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Jerry Wind paints outside the lines with AI
In his latest book, Wind and his co-authors want to help you do the same.
By Francesca Di Meglio
“Don’t wait for the future of AI and creativity to arrive.”
"Reimagining how we educate, how organizations operate, and how we can use tools like AI to boost creativity and impact.”
'What if the approach that works for me today will not work tomorrow?'
A lightbulb shining with bursts of paint splatter in rich colors - purple, turquoise, yellow, and fuschia - graces the cover of “Creativity in the Age of AI: Toolkits for the Modern Mind” (De Gruyter, 2025) by Jerry Wind with Mukul Pandya and Deborah Yao. More than an artistic rendering, the image represents Wind’s philosophy on AI.
Using an open innovation approach, Wind worked with a company that tapped into a network of cover designs, which yielded nearly 200 different concepts. He narrowed it down to three favorites, and then iterated with the company to arrive at the cover now on readers’ nightstands and bookshelves.
“The most important thing is to stop treating AI as a black box oracle and start treating it like a versatile, fallible, but extraordinarily powerful creative partner, one you manage actively,” says Wind.
A nearly 60-year veteran in business school education and the Lauder Professor Emeritus and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Wind’s purpose in writing this book and preaching on the usefulness of AI for innovating is simple. He wants everyone to stay curious, challenge the traditional way of doing things, weave and design new ideas, bravely experiment and take action. When talking to Wind, people feel the urgency of the moment and the need to collaborate fearlessly with AI. After all, he is metaphorically shouting from the rooftops.
“Don’t wait for the future of AI and creativity to arrive,” he says. “Start co-creating it today through deliberate, courageous experimentation.”
Don’t color within the lines
Wind has shared these ideas widely at conferences like one recently at the University of Latvia in March, when he urged educators to reinvent curriculum and formats to match the technology of the moment, as well as in articles and conversations with reporters. His passion for education and technology innovation goes back decades. As co-founder of the QS Reimagine Education Awards and Conference, held in December each year, he has used his platform to unearth new innovators in the education space and beyond. In his conference summation sessions, Wind urges educators to "get real" and embrace new technologies.
In the book, he and his co-authors go further, offering frameworks for how to navigate this new relationship with AI. Readers will find 12 approaches that are drawn from decades of research and real-world application.
“They range from challenging mental models and creating new paradigms to morphological analysis, analogies and benchmarking, interdisciplinary collaboration, consumer insights, experimentation and leveraging emerging technologies,” writes Wind in an article, ‘Creativity in the Age of AI: An Imperative for Business Leaders’.
“But these 12 sets are by no means exhaustive. They are starting points. The key is for each individual and organization to select, adapt and build upon these or other approaches that they discover or develop on their own.”
Wind has spent his life and career challenging tradition, disrupting the usual, and transforming programmes with an eye on the future. He has made it his life’s work to help everyone else do the same.
Joining Wharton in 1967, he was armed with a doctorate from Stanford University and has since published more than 300 articles, manuscripts and chapters, and authored, co-authored or edited 30 books. During this time, he has earned accolades and awards that include the Buck Weaver, Parlin, Converse and AMA/Irwin Distinguished Educator Award. He is also a member of the Marketing Hall of Fame.
But what put him on the business schools map were his many disruptions to the system. He led the redesign of the MBA curriculum at Wharton, which helped the school land the top spot on BusinessWeek’s school rankings at the time. He chaired the committee and was deeply involved in the creation of several major initiatives at Wharton, such as the Executive MBA programme and Knowledge@Wharton, the first digital business school journal.
Wind also co-founded Reichman University in Israel and launched multiple innovative programmes, including the Lauder Institute’s joint MBA-MA programme. Nowadays, he is serving on the board of the Curtis Institute of Music because he helped connect the institute to Wharton undergraduates, who are collaborating to imagine the orchestra of the future and understand why younger audiences are not flocking to orchestral concerts.
“Across all of this, the common thread is creating new programmes and structures – reimagining how we educate, how organizations operate, and how we can use tools like AI to boost creativity and impact,” he says.
Cognitive enrichment rather than cognitive offloading
This is all evidence that Wind practices what he preaches. These efforts set the stage for his call to action to boost human creativity with AI. Even though Wind encourages collaboration with AI, he recognises the potential risks like hallucinations, misinformation and privacy breaches. He stresses that humans have the obligation to use advanced technology responsibly. Now is the time to set standards.
“You should treat AI as the smartest assistant you’ve ever had – available 24/7, in any language – but capable of making mistakes,” he warns.
As a result, Wind recommends that people monitor AI, question it and ask about sources and evidence and counterevidence. He wants people to push back and challenge assumptions when working with AI as a collaborator. However, Wind puts no stock in the opinions of naysayers, who are suggesting that use of AI will lead to “cognitive offloading”, which means humans will become mentally weaker and less creative as they begin to rely on the smart technology.
“The concern about cognitive offloading is real only if we use AI incorrectly,” he adds. “Most studies that show cognitive offloading with AI have a major flaw: they don’t control for proper usage. Participants are simply given access to AI without being taught how to use it effectively. Unsurprisingly, they treat it like a search engine.”
Keeping the human hand on the switch
Instead, in the book, Wind and his co-authors provide advice on how to forge a working relationship with AI. In other words, humans must shift their mindset and think of the technology as another co-worker, who needs oversight and can learn and respond to pushback and feedback.
“If you simply ask a question, take the first answer and leave, you’re not collaborating,” he says. “You’re outsourcing. Creativity comes from back-and-forth interaction. When you work with AI in that way on something you truly care about, it can change your relationship to problem solving and creativity. You experience firsthand how powerful and enriching this collaboration can be.”
Never one to rest on laurels or accept the status quo, Wind is forward thinking. While he offers interesting new ways to apply AI to benchmarking, gaining a global perspective and unearthing blind spots in problem solving and innovation, he wants everyone to realise the usefulness of this technology for this VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) era in world history.
“The starting assumption in today’s world should be: ‘What if the approach that works for me today will not work tomorrow?’ … Just consider how fast tools like ChatGPT reached 100 million users. With that kind of speed and magnitude of change, there are very few things we can confidently say will continue to work as they always have.”
Readers of the book gain an understanding of how to apply AI in a way that helps them innovate and continuously adapt to this rapid pace of change that Wind aptly describes. They also can test the authors’ recommendations by using the text as a workbook. At the end of every chapter, which includes examples and case studies from the real world, readers receive “assignments” and can try their hand at using AI to ask “what if questions,” for example. There are many similar suggestions.
They weave tips and tricks into the research and frameworks. The authors lay out a means of getting started with AI and finding ways to improve brainstorming and innovation. In fact, Wind wants readers to channel Nike and “just do it” when it comes to experimenting both with AI and its ideas.
Most importantly, Wind hopes people will stay in charge and challenge AI as they would other humans to stay ahead of the revolution unfolding all around. He wants humans to control their own destiny, tapping into their imagination and the technology at their fingertips, still the ones filling the light with colour.
“The future you want to live in,” according to the book, “you have the tools to create.”