How are the world’s most creative people using AI to drive their work forward? This was the question at the heart of an in-depth survey Fast Company recently conducted in partnership with Whalar, a leading social agency focused on content creators.
We found that, for most, AI has become a routine part of the creative process—and a return to an AI-free working life has become almost unfathomable. Yet the survey also found the world’s creative elite are grappling with a technology that gets more powerful and useful every day but remains unwieldy, error-prone, and not entirely trustworthy.
“I want people to understand how well it can augment and enhance the thinking process—not just the creative and generative thinking process, but the thinking process itself,” said one respondent. “If AI is used responsibly, it’s a wonderful collaborative partner and needn’t be feared.”
We sent the detailed (anonymous) survey to a diverse cohort of people who have been honored in Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” list over the years, plus a selection of independent content creators, and got 100 responses. The result offers a close look at how the world’s leading creatives are using this revolutionary technology to shape the future of their industries and the wider world.
“The internet first revolutionized the playing field by democratizing publishing and audience access,” says Neil Waller, co-CEO of the Whalar Group. “Now, AI is creating the next massive rebalancing, this time in creative production capability. What excites me most is watching creators, who are inherently nimble and unburdened by legacy systems, adopt AI tools with remarkable speed. ”
EARLY AND ENTHUSIASTIC ADOPTERS
First, here are some key stats on the respondents:
- Forty-seven percent of those who responded were founders, partners, or principals of their companies, and 65% were 10 C-suite or higher.
- The top industries were tech (22%), design (16%), and entertainment (14%), and substantial numbers came from healthcare, science and research, and the nonprofit sector.
- The size of their organizations ranged from global behemoths to solo creators. Twenty-two percent of respondents booked more than $1 billion in revenue in 2024. Twenty percent did less than $1 million.
Unsurprisingly, these folks are not new to AI, for the most part. More than a third (39%) have been aware of AI usage in their industry for more than five years, and 19% began using it themselves that long ago. Another third (30%) began using the technology two to three years ago, a timeframe that aligns with the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022. “Eighty-three percent have incorporated AI into their creative process, and nearly half (48%) rely on it for most or all of their projects.
“I absolutely use it every single day—probably five times a day or more,” says Joel Bervell, a med-school student and popular influencer known on TikTok and Instagram as the Medical Mythbuster.
Text-based software still dominates usage. Three quarters (74%) of the respondents use AI primarily to generate or manipulate words, with only 26% saying they mainly use it for still images or video.
“Whenever I use AI for writing, I make sure to make it my own,” says Amy Merrill, an artist, musician, web designer, and founder of Plan C Pills, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving abortion access nationwide. “But sometimes my tired and overstretched brain needs help synthesizing, and I’m grateful for the tool to be able to take a heady, complex question or issue and compress it into a more or less understandable response that I can adapt, correct, personalize, and use. Sometimes it feels like it saves me time in the clumsy human part, while allowing me to preserve the thought leadership part.”
WHICH TOOLS ARE MOST POPULAR?
OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues to dominate the LLM market, with 69% citing it as their go-to app, followed by Google’s Gemini (28%), Anthropic’s Claude (19%), and Microsoft’s Copilot (18%). Google leads in AI search, but it’s far less dominant than in traditional search. While well over half of respondents (57%) say they primarily use Google’s AI summaries, 14% cited Perplexity and 7% Microsoft’s Bing. Twenty-eight percent said they don’t use AI search at all. (For those tallying up the numbers, respondents could select more than one answer.)
On the image side, Midjourney came out on top at 28%, followed by Adobe Firefly at 19% and OpenAI’s DALL-E at 16%. “We use Midjourney to create posters for our shows,” says Plan C Pills’ Merrill. “We love the experience of prompting and feeding in inspiration, and in return getting something we never would’ve thought of.”
Fashion designer Arturo Obegero recently collaborated with an artist to create an ad campaign featuring real models against an AI-generated backdrop. “We never would have been able to afford that shoot [IRL],” he says.
In that vein, notes Waller of Whalar, “a creator with passion, vision, and an AI tool kit can now produce content that previously required a 20-person team and a seven-figure budget.”
Although AI generally saves time and money, it’s not always smooth sailing. “While the AI tools helped generate images quickly, it can be a real struggle to get results that meet our standards,” said one respondent, articulating a theme that came up repeatedly in the anonymous responses. “We have spent many hours sifting through hundreds of generated images that more or less looked similar. It’s [often not] until we manually create more specific visual inputs such as sketches or quick 3D models/ screenshots that we’re able to direct the images to be more specific and distinctive and reflect our aesthetics and design principles.”
Despite AI’s growing role in image creation, video tools have yet to see widespread adoption outside industries that rely on them, with 76% of respondents saying they don’t use them at all. Of those who do, Adobe Premiere Pro was the most popular application (15%), followed by Runway (5%), and Synthesia (3%).
Among respondents who use AI to help write code, ChatGPT was most popular at 25%, Github Coplit was second at 10%, and Claude third at 8%.
WHERE AI IS HELPING THE MOST (AND THE LEAST)
We asked respondents how AI is affecting their creative work and overall business. A plurality of respondents praised production speed (44% “very positive”) and idea generation (35%), with marketing/promotion (25%) and revenue generation (25%) tying for third.
Production speed and idea generation go hand in hand. Many respondents noted that AI allows them to focus on creative ideation by automating tedious tasks and enabling rapid iteration without the need for physical prototypes. “This dual transformation—amplifying creative potential while streamlining business operations—is why AI represents such a profound accelerator for the creator economy,” says Waller. “When harnessed the right way, it’s not replacing the creator’s voice. It’s supercharging it, and unlocking the next chapter of growth.”
On the flip side, there were grave and consistent concerns about consumer trust. “My greatest fear is not about creativity,” said one respondent. “My greatest fear is that we are entering a dystopian era when people will lose trust in what they see and hear.”
“I now doubt every video I see on the internet,” said another. “Everything is no longer a ‘wow’ video since it could possibly be AI.”
We also asked for respondents’ views on how AI will affect the job market in their industries. Surprisingly, 39% said it would have neither a positive or a negative impact on job creation, and 34% said it would have a “somewhat positive” or “very positive” impact. Only 28% predicted the impact would be “somewhat negative” or “very negative” impact. But when asked to predict how many jobs in their industry would be replaced by AI, 42% replied that about a fifth of all jobs would be lost to machines.
THE PARADOX OF AI
That apparent contradiction reflects a macro theme that infused the survey results in a variety of ways: a sense that we are living through a technological shift that is existentially game-changing but ultimately still nascent. Think of it like a young and immensely talented athlete: The potential is indisputable and crystal clear, but the coordination and mastery just aren’t there yet. “It fails all the time in code, but I just test and ask for revisions,” said one respondent.
“I used it to help prep me for a business meeting,” said another. “The client company had just emerged from Chapter 11, and ChatGPT didn’t think to mention that little fact.”
Overall, though, most respondents took the rise of AI as an inevitable and ultimately positive thing that nevertheless requires human will to control. “Are you gonna let AI take over you,” asks Joel Bervell, the Medical Mythbuster, “or are you gonna let it enhance your work?”
In that spirit of optimism, we’ll close with the most utopian anonymous comment in the entire survey: “I truly believe we are unlocking new insights into information, understanding, creativity and human potential, including our growing ability to understand the ecosystem we live in and the vast potential to coexist with each other and everything else in it. Let’s do this!!”
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