- A study reveals that the average creator uses 14 tools. AI could help, but it doesn’t currently
- With better organization, creatives could save 1.5 days per month
- AI is favored for brainstorming, summarizing and retrieving information
New research attributes tool overload and dispersed workflows to productivity disruptions, with creatives facing slow deliveries, reduced work quality and impacted margins.
A report from Dropbox reveals that the average creative uses 14 digital tools, but better digital organization could improve their performance by 54%, resulting in an average of 1.5 additional days of creative time per month.
“Every extra click, every lost file, every time you have to remember which system something is in, it all eats away at your creative capacity,” summarized lead director Andy Wilson.
For a creative team of 10, that extra 1.5 days per worker per month could equate to £144,000 per year, in Dropbox days. On this basis, a 200-strong agency could lose £2.88m a year.
With simplification proving valuable in saving time, 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 top three use cases, and it’s the third point that’s most relevant here.
The company found that 34% forget call information and 26% forget where important files are, with creatives remembering emotionally significant information better than work-critical details.
“The less time you spend researching things, the more time you have to come up with ideas,” Wilson added. “By handling the administrative side of creative work, like finding files, version control, and summarizing notes, AI can help teams spend more time on flow and less time on logistics. »
With one in three people finding that AI tools often fail to understand the context of their projects, it’s clear that creatives need to move away from generic AI assistants and toward more focused, agentic tools.
By consolidating their tools (and reducing the average by 14), creatives should waste less time and more time to devote to meaningful creative output.
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