Generative AI

The potential of generative AI is extraordinary.

Even more extraordinary is the potential of combining it with the collective intelligence of your group.

Generative AI heralds an intellectual revolution on par with the Enligtenment. You could be forgiven for dismissing this as Silicon Valley hype were it not written by Henry Kissinger (former Harvard professor and Secretary of State), Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), and Daniel Huttenlocher (inaugral dean of MIT’s computer science department)—three people not given to hyperbole.

Generative AI represents a profound leap in humanity’s problem-solving ability because it has been trained across an enormous range of human knowledge, including science, engineering, medicine, psychology, economics, history, design, philosophy, systems theory, and thousands of other disciplines. It can detect patterns, analogies, relationships, and possibilities in this massive amount of knowledge that would be impossible for a single individual—or even a single discipline—to see on its own. Generative AI can combine ideas across fields, helping people generate novel strategies, uncover hidden connections, and rapidly explore alternative futures. In this way, it acts as a cognitive amplifier that expands humanity’s capacity to reason, imagine, and innovate by making vast portions of civilization’s accumulated knowledge dynamically accessible in conversation.

Yet generative AI alone isn’t enough. Despite its extraordinary breadth of knowledge, it lacks the lived experience that you and your group possess—the emotional understanding, contextual judgment, tacit knowledge, ethical sensitivity, and practical wisdom that emerge from being human and living in the real communities and organizations to which you belong. Humans understand what matters, what is feasible, what is culturally acceptable, and what people are willing to act upon. This is why the greatest opportunity lies in combining the artificial intelligence of generative AI with the collective intelligence of your group. When combined, the generative AI and the group create a new form of hybrid intelligence in which human experience, values, and situational awareness interact with AI’s unprecedented ability to synthesize knowledge and generate possibilities. Together, they can solve problems and design strategies at a scale, speed, and level of creativity that neither humans nor AI could achieve alone.