As artificial intelligence automates call centers and back-office operations at unprecedented speed, one utility company recently announced plans to eliminate 70 percent of its customer service workforce — hundreds of employees facing an uncertain future. Yet embedded within this troubling scenario lies an unexpected opportunity: using AI’s own capabilities, enhanced by human creativity, to reimagine career transitions and unlock potential.
A New York-based company called Quant AI is pioneering exactly this approach. Its main transformation initiatives focus on automating customer service operations and other functions with advanced AI platforms — work that often leads to replacing human operators. Yet when working with organizations implementing this automation, Quant AI has developed a platform that transforms job displacement from a crisis into creative reinvention.
The system analyzes displaced workers’ strengths, weaknesses, passions, and aspirations, then matches those against available positions worldwide — not just similar jobs, but roles aligned with employees’ deeper interests and talents. A call center employee might discover a pathway to become a tour guide, landscape designer, or community organizer. The platform then identifies the specific skills, training, and apprenticeships needed to bridge the gap.
What makes this approach revolutionary is the creative problem-solving methodology underlying it. Rather than asking, “How do we retrain people for jobs like the ones they lost?,” the platform reframes the question: “How do we help people discover and pursue work that genuinely fulfills them?” This shift from optimization to possibility exemplifies the kind of creativity that AI can amplify but never originate.
This agentic career counseling demonstrates three critical principles about creativity in the age of artificial intelligence that we explore in our book, Creativity in the Age of AI: Toolkits for the Modern Mind, which was published in October. The book encourages readers from all walks of life to create personalized approaches that can enhance their creativity without diminishing their humanity.
First, creativity flourishes when we expand rather than constrain our search space. Traditional career counseling typically matches workers to similar roles based on existing skills. The agentic career counselor functions more like a creative ideation session, exploring unexpected connections between workers’ capabilities and opportunities they may never have considered. By analyzing patterns across thousands of career paths and skill sets, AI helps surface non-obvious possibilities that human counselors might miss — but only when programmed to seek breadth rather than efficiency.
Second, the most powerful AI applications enhance human agency rather than replace it. The agentic career counselor doesn’t make decisions for displaced workers; it expands their menu of choices and clarifies pathways forward. This approach addresses what organizational psychologists call “bounded rationality” — our tendency to accept an option as satisfactory rather than optimize, because we can’t evaluate all possibilities. AI overcomes these limitations not by choosing for us, but by helping us make better-informed choices aligned with our values and aspirations.
Third, systemic creativity requires reframing problems at multiple levels. Quant AI recognized that workforce displacement is an organizational and societal issue. The platform serves two purposes for displaced workers: helping them transition to fulfilling careers, and enabling companies to demonstrate social responsibility (thereby increasing internal employee loyalty).
The power of this approach goes way beyond helping displaced workers. The same platform, with one crucial modification, addresses an equally pressing challenge: employee dissatisfaction. Instead of searching for jobs worldwide for displaced employees, the system searches all available positions within the company for retained employees. Using identical logic, it identifies the best match between each employee’s skills, aspirations, and available internal roles. This addresses a critical reality: Nearly 50 percent of workers report feeling dissatisfied with their current positions.
The dual benefit is transformative. The same platform and process address two organizational challenges simultaneously: finding fulfilling careers for displaced employees, and matching retained employees with the best internal opportunities for them. In both cases, the agentic system finds and connects users with the needed training, learning, and apprenticeships that will best prepare them for their new roles. Moreover, the system is designed as a personalized tool that helps at the initial stage and on an ongoing basis as job requirements and opportunities evolve.
The Creativity Imperative
The Quant AI example illuminates a broader truth about our AI-enabled future: Creative thinking matters more than ever precisely because radical advances in AI and related technologies are accelerating at unprecedented speed and impacting the way we live, work, and play. As routine cognitive tasks become automated, human comparative advantage shifts decisively toward creativity — our ability to reframe problems, envision possibilities, and generate novel solutions.
Here’s the transformative insight at the heart of our book: Everyone can enhance creativity using the right approaches, and each of these approaches can be turbo-charged with AI. Creativity isn’t an innate gift reserved for a select few. It is a capability that can be developed and enhanced. The methodologies we present in our book — from Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats to morphological analysis and SCAMPER techniques — provide structured approaches for generating breakthrough ideas. When combined with AI’s pattern recognition and information synthesis capabilities, these frameworks become exponentially more powerful.
To bring these principles to life, we’ve developed a Coursera course featuring 60 remarkable creative experts who illustrate the power of creativity across diverse disciplines — from art, music, and dance through design and architecture to gaming, advertising, marketing, science, medicine, and entrepreneurship. Their stories show that systematic creative thinking, enhanced by AI, can transform any field of human endeavor.
Consider how the career counseling platform might incorporate creative problem-solving methods:
- Instead of asking, “What jobs match these skills?” ask: “What skills do these dream jobs require?” This inverts the traditional matching process, putting aspirations rather than current capabilities at the center.
- If someone excelled at de-escalating angry customers, what other roles require similar conflict resolution — perhaps mediator, teacher, or patient advocate? AI can identify these parallels across industries.
- Rather than limiting searches by geography, education level, or industry, what happens when we systematically remove each constraint and explore expanded possibilities?
The implications are far-reaching. Organizations implementing AI need creativity labs where teams experiment with AI tools to reimagine processes. They need leaders who ask not, “How can AI do what we currently do faster?” but rather, “How can AI help us discover what we should be doing instead?”
The Quant AI platform succeeds because it applies creative problem-solving to AI deployment itself. Rather than automating existing functions, it reframes displacement as an opportunity for human flourishing. This approach, using structured creativity to guide AI implementation, represents the frontier of transformative innovation.
As AI continues reshaping the world of work, we face a choice: to passively accept displacement and disruption or to actively harness AI as a creative partner in building more fulfilling careers and organizations. The technology itself is neutral. But when augmented by creativity, human imagination, and genuine concern for human flourishing, AI becomes not a threat to meaningful work but a powerful tool for enhancing it. The question isn’t whether AI will transform work — it already is doing so. The question is whether we’ll respond with the creativity, adaptability, and human-centered thinking that this moment demands.
Yoram (Jerry) Wind joined Wharton in 1967 with a doctorate from Stanford and has been the Lauder Professor Emeritus and professor of marketing since 2017. Among his many innovations at Wharton, he founded the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management and led the development of the Wharton Executive MBA, the Lauder Institute, and various research programs. He has published more than 300 articles and authored or co-authored 30 books, received the four major marketing awards, and been selected as one of the 10 “legends of marketing.” He co-founded Reichman University, the first private nonprofit university in Israel, and is co-founder of the Reimagine Education Global Competition and Conference. He is a 2017 inductee into the Marketing Hall of Fame and recipient of the Lifetime Impact on Reimagining Education Award (2024). His latest initiative is developing an AI-empowered new educational paradigm with Quant AI. He is the author of Creativity in the Age of AI: Toolkits for the Modern Mind, which he wrote in collaboration with Mukul Pandya and Deborah Yao.
Mukul Pandya is an associate fellow at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. He was the founder, editor in chief and executive director of Knowledge@Wharton, the online research journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which he edited and managed for 22 years before his retirement in 2021.
