Emergent Creativity in Human-AI Collaboration

Well-organized human-AI collaboration is expected to be the next frontier of unlocking organizational potential and performance. Research calls for understanding how such collaboration may be leveraged to expand creativity, which leads to innovation, new value creation, and the possibility of achieving a greater competitive advantage. This study explores how creativity arising from human-AI collaboration may be enhanced, primarily based on the end-user’s motives and the nature of the task. We find that the emergent creativity-enhancement is greater when the end-user is an end customer with personal motives of use rather than an organizational employee with organizationally predefined motives of use. Additionally, explorative rather than exploitative tasks are found to affect emergent creativity-enhancement more. The findings add to the knowledge and understanding of the elusive creativity construct and have major significance in practice.