Reflections on five years of creativity and innovation as Bayes CebAI project ends

As the CebAI project at Bayes winds down, Professor Neil Maiden looks back on some of its key achievements and legacy.

Management Expert Comment; Announcements

First published Thursday, 13 February, 2025

by Hamish Armstrong (Senior Communications Officer)

After nearly five years, the Centre for Creativity Enabled by AI (CebAI) at Bayes Business School is drawing its work to a close.

In 2020, a Research England Development Fund grant was awarded to Bayes, with the aim of finding ways of helping businesses harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to grow innovation. Since then, it has created several successful spin-off projects while continuously evolving due the pace at which the AI revolution has travelled.

Neil Maiden, Professor of Digital Creativity and project lead for CebAI, said it has been a success, despite challenges along the way.

“The process of obtaining funding for the Centre for Creativity enabled by AI was a highly competitive one, both within City St George’s, University of London and then across the country,” he said.

“CebAI was – and still is – my vision of how AI technologies can offer value for organisations, helping them create and innovate more effectively.

“The AI wave that has hit since we launched CebAI could have provided additional challenges to this mission, but in many ways I think we saw it as an opportunity. We’ve managed to ride the wave to position ourselves differently and integrate this technology effectively.”

Professor Neil Maiden

Professor Maiden and CebAI began collaborating with businesses to establish their needs, and co-design develop appropriate tools.

“From the start we collaborated with different types of external businesses and organisations to understand their needs, for what we call co-creative AI,” he continued.

“Our approach was one of co-design with our partners, through understanding their needs, designing and building early AI prototypes, and testing these prototypes with them to refine, improve and build business cases. As a consequence, we moved from developing research prototypes to full-on production tools robust enough for organisations to use.”

CebAI has now developed a number of innovative designs to aid creativity across a range of disciplines. These include the launch of Sports Sparks from partnering with the English Institute of Sport, Business Sparks to support executives with finding new strategic solutions, and Design Sparks.

With the development of these tools came further partnerships and funding streams. These include Miele, the Centre for Management Consulting Excellence and the project’s own funder, Research England. Most significantly, the success of CebAI has led to the formation of the new interdisciplinary Institute for Creativity and AI, joining forces with other schools across City St George’s to create a new outward-facing space to research and explore strategic technological impacts. The Institute was launched towards the end of 2024, and will take advantage of the partnerships, networks, investments, tools and knowledge gained by CebAI.

Looking ahead, Professor Maiden believes the legacy of the Centre will play a crucial role in businesses’ adoption of AI technologies.

“I am really proud to be able to say that CebAI pre-empted AI’s critical role in business,” he said.

“Most proposed uses of generative AI are to increase efficiencies and productivity via automation, but productivity gains are still expected to be limited in years to come.

“The key is to determine other strategic applications of artificial intelligence for business. While creativity and innovation remain strategic needs for many, most language learning models (LLMs) – even DeepSeek – are not optimised to achieve this. It is not about the technology, but more understanding what creativity and innovation is, and then developing the tech to support it.

“The next step must now be to develop new forms of co-creative AI that build on creativity theories and models, while recognising how humans interact with tools in creative work. This is what CebAI has gone a long way towards achieving, with a new, more informed and hybrid approach to AI adoption for business innovation.