Is there fear around AI right now, amongst creatives and marketers?
A fear that AI will produce a flood of mediocre content that drowns out everything good? (This is already happening.)
Or that, under pressure to do more with less, brands will let it? (In some cases, this is already happening.)
Or that we’re in a race to the bottom – more content, made faster, by machines – and a creative industry that gradually stops noticing the difference? (This time, no. This is where the trajectory stops.)
Some say AI, used well, is the most powerful engine that creative teams have ever had access to. Brands getting this right are using it to make better creative decisions, faster, and at a scale that wasn’t previously possible.
The question isn’t whether to use it. It’s what you use it for and why – how you find the point at which AI is as helpful as possible, before it starts pulling every brand towards an ever more beige canvas that looks suspiciously like everyone else’s.
Key takeaways:
- The best creatives are using AI for pattern recognition, audience insight and personalisation. Yet they know where to draw the line. They decide, clearly and deliberately, what AI is for – and what it isn’t.
- Customer experience is the arena where machine agency has the most immediate upside – but it’s risky to deploy AI without considering the human on the other end.
- AI tools are changing how creative and strategy teams synthesise research – compressing weeks of analysis into hours without losing the nuance.
- The risk isn’t AI producing bad creative work. It’s brands using AI as a shortcut and calling it a strategy.
The floor for creativity has risen
A brand that previously couldn’t afford to personalise its customer communications at scale can now do it. A marketing team that lacked the resource to analyse every campaign signal and extract actionable insight can now do it in hours.
That is genuinely valuable. It means more brands can do more good work more consistently. That’s a better creative industry, not a worse one.
What AI doesn’t change is where the best work comes from. ‘The ceiling’ – aka the ideas that stop people, that earn real cultural attention, that make buyers feel something they didn’t expect to feel – still requires a human being with taste, judgment and something genuinely worth saying. The chances of those ideas coming from an AI? Slim.
What great AI-assisted creativity actually looks like
The most compelling creative work to emerge from AI-assisted campaigns in the past year shares a common characteristic: the AI was used to unlock a creative possibility that wouldn’t have existed without it.
Uber Eats’ ‘Hungry for the Truth’ campaign for Super Bowl LX is a useful case in point. The campaign’s centrepiece was a 60-second ad featuring Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper debating whether football exists primarily as a vehicle to sell food. A strong creative idea on its own. But what AI made possible was the extension: over 1,000 customised, celebrity-filled commercial versions that users could generate themselves inside the Uber Eats app. The human creative team had the idea. AI gave it a scale and a level of customisation that would have been impossible without it.
That’s the model worth paying attention to. AI as a multiplier, not originator. The brief still required human insight – the observation that the Super Bowl is as much a food event as a sports one. AI turned that insight into an experience at scale.
Credit: AdAge
The creatives who aren’t afraid
It’s worth pausing on what some creatives think about all of this.
At a recent BAFTA Games Music Masterclass, Austin Wintory – the composer behind BAFTA-winning Journey – described AI as simply another step in the long progression of music technology. One that could open new ways of composing and creating. He spoke about imagining, fifteen years ago, generative tools that could create real-time adaptive music cued to gameplay – and seeing today’s AI tools as the beginning of that becoming real.
Meanwhile, Sam Gale, StrategiQ videographer, talks about AI as a means of getting closer to true realism.
“Say you miss a frame on the day of a shoot. AI can fill in the blanks, based on the material you did capture. So you can stay more true to form in the final version.”
AI also empowers creatives to push boundaries. They can pitch bolder ideas, using AI to mock up an immediate sense of a concept for their stakeholders. Without the AI visualisation, some ideas might never get signed off.
N.B. The net for the best creative talent is likely expansion, not contraction.
Looking for your next creative role? Check out careers with StrategiQ.
The AI tools elevating strategy for creative teams
It’s best to experiment with AI tools often – as they’re constantly evolving and improving at a rapid pace. Each tool is also best suited to different outcomes. Here are a few examples.
NotebookLM – research synthesis and strategic insight
Google’s NotebookLM sits at the strategy end of the creative process. Feed it customer research, competitor analysis, category reports, previous campaign results, brand guidelines – you name it – and it interrogates that material, surfacing patterns and summaries that would take a human analyst days to land on.
