‘Struggling’ forward: Innovating with generative AI in the business world
Dr Guy W Bate
Thematic Lead for Artificial Intelligence
University of Auckland Business School
The question — how do we stay creative, critical, and intentional in an age of generative AI? — isn’t just for educators. It’s a strategic challenge facing every leader and manager trying to innovate in the current business landscape.
I recently published a piece in the journal AI & Society titled “The struggle is the lesson! Being an educator in the age of AI” (Bate, 2025). The piece appears in their Curmudgeon Corner column, a forum for bold and reflective commentary on emerging tech-society issues. It asks what it means to be an educator when generative AI is reshaping how knowledge is produced, shared, and judged.
Beyond efficiency: Generative AI as a thinking partner
Much of the early conversation around AI in business has centred on productivity: faster emails, automated reports, summarised customer feedback. Generative AI excels at these tasks, and when used wisely, it does save time.
But innovation is a different game. It’s not just about speed; it’s about insight, exploration, and judgment. The most exciting potential of generative AI isn’t that it can do your work for you. It’s that it can help you think differently about your work, surfacing blind spots, reframing problems, and expanding the range of strategic options.
In the executive and professional development programmes I help run at the University of Auckland Business School, we’re encouraging managers to experiment with generative AI. Not just to accelerate tasks, but to provoke better thinking. We’ve found that three deceptively simple practices — reflecting, struggling, and wayfinding — help unlock that potential.
Dr Guy W Bate
1. Reflect: Generative AI can reveal how we think
When you use a tool like ChatGPT, it offers more than answers; it reflects assumptions. Trained on vast bodies of human-generated content, these models tend to amplify what is common, conventional, or easy to predict.
That can be useful, but it can also be misleading. Managers using generative AI to draft a business plan, refine a strategy, or reword a customer value proposition often notice the same thing: the output is smooth, plausible, but ultimately unsurprising. It reflects the dominant logic of an industry or profession, not the distinctive thinking of a specific team or leader.
This is where reflection becomes essential. When generative AI gives you the “average” answer, what’s missing? Where are your unique insights, your strategic differentiators? Used well, these tools function like a mirror, helping you surface unspoken assumptions and opening space for intentional redirection.
2. Struggle: Innovation happens in the tension
One of the most productive uses of generative AI we’ve seen is also one of the simplest: comparing AI-generated output with your own.
Take a marketing strategy, for example. A manager prompts AI for a campaign idea, compares it with their team’s draft, and finds the AI version more polished but less authentic. It lacks nuance, voice, and contextual relevance.
That moment of struggle, when the human and machine outputs don’t quite align, isn’t a failure. It’s where innovation can spark. The tension forces clarification: What are we really trying to say? What matters to our brand? What are we willing to push further?
In this way, generative AI doesn’t replace creativity. It sharpens it. It gives you something to react to, push against, and refine. The struggle becomes a generative space, not of resistance, but of richer thinking.
3. Wayfind: Use AI to explore, not just execute
Generative AI is often treated like a productivity assistant: give it a task, get a result. But in strategic work, the value often lies not in the destination, but in the exploration.
This is where the idea of wayfinding becomes powerful. Instead of following a fixed path, wayfinding means making sense of complex terrain as you go: testing ideas, sensing shifts, adjusting plans.
Generative AI can support this by helping teams brainstorm alternative framings, simulate different stakeholder perspectives, or stress-test assumptions. For example:
- “What would our positioning look like if we prioritised sustainability over cost?”
- “Draft a competitive response assuming a new entrant with half our pricing.”
- “Write this proposal in the tone of a bold startup versus a risk-averse incumbent.”
These prompts don’t produce final outputs. They open up new ways of thinking. Managers who use generative AI in this exploratory mode build capacity to adapt and lead in complex, dynamic environments.
Why this matters for business leaders now
The adoption of generative AI is accelerating across sectors. But leaders face a crucial inflection point: Will we use these tools simply to do more of the same, faster? Or will we use them to do things differently?
That difference matters. Leaders who engage with generative AI as thinking partners, not just as content generators, are better positioned to:
- Avoid falling into pattern-based, average thinking
- Cultivate deeper strategic reflection and discussion
- Reframe challenges and discover new opportunities
- Empower teams to explore, question, and iterate at speed
In short, generative AI doesn’t innovate for us. But it can help us become more innovative — if we remain active, reflective participants in the process.
The struggle is the innovation
When I titled my article “The struggle is the lesson,” I wasn’t being poetic. I was naming a real leadership practice.
The moment when your team disagrees with what the AI suggested, when someone says “This version is too bland,” or when the machine pushes you toward consensus, but you insist on differentiation, that’s the moment innovation begins.
Struggle with generative AI isn’t a sign that something’s gone wrong. It’s where something new might emerge.
In the business world, that’s the struggle worth leaning into.
Reference
Bate, G.W. (2025) The struggle is the lesson! Being an educator in the age of AI. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02347-1
About the author
Dr Guy W Bate is Thematic Lead for Artificial Intelligence and Professional Teaching Fellow in innovation and strategy at the University of Auckland Business School. A passionate advocate for the transformative power of AI in learning, Guy is also a member of the Board of Editors for Research-Technology Management (RTM) and the Chair of EdTechNZ’s AI in Education Technology Stewardship Group.
