Start here (with my apologies for linking to X).
I appreciate this message from Micha, and I think it’s essential reading for people in my world—creatives, marketers, agency folks. It boils down to an incontrovertible truth: a team member who uses AI to be more creative, smart, and productive is simply more valuable than one who doesn’t, or won’t, or can’t.
I spend all day every day following the marketing and media discourse, so I know how polarized it is right now. But it’s also missing some important context. Even before LLMs came into our space, the business trends were all bad:
- Downward price pressure
- In-housing
- Aversion to creative risk
- Clients expecting agencies to do more with less
- Publishers downsizing
- Jobs disappearing
Our industry has been retracting for years. Last month, PRWeek published its Agency Business report, including financials for a broad swath of agencies. Growth is minimal, margins are down. And this is before the impacts of AI have really set in.
AI isn’t the threat to this landscape, it’s the solution.
So this is where I break with Micha’s thinking. AI isn’t coming for us. It’s coming to us.
And this is a good thing. It puts the means of production in the hands of our individual team members. That’s amazing! Now everyone on our team can be a manager and a creative director, and produce work that’s far beyond our own human skill and experience.
And AI is great at speeding up processes that clients hate paying for: 1) learning time; 2) ideation time; 3) admin time.
Start with learning. Expertise is super valuable, and it takes a lot of time to study a new industry, company, or audience. With AI, team members can get most of the way there so much more quickly. That’s not dehumanizing, it’s empowering. Is it a replacement for career-long expertise? Of course not. Can it perfectly represent your own impeccable taste? No. But let’s be real here, [whispers] deep experts and true creative tastemakers are super rare anyway. If AI can get you 85% of the way there, why wouldn’t you use it?
Next is ideation. In our industry, ideation is seen as this mystical process. You need time, and inspiration, and a good brainstorm or a Jamboard or a Figjam or an offsite or hallucinogens. I’ve always thought “idea mystique” is dumb—ideas are cheap and they can come from anyone, any time. Good creatives have way more ideas than they could ever possibly pitch, much less execute.
What ideas need most is iteration and follow through. AI helps with both. I use AI constantly, and I’ve never had a breakthrough idea from a chatbot. But they’ve given me LOTS of almost-there ideas, or straight-up bad ideas, that then lead my human brain to The Good Idea. That’s super valuable for me.
And it definitely helps with admin time. Some of this is the day-to-day bullshit that everyone has to deal with at work. But in our space, AI is also helping me quickly build on the foundation of a good idea with supplemental thinking, checklists of next steps, different ways to think about the pitch, different ways to connect it to the audience, and all those post-idea workstreams where so many creative agencies straight-up fail.
So, learning time, ideation time, and admin time. By addressing those three time-sucks directly, AI presents a real path for both employees and businesses to create more, do more, learn more, and earn more. And I strongly believe that both employees and businesses resist this path at their peril.
At Codeword, we’re already working hard to optimize our processes and our team to take advantage of the technology. We’ve already been coaching our talent acquisition team that candidates with AI skills are more valuable to us than candidates without them, and should be moved to the top of the recruiting pile.
Now LLMs aren’t perfect. Neither are humans. Neither of us are perfect truth-tellers, most of our creativity is simple pattern-matching, and neither of us are awesome for the environment (although the latest models are exponentially more efficient than early LLMs). Codeword’s own early experiment with embedded AI tools was mostly a failure.
But computers are really good at a lot of things that our squishy human brains aren’t. And humans have a creativity and intelligence that make us the most magical, wondrous creatures in the known universe.
A world where we can create more and know more is a better world, whether we’re talking about the marketing world or the Earth itself.