Most mornings, I wake up and I already feel like I’m behind.
The pings have stacked up overnight across Slack, email, Coda, Google Docs, and Figma. By 9 a.m., I’m combing through thousands of words written across a dozen surfaces, diving into async reviews where a thread of 20 comments is doing the work that one live conversation would have solved in five minutes. It’s collaborative software gone wild. And it puts me in a defensive position before the real workday has even started.
I’ve been a creative leader long enough to know this isn’t just a me problem. It’s the condition most of us are operating in right now—and AI hasn’t made it easier. If anything, for many teams, it’s made it more intense.
Redefining productivity
Our recent AI Maturity Report found that 73% of marketers say AI creates extra work to review or fix. I’d have guessed higher.
The ability to produce more content faster is real. But so is the downstream effect: more drafts to review, more rounds of feedback, more async threads that stretch a two-minute conversation into a two-day email chain. The volume of work goes up. The quality of the decisions doesn’t always follow.
For a long time, I measured productivity the way most creative leads do: how much we shipped, how fast we moved, how many tickets we closed. But real productivity for a creative team looks different. It’s not clearing your inbox or whack-a-mole-ing every ping that comes your way. It’s making sharp, high-conviction decisions that feel durable and defensible. It’s doing the work that only you and your team can actually do, and doing it well.
AI is genuinely great at a lot of things. But it shortcuts something we’re not talking about enough: the part that actually makes creative work good.
The joy is in the process
Producing good creative—whether that’s writing, design, or anything in between—is more about personal taste and intuition than it is about simply getting it done. There's a synthesis that happens in the messy middle of making something: the dialogue, the iteration, the moments where you change your mind and figure out why. That process isn’t inefficiency. It’s where creative judgment gets formed, and it’s where the joy lives.
AI gets straight to an output. And that output is often good enough, which is exactly the problem.
Good enough is the enemy of opinionated because it lacks the one thing that actually makes creative work land: a real point of view. The brands that stand out aren’t the ones producing the most content with AI. They’re the ones protecting the conditions for the kind of creative thinking that AI can’t replicate.
AI’s real job on a creative team
To be clear, I’m not arguing for less AI. I’m arguing for better conditions around it.
Because right now, the conditions aren’t great. Most AI tools weren’t built for how creative work actually happens. They’re transactional—you put something in, you get something out. But creative work is iterative. It’s a conversation. The back-and-forth, the refinement, the moments where you change direction because something isn’t feeling right—that’s not inefficiency. That’s the process.
When AI tools skip straight past the process to an output that comes back needing a brand voice check, a creative gut check, and a quality-control pass before it’s anywhere close to usable, you end up doing two jobs: the creative work and cleaning up the AI version.
There are so many things creative teams have to do that quietly pull focus away from the work that requires actual creative intelligence. Synthesizing feedback. Managing rounds of review. Iterating endlessly on execution details. AI should be absorbing those categories of work. The logistics. The repetition. The hundred small tasks that fill a day and drain the energy that creative thinking actually needs.
Prototyping is where I’ve seen AI shine most. Roughing out an idea before you’ve invested in it, pressure-testing a concept before you’ve fallen in love with it, iterating an asset across 10 languages without burning out your team. AI is also great at tackling “blank page syndrome.” AI is genuinely good at pulling a squishy idea into something concrete enough to discuss, react to, and build from. These uses keep the human in the driver’s seat. They use AI to move faster through the parts that don’t require taste, so there’s more room for the parts that do.
That’s the version of AI I want on my team. Not the one that gets straight to an output. The one that clears the path so my team can do the work only they can do, and actually enjoy doing it.
What I’d tell every brand and creative director right now
The future of a high-performing creative org isn’t one in which AI does the creative work and humans manage the output. It’s the opposite. AI handles the coordination, the iteration, the context-carrying, so humans can do what only they can: make something that genuinely moves people.
That means AI that lives where the work already happens. It should be intuitive and there when you need it, not in a separate tab that breaks your flow. It means AI that already knows your brand, your campaign history, your standards, so every draft starts in the right place instead of somewhere you have to fix. It means visibility across campaigns so nothing slips through the cracks, and governance that actually reduces the oversight burden instead of adding to it. Less time Q&A-ing. More time creating.
The magic—the firing synapses, the intuition, the taste that comes from years of making and thinking and caring—is yours. No tool is going to replicate it. But the right tools can enhance the conditions for it. They can clear away the coordination overhead, the context-switching, the endless review cycles, and give your team back the thing that makes the work worth doing.
That’s the bar I’m holding. And it’s worth protecting.
Want to dig into the data? The AI Maturity Report breaks down what marketing professionals are really experiencing with AI. Get the report →
