘Belt and Road’ strategy to establish interconnecting business and transport corridors around the world.
While China’s economic ties with Africa have benefited a good number of African countries, many are paying back expensive dollar-denominated loans and local companies are using often-scarce dollars to import Chinese goods. So, for African governments and local commercial entities, it makes financial sense to step up use of the yuan, as its trading and interest costs are lower.
Challenging the dollar
Internationalisation of the yuan is a direct challenge to the primacy of the dollar and, by extension, US economic dominance. For a long time, the idea that the yuan could compete with the dollar as part of an alternative financial system has been dismissed by economists, and it continues to be so as we are nowhere near a point where the yuan could displace the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency.
Greater adoption of yuan would lead to increased demand and therefore appreciation pressures. But China has traditionally kept the value of its currency low for two principal reasons, one financial and the other socio-political. Strong currency could undermine China’s manufacturing-based economic model that depends heavily on producing relatively cheap goods for developed and developing markets. At the same time, a stronger yuan would tilt domestic economic power away from exporters and manufacturers to importers and consumers. That might upset a carefully-managed balance between sectors of the economy – disruption which, in turn, could lead to domestic tensions.
Cautious approach to yuan globalisation
While a transfer of financial muscle from certain economic groups to others might be inevitable, there are limits to the pace at which it can proceed, as there is an entrenched belief in China that any kind of change is bad if it happens too quickly and threatens the functioning of the state.
China, however, seems prepared to manage such risks in order to achieve its broader strategic goals. Internationalisation of the yuan would enable it to wield substantially more economic influence worldwide. At the same time it would also make China more resilient by creating an alternative system to circumvent potential Western sanctions. And what we have been seeing over the last year or so is that China has taken steps, albeit gradual, to begin this process.
African testing ground
With its moves to promote yuan adoption in Africa, an attempt is now underway to see how direct yuan competition with the dollar might play out, not least in China. Over the past year, a number of countries, notably Kenya, have been considering or have recently converted their dollar-denominated debt to China into yuan. And the Bank of Zambia confirmed this year that it now allows mining companies to settle mining royalties in yuan.
But there is a downside to all of this. While debt-for-currency swaps could enable countries to manage their debt burden more effectively, the yuan’s limited convertibility is an issue and the IMF has warned about risks around fluctuations in the yuan’s exchange rate.
At the moment, Beijing has zero-tariff deals with dozens of African countries (which come into effect in May 2026). With some domestic industries already concerned that they will be squeezed out of their own home markets by a flood of cheap Chinese goods, yuan adoption would probably exacerbate this effect by reducing transaction costs. There is also a risk that states focused on yuan-denominated trade with China will find it harder to pursue stuttering African economic integration, especially since central to the process is the use of local African currencies via cross-border payments systems.
Prospects for western investors
For multi-nationals with commercial interests in Africa, the gradual adoption of the yuan also has costs and benefits, but decision-makers should be able to adjust their business strategies to mitigate the former.
On the plus side, multi-national subsidiaries in Africa importing Chinese components might see lower transaction costs, as they will not have to convert local currency into dollars and then into yuan. These subsidiaries may also be able to access more convenient yuan-denominated loans to expand domestically and regionally, and would also gain from any Chinese financing of local logistical infrastructure.
Yet while there are opportunities, there is significant risk for multi-nationals operating in Africa. With the increasingly adversarial nature of US-Sino relations, corporates exporting to America from countries deemed by Washington to be too closely engaged with China might find themselves subject to higher US tariffs and other economic restrictions. So business strategies need to take particular heed of the elevated political risks of commercial ties with African countries deep within the Chinese economic sphere of influence.
It’s too early to say whether China’s efforts to expand yuan usage in Africa will persuade it to accelerate the process on the continent and extend it to other regions. In the relatively short time the African test has been underway, the signs are that it is proceeding well. But associated problems, for Beijing and its partners, are more likely to be felt over a longer period of time, as yuan adoption in Africa works through local economies and China itself. Chinese officials will be closely monitoring this, very much aware that while they are eager to expedite the experiment, they must be alert to unintended consequences.
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