Remember when 'design thinking' was plastered on every corporate whiteboard from San Francisco to Singapore? Well, dust off that whiteboard, because there's a new framework in town - and this time, the robots are the ones forcing our hand.
According to a Fast Company report, the C-suite has reached a rare, almost eerie consensus. In a January 2025 podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman named the ability to ask creative questions as the single most important skill in the AI age. Not coding. Not data literacy. Not 'prompt engineering' (sorry, LinkedIn). Asking good questions.
When three CEOs agree, maybe actually listen
It doesn't stop there. Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI, wrote last summer that despite all the very reasonable panic about artificial intelligence eating our livelihoods, he genuinely believes 'creativity will remain the real currency.' And Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost threw his own buzzword into the ring, arguing that people need to become 'creative orchestrators' to stay relevant.
Three of the most powerful people in tech, independently arriving at the same conclusion. That either means they're all reading the same airport business books, or they're onto something real.
So what actually is 'applied creativity?'
This is where it gets interesting - and slightly corporate, if we're being honest. The term 'applied creativity' positions creative thinking not as an abstract personality trait for people who own berets, but as a practical, teachable, deployable skill. The 'applied' part is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's the difference between 'I'm a creative person' and 'I can systematically generate and execute novel solutions under constraints.' One gets you a diary. The other gets you a promotion.
The framing is clearly designed to give organizations permission to invest in creativity the same way they invest in agile training or Six Sigma certification. Whether that industrialization of imagination is a feature or a bug is a very legitimate debate.
Will it stick, or is this just design thinking with a new hat?
Design thinking had a good run before becoming a punchline in every innovation department that used it to justify renaming their suggestion box. Applied creativity could easily suffer the same fate - especially if it becomes a checkbox exercise rather than a genuine cultural shift.
But the underlying argument is harder to dismiss this time. When AI can write code, analyze data, and generate marketing copy, the humans who survive are the ones asking questions the AI hasn't thought to ask yet. That's not a soft skill. That's the whole job.
So maybe it's time to take creativity off the 'nice to have' list and put it where these CEOs are suggesting it belongs - right at the top.
