- Study finds the average creative worker uses 14 tools – AI could help, but it isn’t currently
- Just with better organization, creatives could gain 1.5 days per month
- AI is favored for brainstorming, summarizing and information retrieval
New research is blaming tool overload and scattered workflows for productivity disruptions, with creatives experiencing slow delivery, reduced work quality and impacted margins.
A report from Dropbox found, the average creative uses 14 digital tools, but better digital organization could improve their performance by 54%, leading to an average of 1.5 extra days of creative time per month.
“Every extra click, every lost file, every time you have to remember which system something’s in, it all eats into creative capacity,” Senior Director Andy Wilson summarized.
For a 10-person creative team, that extra 1.5 days per worker per month could equate to £144,000 a year, Dropbox days. A 200-person-strong agency could be missing out on £2.88 million annually, on that basis.
With simplification proving valuable to time savings, Dropbox found that 95% of creatives use AI tools, putting them ahead of the general population (74%). Brainstorming (53%), meeting summaries (50%) and retrieving information and past work (48%) are the three top use cases, and it’s the third point that’s of most relevance here.
The company found that 34% forget information from calls and 26% forget where important files are stores, with creatives remembering emotionally meaningful information better than work-critical details.
“The less time you spend hunting things down, the more time you have for ideas,” Wilson added. “By handling the administrative side of creative work, things like file search, version control, and summarising notes, AI can help teams spend more time in flow and less time on logistics.”
With one in three noting AI tools often fail to understand the context of their projects, it’s clear that creatives need to leave behind generic AI assistants for more focused agentic tools.
Together with consolidating their tools (and reducing the average from 14), creatives should experience less wasted time and more time to spend on meaningful, creative output.
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