James Taylor is an award-winning entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and internationally recognised authority on creativity in the digital age. As one of the world’s leading creativity speakers and innovation speakers, James empowers organisations to harness emerging technologies to unlock human potential and accelerate performance.
A trusted voice among artificial intelligence speakers and technology speakers, James helps businesses navigate the fast-changing intersection of AI, automation, and creative thinking. His insights are also sought after in the fields of digital ethics and future risk, aligning him with today’s most forward-thinking cyber security speakers.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, James shares how businesses can embrace AI without losing the human touch, how to enhance creativity through intelligent tools, and why ethical leadership is essential in the age of autonomous systems.
Q: As organisations adopt AI at scale, how can they ensure it enhances human capability without diminishing the human touch?
James Taylor: “So, it’s first of all recognising that AI is really about augmentation, not automation. So, we’re really looking to augment those people in our organisations — take their work to the next level. You know, there’s that expression that an AI may not take your job, but an AI collaborating with a human may take your job.
“So, we need to look at that — using it as an augmentation tool. One of the first things we want to look at is, in any role in an organisation, you can basically split it into three categories. You know, what are those tasks that that individual has to currently perform that, frankly, they’re not very good at and they probably shouldn’t be doing anyway? That’s the first lot of things you would look to use AI for — to get rid of some of those tasks. Often that’s the bureaucratic, the mundane things.
“Then there’s a middle category where these are the things which the person can do, but perhaps it’s not the best and highest use of their time. So that’s a second list you would normally do.
“And then there’s this third list, which is actually often the most difficult one — which is the things your person on your team is probably very good at doing, but by doing that thing, it’s holding them back from increasing their productivity and doing more creative work and many other things in the organisation. And that’s a hard one because we’re coming up with harder choices now as well.
“What they believe is that when we start to make those choices — look at those three different lists — that will increase human productivity by about 25% to 35% by the year 2035. So, we’re going to see huge productivity gains. It, first of all, just starts by listing all those different tasks you currently do in your role, and then going for the low-hanging fruit first and then gradually going onwards.”
Q: In what practical ways can businesses use AI to boost creativity, without allowing it to overshadow or replace the human creative process?
James Taylor: “So, when we think about creativity, I talk about this creative process — we have these five steps or stages in the creative process, and you can use AI at different stages of this.
“The first stage is what we call that kind of research stage, where you’re doing your research as much as possible. So, for example, me — I’m a keynote speaker, and so I’m using AI all the time to research the industries and the clients that I’m working with as well. I even use AI to analyse the audience I’m going to be speaking to in advance — to understand their psychometrics, understand what’s important to them: are they more data-focused, are they into big heart stories?
“Now, the AI doesn’t write my speech for me, but it hopefully makes me a better presenter of my ideas. So something like that — that research stage — is great for.
“Then we come to the next stage, what we call the incubation stage, where we just need to put things to the back of our mind for a bit. My advice is: get away from your desk, get away from your usual work environment. This is when you want to get out in nature. Only 16% of your creative ideas are ever going to happen when you’re at your desk. So, as amazing as — I love using AI and I use AI all the time for different things — but actually, get out in nature, get away from that device.
“Then the third is the “aha” moment — the insights. And we can use AI in lots of different ways. We can essentially use it as what I call a creative pair — so we can use it to probe and help us ask different kinds of questions.
“Then the fourth stage is the evaluation. Now, this is where AI almost comes into its own, because what it can do is act like a very different personality type from you, and it can help us identify any biases that we have. So, essentially what it does is it stress-tests our ideas. You can say to it: “Imagine you are these five people — you’re the five members of Dragon’s Den, for example — have a look at my business plan, and I want you to critique it and analyse it and tell me all the things I’m missing.” So, AI can be brilliant for that.
“And then we finally get to the final stage, which is the elaboration stage — building out that thing, that minimum viable product, doing the work. There are so many ways that we can use AI, and I would say just now, agentic AI is one of the most fascinating areas of this — because it’s like having a whole company of AIs helping you to achieve your creative ideas.”
Q: What are the most pressing ethical challenges companies must navigate when implementing AI — and how can they build trust and accountability into their systems?
James Taylor: “So there’s three really — there’s bias, transparency, and accountability.
“Bias is, you know — good stuff in, good stuff out; bad stuff in, bad stuff out. So you have to ask: how is this AI being trained? What training data is it using to come at this? Because we can introduce bias into AI systems if we’re not careful.
“The second one is transparency — so it’s understanding it’s not just a black box. How has it arrived at this decision? One of the things with the newer versions of AI, like DeepSeek for example — which is one of the big Chinese AIs — is they don’t just give you the answer, or an answer. They will give you its workings — how it arrived at that decision. And that’s really important because it helps you to understand and maybe poke, ask questions of the AI.
“And the third — that brings me to the third part — which is the accountability. I just spoke for an audience of a thousand internal auditors. So these are people — almost like the internal police force in many organisations — looking for fraud and looking for ensuring things are done properly and according to corporate governance.
“So here, they’re going to be asking questions to you, if you’re using AI, like: “How did that arrive at that particular decision?” “What were the processes it went through?” “What was the data, the training, the information it had?”
“So, you need to have a sense of accountability if you’re asked by either internally in the organisation — how was that decision reached upon? — or if it’s by regulators. Many of my clients are in very regulated industries — and that could be banking, finance, defence — and accountability means to be able to go to your regulators and really show how you have been working with AI, how that decision was arrived upon.”
