Companies are increasingly looking to GenAI tools to supercharge their innovation efforts. By deploying tools that make coding more accessible, companies are putting the ability to develop workflow automations or make product tweaks within reach of nontechnical employees.

A bottom-up, employee-driven approach to innovation holds significant promise. Breaking down the traditional barriers between daily execution and the exploration of new solutions promises to generate more improvements, faster. But it will take more than GenAI tools alone to truly unleash firms’ innovative potential—and enable firms to adapt to today’s volatile environment. Here’s what firms must do.

Emulating Nature’s System for Continuous Adaptation

Evolution is nature’s mechanism for continuous adaptation. It builds on the variation that occurs naturally across a population. Similarly, GenAI tools can increase the variation of new ideas and solutions that are developed across a corporate workforce. For example, at Chevron, employees have used low-code tools to create an app to track and manage drilling equipment availability, and a compliance audit checklist app for field inspections. Some improvements lie beyond the capabilities of the average employee—be it due to a lack of expertise, resources, or time. In these cases, GenAI can enhance the development of creative ideas that fuel innovation and complement the work of traditional R&D departments.

However, evolution complements variation with selection (of the traits with the best fit for a given environment) and amplification (the spreading of these traits across the broader population). To emulate this biological process, businesses must complement the deployment of GenAI tools with systems for testing, identifying, and rolling out the best decentrally developed solutions.