A massive study involving over 100,000 participants has recently delivered a sobering reality check for every leader, the findings are clear: Generative AI can now outperform the average human in divergent thinking.
The baseline for professional creativity has just been reset in 2026.
In tasks like the Divergent Association Task (DAT), which measures the ability to connect unrelated concepts, AI isn’t just competing; it is exceeding the human mean.
For years, we have been researching creativity for innovation leadership. This new data confirms a shift we’ve noticed ourselves over recent years: we are entering an era where being “average” at creative problem-solving is no longer a viable career or business strategy.
Navigating the 2026 Innovation Gap
As a senior leader, this shouldn’t be a cause for alarm, but a call for strategic realignment.
While AI excels at the volume and speed of creative output, as measured by recognized metrics like the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), our research shows that humans still hold the creative ceiling. By continually overseeing and monitoring the creative process and including AI as a tool rather than deferring to it completely, we can maintain creative control.
Here are three key areas of concern and the strategic takeaways that can ensure your leadership remains in that unbeatable top tier:
1. The Fixation Effect: Original vs. Derivative
The most crucial finding of the 100,000-person study is that while AI beats the average, it still cannot touch the top 10% of human creators. This was a gap even GPT-4 couldn’t cross.
AI’s creativity is fundamentally derivative - it synthesizes existing data rather than producing ideas from lived experience. There is always a risk that AI is simply repeating non-validated or hallucinated patterns from its training, which is known as the fixation effect.
A Carnegie Mellon study found that using search engines during brainstorming leads to fewer original ideas as teams converge on predictable answers. The more we over-rely on AI, the more we face cognitive debt and a decline in our own executive function.
The takeaway is that leadership in 2026 is about using AI to clear the mundane work so your people can engage in brain-only ideation, activating deeper memory and the genuine originality required for high-level breakthroughs.
2. Resisting Premature Closure: Ambiguity as a Strength
AI is trained to provide definitive, high-confidence solutions. This often leads to premature closure or closure bias, where the machine favors structured answers early in the process.
Humans possess the emotional tolerance and intuitive patience to embrace ambiguity. While AI ranks and selects divergent pathways prematurely, humans can hold multiple conflicting ideas without forcing a resolution, allowing deeper insights to emerge.
The takeaway is that it is important to use AI for exploration rather than finding definitive answers. For example: try utilizing “etymological prompting”, or asking the AI to explore word origins and historical shifts, to push the machine out of its predictive average and into more unexpected territory.
3. The Experience Gap: From Brainstorming to “Brain-Steering”
AI can mimic metaphorical reasoning, but it doesn’t experience abstract thought or understand the human stakes of a wicked problem (a problem with multiple facets that is difficult to solve). This experience gap is still a challenge for AI models tasked with generating highly original ideas.
AI generates a high volume of ideas, especially at higher temperature settings, but it lacks the human intuition to know which risks are viable. Humans remain significantly more effective at evaluating the feasibility of ideas and executing them in complex, real-world practical settings.
The takeaway is that your value has shifted from Idea Generator to Idea Architect. You must therefore learn to steer the machine toward strategic relevance, providing the metaphorical and abstract thinking that AI currently only simulates.
Every investigation needs a baseline. Be honest: which of these four profiles best describes how your team is currently interacting with generative AI?
Andrew Grant and Dr. Gaia Grant (PhD) are globally recognized experts in innovation leadership, known for their groundbreaking research and bestselling books, including The Innovation Race and Who Killed Creativity?. Through Tirian (& Sydney University Business School), they have helped Fortune 500 companies and global leaders navigate the complexities of change, offering research-backed tools like the Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi).
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