The Efficiency Trap

Right now, we are optimizing for the wrong metric. Most enterprise conversations about AI still revolve around speed: how fast can we write the code, draft the email, or generate the image? But speed is a commodity. It’s no longer rare or impressive. In a world where “good enough” content can be generated in seconds, speed becomes a baseline expectation rather than a competitive advantage.

The uncomfortable truth is this: if we use AI only to make tasks faster, we will simply drown in faster mediocrity. Automating low-level work doesn’t magically elevate the overall quality of thinking inside a team or an organization. In fact, it often does the opposite—it discourages depth, exploration, and challenging assumptions, because the output arrives too quickly to invite debate.

The sharper point of view is that AI is not here just to save us time—it’s here to raise the quality of our collective thinking. It shouldn’t merely reduce the workload; it should increase the creative tension. It should push us, challenge us, and complicate the work just enough to make the outcome meaningfully better.

When AI becomes a tool for acceleration alone, we lose something essential: the friction that forces us to think.

AI as a Collaborative “Sparring Partner”

Collaboration is suffering. Remote work, distributed teams, and digital silos have made our work more transactional than collaborative. We often mistake “file sharing” for collaboration, when what we actually need is shared thinking.

AI has the potential to fix this—but only if we design and use it as a participant rather than a processor. The magic of collaboration isn’t in the tools we use but in the tension and synthesis created when ideas collide.

Here’s how AI can actually strengthen that dynamic:

Breaking the Echo Chamber
A good human collaborator challenges your assumptions. They tell you when you missed the obvious or when your logic is flawed. AI should do the same. It shouldn’t just summarize your meeting; it should identify the counter-arguments your team ignored, highlight blind spots, and ask questions you forgot to ask. This is not about correction—it’s about provocation.

Connecting the Dots
True innovation rarely happens in a straight line. It emerges when two unrelated ideas collide in an unexpected way. AI can act as the connective tissue that identifies a pattern in a designer’s sketch and links it to a data point in an engineer’s report. It can recognize relationships that humans may gloss over because we’re locked into our respective domains.

The End of the Blank Page
Collaboration often stalls before it even begins. Staring at a blank document is paralyzing, especially for teams spread across time zones. AI can act as the “first drafter”—not to produce the final answer, but to put something imperfect on the table. Once teams have something to react to, the creative engine turns on. Momentum beats perfection.

The Shift from “Creator” to “Curator”

Creativity is evolving. We are moving from an era of pure creation—where the value came from making the brush strokes—to an era of curation, where the value comes from choosing the direction.

This shift doesn’t make human creativity less important; it makes human taste the rarest and most valuable asset in any company. When AI can generate 100 variations of a campaign, product design, architecture concept, or research frame in an hour, the skill isn’t “making.” It’s knowing which one is good—and why.

Here’s what this shift demands:

Provocation Over Production
Use AI to generate the obvious ideas, the weird ones, the impossible ones. Not because they will be used, but because they force the human team to sharpen their instincts and find the unexpected path. AI becomes a generator of prompts, not just products.

Protecting the “Messy Middle”
Great creative work requires wandering, reconsidering, and sometimes failing. It requires arguing, reframing, and getting lost before clarity emerges. If we over-automate the creative process, we risk sanitizing it, removing the tension that makes the work meaningful. AI should handle the logistical burden—organizing files, formatting documents, rendering prototypes—so humans can stay in the messy, conceptual phase longer.

The messy middle is where originality lives. Preserving it is non-negotiable.

Designing for Friction

One of the biggest dangers of AI is that it makes things too smooth. Frictionless processes are efficient, but they often lead to forgettable outcomes. A frictionless workflow removes moments of pause, reconsideration, and challenge—the exact conditions under which insight and creativity thrive.

To truly amplify collaboration and creativity, we need intentional friction built into our AI systems.

We need AI to ask “Why?” before it executes.
We need interfaces that force teams to verify, edit, and inject their unique point of view.
We need systems that don’t let us accept an answer without understanding the reasoning behind it.

If the AI does everything without pushing back, we are no longer collaborating; we are spectating. And passive creativity is not creativity—it’s compliance.

The Verdict

The future belongs to teams that treat AI as a distinct member of the creative circle—one that never sleeps, has read every book, and can generate infinite possibilities, but has zero taste. The humans provide the taste. The humans make the judgment calls. The humans decide what matters.

AI provides the scale.

So stop asking, “How much time can AI save us?”
Start asking, “How much better can AI make us work together?”

Speed is fine. Efficiency is fine. But they are not the point.

The real ROI of AI is the elevation of human collaboration, the expansion of creativity, and the ability to think at a higher level than any of us could alone.

That is the only metric that will matter.