Fostering continuous innovation and creativity with generative AI

Editorial note: Duet AI for Google Workspace is now Gemini for Google Workspace. Learn more. This post also appears in our LinkedIn newsletter AI@Work with Google Workspace.

For most companies, innovation is more likely to come out of seamless collaboration than a siloed, single great idea. By making it easier to work together and develop new thinking, organizations can make continuous innovation and creativity part of their everyday culture. Generative AI plays an outsized role in creating that culture by helping teams break loose from the demands of process to bring their visions to life. It also helps people create new perspectives, improve early-stage ideas, and maintain their creative flow. 

Get a fresh perspective

Both innovation and creativity depend heavily on brainstorming to bring new ideas to life. And the success of a good brainstorm depends on a group with various perspectives feeling comfortable sharing their unique points of view. But employees face a number of obstacles to sharing their perspectives. The pressure of a group setting, the intimidation of a blank page, the fear of sharing a “bad” idea — we all know those feelings. Turning ideas into action isn’t possible if the ideas never see the light of day. With generative AI, the intimidation of a blank page is a thing of the past. 

Imagine a global retail company is launching a new line of shoes, and they need a name that will stand out from competitors. Every member of the team might give Duet AI their own unique prompts with help me write to generate dozens or hundreds of name ideas within seconds. And even if none of the results turn into the final product name, everyone can take elements they like to inspire their own creativity.

By making it easier to develop fresh perspectives, companies using generative AI can boost employee confidence to bring more ideas to the table. And when these dynamics define your everyday culture, it’s easier than ever to generate an abundance of good ideas to unleash the collective genius of your teams. 

Visualize early-stage ideas

Without the space to nurture the ideation process, good thought starters can be dismissed before seeing where they lead. Generative AI supports “divergent thinking,” or making surprising connections between different concepts. In early stages of ideating, there’s no need to focus extensively on logic or order. It’s all about curiosity and openness — seeing where ideas take you and pursuing the strongest ones. 

Sometimes visualizing your ideas can help early-stage thinking. Before generative AI, that was a lot easier said than done. But now, a feature like help me visualize in Duet AI brings ideas to life in unexpected ways. 

Thinking back to the shoe launch, a prompt like “create 10 images of white sneakers in front of different iconic mountains” could help a marketing team develop campaign designs for an internal pitch meeting. And if they don’t love the first results, they can easily tweak details, combine ideas, or generate a new batch of images altogether in just a few seconds. 

Maintain your creative flow 

When we work on creative projects, getting to a state of flow and feeling fully immersed in exploring ideas means eliminating distractions. It can take someone nearly half an hour to recover focus after being interrupted. Generative AI helps teams automate mundane and administrative tasks so they stay in creative flow. 

Imagine using the help me organize capability to create a custom project plan for the product launch, complete with deadlines and task statuses to keep things moving. You might share those files and tasks in a group space within Google Chat to keep everyone connected and on-task. Or take it a step further, and use help me create an app in AppSheet to build a project tracking app that automates workflows without any custom code. 

By streamlining and automating manual and administrative tasks, generative AI can help the product launch team maintain focus and stay in the creative flow, while Duet AI takes care of the details. 

A launchpad for creativity