The AI Multiplier: Why Your "Organic Capabilities" Matter More Than Ever

Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said something on Beyond the Prompt that stopped me cold:

"There's no point in the future where I can imagine that strengthening our 'unwired faculties' won't matter. If you can bench 200 naturally, then when you attach AI, you bench a thousand. If you can only bench 100, even when you attach AI, you can still only bench 500."

Read that again. The math is brutal—and essential.

AI doesn't give everyone the same lift. It multiplies what you bring. And right now, while we're expanding investment in human capability development at Stanford, I'm watching corporate leaders make a catastrophic calculation error.

The Paradox We're Living

Here's what's fascinating: at Stanford—where I’ve been fortunate to teach the last 16 years—the d.school has become one of the most sought-after programs on campus. Not despite AI, but alongside it. We keep expanding enrollment. Students are flooding our courses on creativity, innovation, and design thinking at rates we've never seen before.

Why? Because the smartest 18-year-olds in the world have done the math Thompson described. They've realized that in an AI-augmented future, what will differentiate them isn't access to technology. Everyone will have that. What will differentiate them is their ability to empathize with other humans, identify meaningful problems, generate unexpected insights, and push creative boundaries.

We aren't teaching less design thinking because of AI. We're teaching more.

Meanwhile, I just got off a call with a global company with 80,000 employees. Over the past eight years, they'd invested heavily training 800 people (checks calculator: that’s 1% of their workforce) in innovation methodology. Real investment. Deep capability building. Measurable results. People who can actually innovate, not just talk about it.

Then AI arrived.

And leadership asked me: "Should we keep investing in this training, or should we redirect that budget to AI tools?"

I almost dropped the phone.

The Tragedy Playing Out Right Now

Here's what they're about to do—and I'm watching dozens of companies make the same mistake:

They've spent eight years building a foundation. 800 people who know how to identify meaningful problems. Who can generate unexpected solutions with cross-disciplinary teams. Who've developed the muscle to push through creative discomfort. Who understand how to prototype, test, iterate.

These aren't people who talk about innovation. They're people who do it.

And now—precisely at the moment when AI is poised to 10x that underlying “unwired capability”—leadership is considering canceling the training that created that capability in the first place.

Let me be blunt about what this means: Those 800 trained innovators are sitting on a gold mine. With AI collaboration skills, they could multiply their impact exponentially. They're like Nicholas Thompson's 225-pound bench pressers—ready for the exoskeleton that will let them lift a thousand pounds. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

But leadership is wondering whether to continue the very training that creates more 225-pound bench pressers. They're going to hand AI tools to the other 79,200 employees—who've never been trained, who don't know how to empathize with real humans, identify good problems, defer judgment, turn off their critical minds, who've never learned to push through creative resistance—and expect magic.

What they'll get instead: AI will faithfully multiply their weak baseline. 100 pounds × 10 = 1,000 pounds. Sounds good until you realize the trained innovators would be hitting 2,000 pounds. The untrained employees aren't catching up. The gap is exploding.

The real tragedy? They already paid for the foundation. The hardest part—the eight-year culture shift, the training infrastructure, the 1% of true believers—is done. And they're about to abandon it right before the payoff.

(I confess: this call forced me to confront my own bias. I'd been so focused on teaching AI collaboration skills that I hadn't fully appreciated how much the underlying innovation capability matters. I was assuming everyone had the foundation. They don't.)

The Zero Problem

Here's the uncomfortable truth I should have been shouting from day one: zero times any number is still zero.

If your innovation capability is weak, AI will multiply weakness. If your creative problem-solving skills are underdeveloped, AI will amplify that limitation. Thompson's bench press metaphor isn't just clever—it's mathematically precise about how every multiplier works.

You can't skip the foundation and jump straight to the exoskeleton.

The Two-Fold Requirement

This isn't either-or. It's both-and.

The winning strategy requires two complementary investments:

First: Continue building innovation capability. Grow the percentage of your organization that can identify meaningful problems, generate novel solutions, and push through creative resistance. These are Thompson's "unwired faculties"—the organic capabilities that AI amplifies.

Second: Equip those capable innovators with high-quality AI collaboration skills. Teach them to work with AI as a teammate, not a tool. Show them how to push AI to unexpected places, how to use it for creative collision, how to leverage it for rapid prototyping.

The formula is simple: Strong human capability × AI collaboration = Exponential impact

But here's what everyone's missing: the multiplication only works if you have something worth multiplying. Garbage in, garbage out—especially when the garbage comes out 10x faster.

What This Means for Your Next Decision

If you've already invested in innovation training, this is your moment to reap returns—not retreat. Every person you've trained in creative problem-solving is now positioned to achieve 10x more with AI augmentation. But only if you complement that training with AI collaboration skills.

If you haven't invested in foundational creativity development, AI won't save you. It will simply multiply the mediocrity faster. (And your competitors who DID build the foundation? They're about to lap you.)

The organizations that will dominate the next decade won't be the ones with the best AI tools (everyone will have access to similar technology). They'll be the ones whose people can bench press 200 pounds before they attach the AI exoskeleton.

Our students at Stanford understand this instinctively. That's why they're flooding design thinking courses even as AI capabilities explode. They know their organic intelligence—their ability to see problems others miss, to make connections between disparate ideas, to push through creative discomfort—is the platform AI runs on.

When Thompson says "I can't imagine a point where strengthening our unwired capabilities won't matter… keeping those skills strong will always, for the foreseeable future be an important thing," he's not being sentimental about human creativity. He's sounding a counterintuitive call to humanity in the age of amplification.

Your Move This Week

Don't just "audit your strategy." Do these three things:

1. Run The Bench Press Calculation
For each of your key roles, honestly assess: What's their baseline? If someone can bench 100 pounds and AI gives them a 10x multiplier, that's 1,000 pounds. But if they could bench 250 with proper training, that same 10x means 2,500 pounds. What's the gap costing you? For all the talk about ROI, we should be talking about RONI (Risk of NOT Investing — deserving of another post soon).

2. Identify Your 1%
Who in your organization has actually developed innovation muscles? Not who's been "exposed to" design thinking in a half-day workshop, but who has genuine capability? List them. That's your foundation. Now ask: are you building on it or abandoning it?

3. Answer The Both-And Question
In your next budget meeting, someone will ask: "Innovation training OR AI tools?" Your answer should be: "That's like asking whether we should train athletes OR give them performance equipment. The answer is both, and anyone who makes me choose doesn't understand how performance works."

The multiplier is coming whether you're ready or not. The only question is: what are you multiplying?

Related: Innovation Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
Related: How To Work With AI As A Teammate
Related: The $200 Creativity Test
Related: Ask for More (Collaborating With GenAI for New Ideas)
Related: Beyond the Prompt: Nicholas Thompson

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