AI strategy for Creative Directors

POV: your CEO hopes Claude Design can replace designers

Jelly Luise. Misc project. Death to Stock.

My client is CD at a full-service digital consultancy. He emails me this the other day:

Kat, I’m at an AI conference this week. I had to walk out earlier today to compose myself. The host of the event is advocating for a new agency model. One that eliminates all the people in it.

How am I supposed to respond to that? I feel like I’m being asked to eliminate my team. Or at the very least take away their ability to be creative.

He’s also under intense pressure by the CEO to know Claude Design and draft an AI strategy for his team.

The message is “Figure out this tool that just came out and then write perhaps the most important doc of your career it needs to guide the company through the AI era oh also help me decide whether I can lay off your team entirely or just some of you guys”

What would you do? Don’t know? Of course you don’t. Neither does he. No one does. But here’s what you need to know to make a start.

Your CEO is not necessarily asking you to disappear your team

They’re scared, feel behind, and are trying to get a handle on this AI thing. The majority of them don’t want to lay people off. They know they’re responsible for people paying their bills and feeding their children, and it keeps them up at night.

Drafting an AI strategy is just that… a draft that will change wildly

We’re all building the plane as we’re flying it. No one knows what’s next, not even the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI.

You didn’t get into this game to talk to a robot all day and make mediocre shit with it

So let’s fight to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Brenna Marrie. Feel Alive project. Death to Stock.

What you need to know about SF

I have lived in San Francisco for 13 years. I hate it. I deeply love it. Unless you’re willfully not using your brain, this paradox is your life.

Picture flying into SFO, the best airport in the U.S.¹² It was designed by someone who understands space, color, machines, people, and the wrangling power of Helvetica. Almost impossible to get lost, except when trying to choose what delicious local fare to eat for $45. If you just want a snack, it will still be $45.

You drive/BART into the city proper and are surrounded by gorgeous topography, iconic architecture and bridges, distinctive micro-neighborhoods with their own micro-climates, well-funded parks full of people with a Forever Young vibe regardless of age, and nine lives’ worth of excellent low, mid, and high-end cuisine from all over the world.

The majority of San Franciscans do try to coexist, provide sanctuary, include, and accept differences. Except when the Giants, Warriors, and Niners lose the big game… then we set cars on fire.

Meanwhile, with the insane amount of money that flows through this city, we can’t seem to get people addiction care or off the streets. There is affordable housing, but it’s for billionaires.

SF is about the unseen. Tech companies tucked into unassuming buildings. The scary-smart people driven by a shared goal, working round the clock. This place makes tectonic-plate-shifting technology.

Some of these companies grab headlines, others are in “stealth mode” doing god knows fucking what — except you know you’ll have to “adopt it” soon.

There are idiotic billboards everywhere, good marketing be damned. They are advertising products you don’t want nor understand because they’re full of language coded for a super specific tech person.

All of this is feels extra insidious because we can’t touch what these people are building (code, the cloud, a server far away, invisible “infrastructure”, yet another exhausting, unnecessary app).

Every hour, in the nicest conference room, there is billions of dollars worth of hand-waving that will end up in the backend of your life.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT, I’ve felt, in the hairs on my arm, SF amping up more and more in quiet frenzy.

Jesus, even the people making AI feel behind: CEO of Anthropic Dario has said that he is amazed at how fast they’re moving and is afraid he can’t seem to slow it down.

… oh cool

AI is not sexy. It won’t make you feel tingly in your tailbone.

But it will relentlessly shape your mind, heart, privacy, expectations around speed, tolerance for inconvenience.

It will eat away at how present you are with your kids, how often you call your aging parents, and honestly your soul.

It will. It already has.

AI will hugely impact your career, that thing fundamental to you, because it’s how you keep the lights on and eat.

Work scaffolds our identities. That’s why it feels so bad when you are stuck and career confused.

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Draft your AI strategy

1. When you think about the best work your company has ever done for a client, what made it great? Could Claude Design have produced that?

2. What do your best clients hire you for, specifically?

3. If a client received an AI-generated deck and a designer-crafted deck side by side and couldn’t tell the difference, what would that mean to you? What if they could tell the difference?

4. What does your team do in the process that you’ve never been able to fully articulate in a brief or a scope of work? What’s the invisible contribution?

Where are you at with AI? Leave a comment or send a DM:

1. This is not up for debate.

2. SFO is the only airport in the world that is also a museum.