Integrating AI Workflows Without Losing the Human Touch
AI can speed up production, but it can't replace judgment. Here's how we integrate it into creative and media workflows.
Every agency conversation about AI eventually splits into two camps: the ones convinced it replaces most creative work, and the ones who won't touch it. Both are wrong in ways that cost their clients money. The useful position is narrower and less exciting: AI is very good at specific, bounded tasks, and still bad at judgment.
Where it actually earns its place
- First-draft variations for A/B testing — a designer picks the direction, AI generates the permutations
- Transcription, summarization, and research synthesis ahead of a strategy session
- Batch resizing and reformatting content across platform specs
- Drafting initial copy options against a brief a strategist has already written
In every one of these cases, AI is compressing the time between a decision and its execution — not making the decision. That distinction is the whole game.
Where it still falls apart
Positioning calls. Tone judgment on sensitive topics. Reading a client's unstated concerns in a meeting. Knowing when a technically-correct design is still wrong for the brand. These require context that lives in relationships and experience, not training data — and clients notice immediately when that judgment is missing from the work.
Our actual workflow
Strategy and positioning stay entirely human, start to finish. Production work gets an AI-assisted first pass where it makes sense, always reviewed and finished by the person who'll put their name on it. Nothing goes to a client without a human having made every call about whether it's actually right — not just whether it's plausible.
The agencies that get burned by AI aren't the ones using it — they're the ones that let it make judgment calls it was never equipped to make. Used as a production accelerant with a human holding the strategic line, it's one of the better tools we've added to the stack in years.