AI: The Coming Creativity Boom

(4-5 minute read)

Most people are asking the wrong question about AI.

They’re asking how it will make things faster. More efficient. Cheaper. Whether it will take jobs. Whether it will help them write code or analyse data more quickly.

Those are reasonable questions.

They’re also the least interesting ones.

Because they assume AI is just a tool.

And it isn’t.

If you look back at every major technological shift, the real impact didn’t come from doing the same things better. It came from doing entirely new things that hadn’t been possible before.

The internet didn’t win because newspapers became slightly more efficient. It won because it created businesses that didn’t exist before. Search engines. Social networks. Marketplaces that connected millions of buyers and sellers instantly. Entire industries appeared almost out of nowhere.

Most of the incumbents missed it.

They focused on improving what they already had. Digitising existing workflows. Making small gains. Meanwhile, something else was growing alongside them, something they didn’t fully understand until it was too late.

AI feels very similar.

Right now, most companies are treating it like an upgrade. A way to reduce costs. A way to automate tasks. A way to improve margins. Those things will happen, and, of course, they matter, but they’re not where the real change is.

The real change is what gets built next.

Because the moment something becomes cheap and easy to do, people start doing far more of it. And then they start doing things that were never viable before.

Think about software.

For years, software has been one of the most powerful forces in the economy, but it has always been constrained. It takes time to build. It requires skilled people. It’s expensive. That means countless problems simply never get solved because they aren’t worth the effort.

Now imagine that constraint loosening.

Not disappearing, but easing enough that more people can create, test, and deploy solutions at speed. Suddenly, the bottleneck shifts. It’s no longer about whether something can be built. It’s about whether someone thinks to build it.

That changes the game.

It means we won’t just see better versions of existing products. We’ll see entirely new categories. New services. New ways of interacting with technology that don’t fit neatly into what we have today.

And most of them don’t exist yet.

That’s the part that’s difficult to grasp, because we tend to think in terms of what we already know. We ask how AI will affect our job, our business, our daily routine. We rarely ask what replaces those things, or what emerges alongside them.

History suggests that’s where the real movement is.

When railways appeared, cities changed shape. Suburbs were built because travel times decreased. When cars appeared, they didn’t just improve transport. They reshaped cities again, created new industries, and rendered others obsolete. When electricity spread, it didn’t just replace candles. It changed how we built factories, how we lived, how we worked.

The pattern repeats.

New capability leads to new behaviour. New behaviour leads to new systems. And those systems eventually become the new normal.

There’s also a deeper shift happening underneath all of this.

For most of history, creating something meaningful required coordination. Teams, capital, infrastructure. That hasn’t gone away, but the threshold is lowering. Individuals and small groups can now produce things that once required entire organisations.

That’s not just an economic change. It’s a cultural one.

It means more experimentation. More variation. More ideas being tested in the real world. Most will fail, as they always have, but a few will succeed in ways that reshape everything around them.

That’s where the opportunity is.

Not in using AI slightly better than the next person, but in seeing what it makes possible before it becomes obvious. In asking different questions. In exploring problems that were previously ignored because they were too difficult or too expensive to solve.

There’s a line of thinking that says technology mainly replaces what already exists.

There’s another that says it expands what exists.

The second one tends to be closer to the truth.

We don’t run out of problems. We discover new ones. We don’t stop building. We build in new directions. The world doesn’t get smaller. It gets more complex, more layered, more interconnected.

AI will do the same.

It will remove some roles, reshape others, and create entirely new ones. It will disrupt industries, but it will also give rise to new ones. It will make certain skills less valuable and others far more so.

And it will do something else that’s easy to overlook.

It will change how we think about thinking.

When you have systems that can generate ideas, test them, refine them, and feed them back into the process, the pace of iteration and invention increases. Not just in technology, but in science, medicine, engineering, and fields we haven’t even defined yet.

That has consequences.

Some good. Some uncomfortable. Some we won’t fully understand until we’re in the middle of them.

But it reinforces a simple point.

The biggest mistake we can make is treating AI as a tool for optimisation.

Because if that’s all we see, we’ll focus on making the present slightly better while the future is being built somewhere else.

And that future won’t arrive gradually.

It will appear unevenly. In pockets. In breakthroughs that seem sudden but have been building quietly for years. In companies and ideas that feel small until they aren’t.

The question isn’t whether that will happen.

It’s who will recognize it early enough to benefit most.

So maybe the better question isn’t how AI will change what you do today.

It’s what becomes possible tomorrow that you’re not even looking for yet.

That’s where the real shift begins.

Until next time,
Brian
BA Gillies

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