Creatives: If AI Is Raising The Floor, It's Our Moment to Raise the Ceiling

Every year in Cannes, our business gathers to toast itself, sip rosé, hand out recognition, and reassure ourselves that creativity still matters.

And it does. But the reason it matters is changing—and so is the meaning of being “creative” in the years ahead.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the tension between optimism and uncertainty in our industry, and I find myself navigating these shifting sands with more hope than fear.

Perhaps it’s naivety, protecting me from cynicism.

Or perhaps it’s the exciting challenge of having to prove ourselves. Not just as creatives, but as an industry.

Flicking through ‘The Anatomy of Humbug’ by Paul Feldwick, I'm reminded of how throughout history, our industry has constantly redefined itself and what we sell to adapt to the world around us. How we talk about creativity is always changing (a creative act in-of-itself), but its transformational potential remains the same.

That’s why I don’t believe AI is coming for the ad industry’s margins. It’s coming for the excess in the middle, offering an opportunity to redefine what we do and how we do it once again.

That’s My Generation

My peers and I are emerging in an increasingly competitive landscape, where everyone is fluent in prompts, tools, and automation. We generate more, quicker.

But what really stands out to me is how the absolute best young creatives I've had the pleasure of working with have an incredible gut that AI could never replicate.

Their true value comes from great judgment and intuition.
They spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on pushing the envelope.
They read people and scenarios.
They catch nuances in between briefs.
They make connections in a way that doesn’t just reveal options but also shows the right way forward.

I believe these are the core strengths of our profession, and therein lies our future.

Widening The Gap

There’s a tendency to see AI as a threat to our jobs. But to me, this isn’t the end of creative advertising, it’s the end of the illusion that all creative work is equal.

AI means that fewer of us will have to spend time delivering what used to be the baseline of agency output. It’s compressing timelines and flattening costs.

But it's also increasing the value of vision and its impact on the bottom line.

Junior and mid-weight roles will likely spend less time on execution and more on developing their taste, championing a distinctive point of view in both craft and concept.

AI easily helps us make derivative work, where outputs aren’t too far from the inputs. As algorithms improve, the unexpected becomes accessible. This raises the bar for what is considered an ‘unexpected’ idea- not just because of the algorithm, but because the outcomes will still be tied to our prompts.

Without context from real-world human situations, without the right-thinking structures and good stimulus, no matter how ‘creative’ the algorithm is, a non-creative prompt will get you a result in equal measure.

This is why I believe that roles around creative problem solving and ideation will become specialised, and much more influential in guiding brands through the chaos of change and driving business transformation.

Creative leaders should already be helping brands refine their direction, products, and cultural impact. But in a future where AI democratises content creation, a creative lens applied at higher levels of decision-making helps organisations decide what should be made, and why.

The more creative thinking is embedded at the top, the more it can shape everything that follows, and so the gap between adequate and brilliant will only grow wider.

And clients can tell the difference.

Does It Get The Pass?

AI can now easily create passable. Passable film. Passable copy. Passable targeting. As automation scales, passable becomes the cheaper default.

But when everything is average, the work that stands out is that which doesn’t easily reveal what could have prompted it. The work that makes you think, ‘how did they come up with that?’.

But think about it: This has always been our benchmark.

AI’s gift is transforming us from assembly line workers into curators who oversee, instruct, and filter out the fluff, revealing the gold underneath.

The Age of Imagination

The irony of this moment is that as AI floods the market with content, the craft of creative thinking matters more.

It becomes scarcer, more visible, and more valuable.

I see an opportunity for our industry to shed its bulk and rediscover its purpose.

Not just to make more things faster, but to make the right things.

To turn complexity into connection. To bring that human touch that completes the puzzle. To envision and define where brands should go next, when everyone else is stuck regurgitating the past.

So, let's let automation do what it's good at.

Let the bots chip away at our comfort zone. We’re better without it.

AI is raising the floor, so let’s raise the ceiling.

If this is your craft, and this is what you love, then this is our moment.