The insight phase – historically the most time-intensive stage – can now be compressed from weeks into hours without sacrificing depth.
“You have to consume an ungodly amount of information to do strategy. The biggest unlock with LLMs is the data processing to compile your story.” – John Jameson, H/L Agency.
NotebookLM’s audio overview feature – which generates a natural-sounding podcast-style discussion of any uploaded source material – has also found an unexpected use case in briefing and onboarding: giving creative teams a fast way to get up to speed before they begin work.
Midjourney and Higgsfield- visual concept development and ideation
Midjourney helps creative teams that want to generate, explore and pressure-test visual concepts at speed. Its value lies in collapsing the distance between a creative idea and a visual reference that the whole team can react to.
Mood boards that would have taken a designer days to assemble can now be iterated in hours. Concepts that might have been killed by the cost of visualisation can be explored before resource is committed.
The practical implication is faster, more visual conversations – and briefs that arrive at production with clarity.
Where Midjourney operates in still images, Higgsfield extends AI-assisted visual creation into motion – generating cinematic video content from text prompts or existing imagery.
The pattern here is consistent with the broader argument: AI is most valuable when it reduces the time between good information and good thinking.
Customer experience: the highest stakes arena
If creativity is where AI’s upside is most visible, customer experience is where the risk of getting it wrong is most immediate.
The promise is real. By 2028–29, Mintel projects that agentic AI will be embedded across customer service and marketing, driving personalised journeys around the clock. The brands that deploy this well will create experiences that feel more responsive and more useful than anything a human-only team could sustain at scale.
But the consumer data should give every CMO pause. More than half of UK consumers say AI-generated content actively discourages them from buying from a brand. Nearly 70% see AI-generated advertising as inevitable – but they don’t see it as desirable.
The brands scoring highest on trust and customer experience right now are the ones that use AI to make human interactions feel better and don’t try to use it to remove human interaction entirely.
The distinction matters more than it might seem. AI that helps your customer service team respond faster, with better information and more relevant context, creates a better human experience. AI that replaces your customer service team with a chatbot that struggles to handle anything complex…we’ve all been on the receiving end of that. It signals to your customers that their time isn’t worth a person.
So the question to ask before using AI in customer experience should be: ‘Does automating this make the customer feel more valued, or less?’
The quality question no one is asking loudly enough
There is a version of the AI-in-marketing story that ends badly, and it’s actually quite mundane. It’s if organisations use AI to produce more content, cheaply, at high velocity – and, in doing so, gradually dilute the distinctive voice that made their brand worth paying attention to in the first place.
Not because ‘AI made them do it’. Because the commercial logic of ‘faster and cheaper’ is always going to win the short-term argument, and no one in the room pushed back hard enough.
The AI tools available right now are genuinely impressive. They can produce content that looks right, sounds right and passes a surface-level quality check with ease. What they can’t do is care whether the work is actually good – if it says something true and earns attention – rather than just fills a slot. Whether it builds the brand or just services the content calendar.
But people can. That caring is a human job. And right now, it’s the most important one in the room.
How does your brand use AI?
Where does your story lead? Are you using AI deliberately and where it’s worthwhile?
The brands navigating this well share something in common. They’re genuinely curious about what AI makes possible. They’re honest about what it doesn’t change. And they’ve decided – explicitly, not by default – that the creative standard, the brand voice and the quality of customer experience are things a machine doesn’t get to set.
Give machines more agency by all means. Just make sure you know exactly what you’re keeping for yourself.
A good jumping-off place
Understand how AI is shaping your brand’s visibility right now. StrategiQ is offering a 10-question AI Visibility Review for senior leadership teams. Find out how AI systems currently describe your brand – and what that means for your creative and commercial strategy.
Sources and references
- TechRadar: BAFTA-winning game music composers don’t see AI as a threat
- BAFTA Games Music Masterclass, Austin Wintory
- Mintel: Agentic AI & Consumer Marketing Forecasts, 2025
- Mintel: AI-Generated Content & Consumer Trust, UK, 2025
- McKinsey & Company: New Front Door to the Internet
- Uber Eats ‘Hungry for the Truth’ Super Bowl LX Campaign, 2026
- AdAge: Uber Eats unveils its Super Bowl ad—and lets you build your own
- StrategiQ & GTA: The Great Visibility Shift – Future of Search Panel