AI isn’t just about automation—it’s about collaboration. The best tech leaders don’t just train their teams to use AI; they encourage them to think with AI. Whether it’s brainstorming ideas, refining strategies, or making better decisions, AI can be a powerful thought partner that boosts creativity and efficiency.

But here’s the challenge: many employees hesitate to adopt AI, either because they don’t trust it or don’t see its value in their daily work. The key isn’t just offering AI training—it’s fostering a mindset shift. When leaders create a culture where AI is seen as a helpful partner, teams naturally integrate it into their workflows.

In this post, we’ll explore how top companies are successfully encouraging AI adoption in the workplace, helping employees feel confident using AI to enhance their work—not replace it.

13 Ways to Build a Team That Thinks and Innovates with AI

1. Empower Your Team Members to Drive Innovation

We invited our team to collaborate on and pilot our own AI solution for orchestration and automation called Roxie AI. Every single employee at the company comes up with new use cases, plays a role in client pilots and provides feedback about how to make Roxie AI event better. We’ve discovered ways to automate manual work, improve employee onboarding, improve customer & patient experience and reduce software cost / total cost of ownership.  

Karen Mangia, President & Chief Strategy Officer, The Engineered Innovation Group

2. Use Constraint-Based Innovation Sprints

From scaling LinkedIn’s AI Innovation Lab across 400+ engineers, I’ve discovered a counterintuitive approach to AI creativity training.  We developed what we call ‘constraint-based innovation sprints’ – instead of asking teams to brainstorm how AI can help, we give them specific system constraints and challenge them to work around them.  For example, we’ll say ‘Build this feature using only 10% of the usual compute resources’ or ‘Design this without accessing the main user database.’  This approach increased novel AI solution generation by 184% compared to open-ended ideation.  Let me share a specific win: Last quarter, we challenged our recommendation team to improve content relevance without increasing model complexity.  By forcing them to think within constraints, they discovered a way to use existing user interaction patterns as a lightweight proxy for expensive NLP processing – improving relevance by 23% while reducing compute costs by 41%.  Pro engineering tip: Think of creativity like system optimization – sometimes the best innovations come from working within strict boundaries.  Just as resource constraints often lead to more elegant code solutions, AI constraints can spark more creative applications.  We now structure all our AI innovation training around specific limitations rather than blue-sky thinking. Remember: The most creative solutions often come from having less, not more, to work with.

Harman Singh, Senior Software Engineer, StudioLabs

3. AI Is Your Jet Pack, Not Your Replacement

Think of AI as a jet pack or exoskeleton or some other tool that augments your skills and abilities instead of something that replaces your skills and abilities.

Kirk Enright, Founder & CEO, CMOcopilot.com

4. View AI as a Creative Collaborator

At InboxArmy, I lead my team to view AI as a creative collaborator rather than a mere utility. We’ve found success integrating AI into our brainstorming process – not for finished solutions, but to generate initial concepts and uncover hidden patterns. The goal is using AI to spark fresh perspectives rather than letting it handle the core work.

Recently, we analyzed past email campaign data through AI during our planning session. Beyond showing successful elements, it revealed connections we hadn’t spotted. This sparked deeper exploration from the team as they questioned why certain subject lines and CTAs resonated more. The creative momentum built from there. One team member transformed an insight about audience behavior into an innovative segmentation strategy. The outcome? Record-breaking engagement numbers.

I’ve observed that positioning AI as a collaborative partner makes the team more inquisitive and open to experimentation. Success comes from blending AI’s analytical capabilities with our human capacity for unconventional thinking. That combination unlocks breakthroughs.

Scott Cohen, CEO, InboxArmy

5. AI Can Write Code—But Keep Your Hands on the Wheel

One of the things AI is particularly strong at is writing code. I’ve asked my dev team to start using AI to generate code for them. AI is similar to Tesla FSD in the sense that as a developer you still have to have your hands on the wheel as it will make mistakes, but it can save a whole lot of time if you use it right. Not only that, but for technologies you are unfamiliar with, it can act like a mentor and you can learn additional skills.

Darye Henry, Founder & CEO, AfterSchool HQ

6. Assign Real-World Challenges with AI

We encourage our team to explore AI tools by assigning real-world challenges and letting them experiment with solutions. For instance, we tasked our office staff with using AI to streamline scheduling or draft client communications, then shared results in a collaborative meeting. This hands-on approach demystifies AI and sparks creative problem-solving. By focusing on practical applications tied to daily tasks, we build confidence and inspire new ways to integrate AI into our workflows.

Blake Beesley, Operations and Technology Manager, Pacific Plumbing Systems

7. AI as Your Co-Pilot: Simplify and Speed Up Work

We like to think of AI as a Co-Pilot. We encourage using AI to make tasks more efficient and to help simplify what can be complex when it comes to business financing. An example of this is taking very detailed financial information and using AI tools to simplify it into a couple of bullet points. This prevents our team from getting stuck on what can be a time-consuming task and lets them focus on the actions needed to move the opportunity forward. 

Casey Bolsega, Sr. Portfolio Manager, Intrepid

8. Treat AI as a Creative Sidekick

I’m teaching my team to treat AI like a creative sidekick, not a replacement. We run “idea jams” where we use AI to brainstorm off-the-wall concepts or tackle challenges from wild angles. The rule? No boring prompts—get weird, get specific, and see what the AI spits out. It’s not about perfect answers; it’s about sparking ideas we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. AI’s creativity shines when you push it outside the box.

