Jeremy Utley presents strategies for using AI as a collaborative teammate rather than just a tool, showing how this mindset shift can dramatically improve productivity and creativity while helping professionals overcome common challenges.

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Shift from "Tool" to "Teammate": 10× Your AI-Powered Creativity

VALUE, PAIN POINTS & BENEFITS

Key Pain Points Addressed:

1. Struggling to get high-quality, creative outputs from AI
2. Facing tedious, time-consuming tasks (like paperwork) that drain productivity
3. Feeling stuck or uncreative, potentially exacerbated by initial AI interactions
4. Not knowing how to effectively leverage AI beyond basic prompts ("basic language" is missing)
5. Experiencing the "realization gap": knowing AI can be powerful but not personally achieving significant productivity gains (less than 10% of professionals do)
6. Tendency towards "satisficing" – accepting "good enough" ideas rather than pushing for exceptional ones

Key Benefits and Insights:

• Learn a prompting framework that lets AI ask you the right questions ("AI to use AI")
• Transform dread-filled chores into minutes-long workflows (e.g., 2 days of paperwork → 45 minutes)
• Empirical gains: 25% faster, 12% more output, 40% higher quality when treating AI as a teammate
• Overcome functional fixedness ("satisficing") to generate world-class ideas via "volume & variation"
• Unlock latent creative capacity in every individual—no technical background required
• Move from "I use AI" to "I work with AI," fundamentally shifting outcomes

What You'll Learn:

• How to have AI coach you, rather than simply answer your prompts
• A step-by-step method to surface both obvious and non-obvious AI applications in your work
• Techniques to overcome cognitive bias and push past your first idea

What Problems This Solves:

• Ineffective prompting and under-utilization of generative AI
• Days-long manual tasks that drain time and energy
• Creative stagnation caused by settling for "good enough"

Powerful Quotes:

• On Idea Generation: "The history of innovation is the bed, the bus and the bathtub."
• On AI Potential: Even the "poorest villager in Palo Alto" can have "an assistant that has my context and my voice and my intent available to me so that when I'm in the bathtub, I can be dictating my address". This is "absolutely technically possible today".
• On Using AI: "AI strangely can teach you how to use itself if you think to ask".
• On Mindset Shift: "shifting your orientation from tool to teammate changes everything about the kinds of outcomes that you can achieve working with generative AI".
• On Creativity Definition: "Creativity is doing more than the first thing you think of".
• On Using vs. Working With AI: To the question "how do you use AI?", the "only correct answer" is "I don't. I don't use AI. I work with it." "When you start working with AI, it will change everything".
• On Inspiration: "'inspiration is a discipline'".

ESSENTIAL INFORMATION

Key Statistics and Research Findings:

• AI makes people 25% faster, 12% more work, and 40% better quality when treating AI as a teammate
• Less than 10% of working professionals derive meaningful productivity gains from AI collaboration
• Case study: Glen Canyon National Park ranger built an AI tool in 45 minutes that saves 2 days of paperwork—scaled across 430 parks → 7,000 days of labor saved this year

Prerequisites & Learning Steps:

1. Access a generative language model (e.g., ChatGPT)
2. Be prepared to answer AI's context-gathering questions (workflows, KPIs, objectives)
3. Embrace a "teammate" mindset—coach, feedback, iterate
4. Allocate time for volume & variation to push past first ideas

How concepts connect:

• The "Tool vs. Teammate" orientation directly addresses the "realization gap" and poor creativity outcomes by changing the interaction model
• Letting AI ask questions is a practical application of the "Teammate" orientation
• "Inspiration as a Discipline" explains why the user's input is key to getting differential outputs from AI
• Prompting for "Volume and Variation" is a strategy to overcome "Satisficing"

CALL-TO-ACTION

1. Initiate the conversation:
Copy

Hey, you're an AI expert. I'd love your help to figure out where I can best leverage AI in my work.

2. Ask AI to interview you:
Copy

As an AI expert, please ask me one question at a time until you have enough context about my workflows, KPIs and objectives.

3. Gather recommendations:
Copy

Based on that context, please make two obvious recommendations and two non-obvious recommendations for how AI could help me.

