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Generative AI can accelerate innovation, but the article argues that its default use often reinforces the human bottlenecks it is meant to solve. In ideation, models steer teams toward familiar Every innovation team now has the same tools: the same foundation models, similar prompt libraries.
Yet the results are wildly uneven. Some teams report a creative renaissance while others report a flood of homogenized, forgettable ideas that all sound like they came from the same person.
The reason isn’t which model you’re using. It’s that generative AI acts on the human bottlenecks buried inside that process. These bottlenecks respond to AI in different—sometimes opposite—ways.