Justin Belmont, Founder & CEO, Prose

9. Turn AI Learning into a Competitive Advantage

I have a client who is incorporating AI into their SKO as a team exercise challenge. I also think you need to allow team members extra time for learning if they are using AI for the first time with a project they used to do “manually” this will encourage people to want to experiment and come up with new best practices and incorporate it into their workflows 

Rachel Johnson, Fractional Marketing Executive and Growth Scaler

10. Leverage AI for Unconventional Ideas

Executives at innovation-driven companies are increasingly recognizing the potential of AI to enhance creative thinking within their teams. One effective approach is to use AI as a catalyst for breaking free from conventional thought patterns and biases that can hinder innovation.

Sally Johnson, CEO of Green Light Booking, emphasizes the importance of this strategy: “We encourage our teams to leverage AI as a springboard for unconventional ideas. It’s about using technology to challenge our preconceptions and push the boundaries of what we thought possible.”

This method involves using AI-generated suggestions as starting points for brainstorming sessions. By presenting teams with unexpected or seemingly impractical ideas from AI, executives can stimulate fresh perspectives and encourage team members to think beyond their usual constraints.

Johnson elaborates, “When we introduce AI-generated concepts into our ideation process, it’s like adding a wildcard to the mix. It forces our team to consider angles they might have otherwise overlooked.”

This approach helps combat cognitive biases such as functional fixedness and the Einstellung effect, which can limit creative problem-solving. By exposing teams to diverse AI-generated ideas, executives can foster an environment where innovative thinking flourishes.

To implement this strategy, executives can set up structured brainstorming sessions where AI-generated ideas are presented alongside human-generated ones. Teams are then challenged to build upon or combine these ideas, regardless of their initial perceived feasibility.

“The magic happens when our team takes an AI suggestion that seems outlandish at first and transforms it into a groundbreaking solution,” Johnson notes. “It’s about using AI to expand our creative horizons, not replace human ingenuity.”

This method not only enhances creativity but also helps teams become more comfortable with AI as a collaborative tool rather than a threat. It demonstrates how AI can complement human creativity, leading to more innovative outcomes.

Sally says: “Training our teams to think creatively with AI isn’t just about using new tools; it’s about cultivating a mindset that embraces the unexpected and sees potential in every idea, no matter its origin.”

Sally Johnson, Owner, Green Light Booking, LLC

11. Foster a ‘What If’ Mindset

Foster a “what if” mindset during brainstorming sessions. I have adopted a unique strategy to encourage my team to think creatively. I temporarily suspend all constraints during brainstorming sessions and encourage everyone to think boldly. My objective is to push them to develop unconventional ideas without worrying about timelines, feasibility, or budget constraints. Every idea is welcome, no matter how weird it sounds. For instance, if we are setting up a marketing campaign for a beauty brand, we ask questions such as “What if the campaign wasn’t limited to digital media? How would you approach it? How can we use AI to drive engagement and personalize our campaign copy and creatives? The primary objective of these sessions is to generate innovative ideas that might seem out of reach. Sometimes, all we have to do is make a few strategic adjustments to the ideas to turn them into practical, impactful solutions that can drive impressive results. This approach sparks creativity and builds confidence in my team members.”

Dan Ben-Nun, Founder, DanBenNun.com

12. Train Staff to View AI as a Tool

I’ve read lots of stories about AI, with many people saying it will take away jobs. While that’s true in some ways, we shouldn’t be overly negative, as AI offers many benefits for businesses. For us, we use it in a rather unusual way and make sure we train our staff to adapt to this by encouraging them to view AI as a productivity tool. We train them on how they can use generative AI to refine ideas, which can help innovate our services. One thing remains for sure, the outputs of these AI models depend on the quality of your prompts. So, we tell our staff that if they want to use AI creatively, they need to have some ideas in mind before asking the tool to generate something. Once they come up with something new, they can seek the help of these models for refinement. Trust me, this is the perfect approach because the tool sifts through the vast information it was trained on to assess the merit of the idea and determine the best way to implement it. I love seeing our employees grow confident over time, knowing that their ideas will work out because they have been tested and validated by this tool, which helps improve them even further. This kind of training has been so helpful, as our staff continue to present suggestions on how to build better writing tools.

Ryan Mcclellan, Marketing Manager, Character Counter

13. Organize Structured AI Hackathons

Encourage hands-on experimentation through structured AI hackathons. We organize short, intensive workshops where team members from different departments collaborate to solve real business challenges using AI tools and frameworks. The primary focus is on technical implementation and fostering a mindset of exploration. For example, we might task the team with developing a prototype using generative AI to streamline our customer communication. We give every team member the freedom to experiment and fail in a supportive environment to gain first-hand experience with AI’s capabilities and limitations in real-time. What has been rewarding is seeing non-technical team members develop creative applications for AI in areas such as content personalization which they previously thought were out of their skill set. This approach helps to build AI literacy and fosters a culture of innovation where everyone feels empowered to think outside the box.

Mitchell Cookson, Co-Founder, AI Tools

Conclusion

AI isn’t here to replace your team—it’s here to help them think bigger, work smarter, and innovate faster. But that only happens when employees see AI as more than just another tool. The most successful companies create a culture where AI is a trusted thought partner, empowering teams to experiment, solve problems, and push the limits of what’s possible.

If you want your team to thrive with AI, don’t just hand them the technology—help them build the mindset to use it creatively. Encourage curiosity, provide hands-on experience, and celebrate wins along the way. The companies that do this aren’t just adopting AI—they’re unlocking its full potential.