4. Coach AI as a teammate:
• If output is mediocre, give feedback: "That's a good start—what else might we try?"
• Ask AI to role-play stakeholders or simulate scenarios (drills)
5. Generate volume & variation:
• Prompt: "Give me 20 different approaches to this problem"
• Sort, combine, refine the outputs to push beyond your first idea
6. Implement for dread tasks:
• Identify tasks you "dread" or repeat ("I have to do this again")
• Build a quick natural-language AI tool to automate paperwork, email drafts, data analysis
7. Begin as a beginner, scale to advanced:
• Beginner: follow the above script step-by-step, asking AI for help framing questions
• Advanced: building custom tools, complex roleplaying scenarios with AI feedback, strategically cultivating diverse inputs for nuanced AI prompts

SUPPORTING DETAILS

Chapter 1: Don't Ask AI—Let It Ask You

• Prompting Strategy: Instead of "How should I answer?", ask AI "What's the best way to frame my question?"
• Unlike traditional tools like Excel or PowerPoint, AI can teach you how to use itself
• The speaker recommends engaging AI in a consultation about your work to discover applications
• Example: A National Park Service employee built an AI tool that automates paperwork, saving him two days of work per task
• This same tool is projected to save the entire service 7,000 days of human labor annually
• Non-technical employees can achieve remarkable results with basic AI training

Chapter 2: Treat AI as a Teammate

• Research shows a significant "realization gap" between AI's potential and actual productivity gains
• Orientation Gap: Underperformers = tool; outperformers = teammate
• Behavioral Shift: Coach, feedback, get AI to ask you for more context
• Example applications include using AI to roleplay difficult conversations and provide feedback
• The speaker's students regularly discover AI use cases he hadn't imagined

Chapter 3: Go Beyond 'Good Enough' Ideas

• Creativity Definition: "Doing more than the first thing you think of"
• This addresses the cognitive bias of "functional fixedness" or "satisficing"
• AI makes it easier than ever to get "good enough" solutions
• For exceptional results, prompt AI for "volume and variation"
• The definition of creativity isn't changing in the age of AI, but the technology affects how we achieve creativity

Historical Context and Personal Background

• The speaker is Jeremy Utley, an adjunct professor at Stanford University working at the intersection of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and AI
• He wrote the book "Idea Flow" on idea generation and prototyping, which was released just before ChatGPT launched
• He compares this timing to "writing the best book on retail just before the internet"
• Upon ChatGPT's release, he became a student again to understand "how does generative AI impact the individual and the team and the organization's ability to solve problems?"

ADDITIONAL HELPFUL REFERENCES

Additional Implied Pain Points:

• Fear of AI replacing human creativity or jobs
• Difficulty translating abstract AI potential into concrete, everyday applications
• Frustration when AI produces generic, biased, or factually incorrect results
• Lack of clear strategies or training on how to integrate AI into creative workflows
• The cognitive effort required to constantly provide feedback and iterate with AI
• Decision fatigue and context switching
• Time wasted on low-value tasks
• Uncertainty about how to evaluate AI outputs

Resources Mentioned:

• Book: "Idea Flow" by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn (on idea generation and prototyping)
• Series: "Exploring Human Agency in the age of AI: Uncoded"
• Episode: "Ep.1 How to Become a Better Collaborator with AI"
• Person: Lecrae (Hip Hop Artist, Multi-time Grammy Winner)
• Person: Herbert Simon (associated with the concept of "satisficing")
• Stanford d.school programs
• Winston Churchill bathtub anecdote (Gary Oldman film)

Recurring Themes and Mental Models:

• The bathtub/bed/bus theory of innovation: Good ideas often come when we're not actively focused on work
• Inspiration as a discipline: Creative individuals are intentional about cultivating inputs
• Tool vs. teammate orientation: Fundamental shift in how we interact with AI
• Metacognition with AI: Thinking about how we interact with AI and improving that interaction
• Differential outputs from common tools: Getting unique results from AI requires bringing unique inputs
• AI as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement for human creativity

Connection to Established Frameworks:

• Aligns with Bloom's Taxonomy: moves learners from understanding to creation
• The cycle of prompting, receiving output, giving feedback/coaching, and re-prompting mirrors aspects of experiential learning cycles
• Parallels Jobs to be Done by fulfilling functional (automation), emotional (confidence), and social (collaboration) jobs

Alternative Perspectives:

• Some research warns AI can entrench bias or reduce deep learning if over-relied on
• Hybrid human-AI safeguards recommended
• Some creativity experts argue that constraints enhance rather than limit creativity
• The emphasis on "volume and variation" could be balanced with discussion of how to effectively evaluate and select from multiple AI-generated options
• Domain-specific AI tools might offer different interaction paradigms than general large language models