My wife and I re-designed and rebuilt our downtown Toronto garden not too long ago.

Because we had a pretty clear sense of what we wanted, we assembled a Pinterest board of ideas, and I drew a rough proposed layout in PowerPoint (don’t judge me; I’m a CEO, and I do everything in PowerPoint).

The team we worked with was superb. They took our clear wishes to heart (good-naturedly), and we were thrilled with the results.

I couldn’t help but feel that this process would have been even more straightforward with AI tools like Midjourney.

As an experiment, I embarked on another thought experiment to design a bright, modern and airy garden in a challenging urban space, surrounded on two sides by high walls (such as you might find in a city like London, England). The results after less than 5 minutes of effort are reflected in the image above.

AI democratizes creativity. It allows us to unlock our creativity without having to be craftsmen. It enables us to render a pretty close facsimile of what is in our heads, even if we cannot draw or paint. It can then allow us to validate whether specific components (plants, etc.) would work given location constraints, sun exposure, etc., without being horticultural experts. It can even write a project brief in a form familiar to the design/build team.

Fundamentally, AI can transform how clients and creatives interact throughout a project's lifecycle. Through real-time (interactive) visualization, collaboration can be streamlined from ideation to final execution. This can potentially drive radical improvements in the speed of iteration and (potentially) a reduction in design costs.

The trend of customers arriving with more fully developed concepts isn’t just restricted to the creative realm. One senior lawyer told me recently that clients are showing up with surprisingly good first drafts of contracts and requesting that those be vetted. That differs from yesterday's legal value chain, where law firms charged clients for creating those drafts and then for the refinement process.

As leaders, we must consider AI's growing impact on our companies. Will it be a force multiplier, competitive advantage, or existential threat? That’s really up to us.