The Bathtub Moment: AI as Your Creative Companion
Utley opens with a vivid scene: Winston Churchill in a bathtub, dictating speeches to an assistant who understands his tone, timing, and intent. In 2025, this fantasy is now reality - not just for leaders, but for anyone with access to a generative model. Today’s AI tools can reflect your voice, understand your workflow, and help shape your ideas - even from the bath.
But the leap is not technical. It’s conceptual.
AI isn’t a button you press. It’s a partner you brief.
Chapter 1: Don’t Just Ask AI - Let It Ask You
One of Utley’s key provocations is this: the best use of AI is to help you use AI better.
Prompting AI to ask you questions about your work, goals, and responsibilities creates a feedback loop that uncovers real opportunities. In one example, a U.S. Park Ranger used a 45-minute AI session to create a tool that saved the National Park Service an estimated 7,000 days of human labour annually - simply by applying AI to the most dreaded part of his job: paperwork.
The magic wasn’t in the model. It was in the reframing: What’s the part of my work I don’t want to do?
That’s where AI should go first.
Chapter 2: AI Works Better When You Treat It Like a Teammate
In Utley’s research, the difference between high- and low-performing AI users wasn’t skill - it was mindset.
- Underperformers treated AI like a static tool.
- Outperformers treated AI like a human teammate: giving feedback, asking questions, and coaching it toward better output.
When AI returns a mediocre result, the best response isn’t to abandon it. It’s to iterate - just like you would with a human colleague.
Ask: “What do you need from me to do better?”
Not: “Why didn’t this work?”
This teammate mindset unlocks new applications - from roleplaying difficult conversations to simulating stakeholder psychology - that most users never imagine.
Chapter 3: Inspiration Is a Discipline
Creativity is no longer optional. Everyone has it. But the most creative people Utley studies aren’t magical - they’re disciplined.
“Inspiration is a discipline,” said hip-hop artist Lecrae during a Stanford class on creative thinking.
The difference in AI outputs isn’t about the tool - it’s about what you bring to it:
- Your questions
- Your reference points
- Your lived experience
- Your inputs
Every user accesses the same model. But your preparation, not your prompt, determines the quality of the outcome.
Chapter 4: Go Beyond Good Enough
A 7th grader once defined creativity as:
“Doing more than the first thing you think of.”
AI makes “good enough” easier than ever - which means the bar for great just got higher.
Utley warns against satisficing - stopping at the first decent output. Instead, creative collaborators prompt for variation and volume, curate results, and refine iteratively.
Creativity hasn’t changed in the age of AI.
But your ability to reach it has.
Realising Human Agency in an AI World
Utley calls this gap between AI’s potential and its actual use in the workplace the “realisation gap.” Less than 10% of professionals currently see meaningful productivity gains from AI, even though early research shows AI can:
- Improve speed by 25%
- Boost work volume by 12%
- Enhance quality by 40%
Why the gap? Because we still treat AI like software. But it’s not Excel.
AI can teach you how to use itself - if you ask it to.
Final Thought: The Only Wrong Answer Is “I Don’t Use AI”
The biggest shift is a simple one:
Don’t use AI. Work with it.
The future of human agency isn’t in replacing what we do - it’s in amplifying how we do it.
At Anjin Digital, we help teams unlock this agency - by designing workflows where AI fits naturally into creative, strategic, and operational processes.
Because once AI becomes your collaborator, not your crutch, everything changes.
