Empathy with users and potential users of products and services can lead to new ideas that disrupt the current environment, according to design thinking research. Humans can, for now, recognize and respond to subtle emotional cues and empathize with others' feelings better than AI. Design thinking, which encourages innovation by challenging presumptions and coming up with fresh ideas, can work in harmony with AI’s ability to process massive amounts of data and identify patterns to provide creative solutions to a variety of problems, according to Aswathy Sreeivasan and M. Suresh’s article “Design Thinking and Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review.”1
The human mind has a limit to how much information it can process, making AI useful for gathering data and identifying patterns. However, people can make intuitive leaps influenced by their culture, emotions, and personal experiences. AI can assist short- and long-term leaps by contributing throughout an entire project’s development, according to Michael Proksch, Nisha Paliwal, and Wilhelm Bielert’s The Secrets of AI Value Creation: A Practical Guide to Business Value Creation with Artificial Intelligence from Strategy to Execution.
Humans still have an advantage over AI because they have information inside an organization that AI cannot analyze due to its lack of access, according to David Shrier’s Welcome to AI: A Human Guide to Artificial Intelligence. Inside information can encompass office politics, employee morale, managerial decisions, vendor relationships, and many other organizational aspects.
1. Sreenivasan, Aswathy, and M. Suresh, "Design Thinking and Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review Exploring Synergies," International Journal of Innovation Studies 8, no. 3 (2024): 297–312. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijis.2024.05.001
