Anyone who knows me will know a conversation about creativity is always going to pique my interest. So when I heard about a morning at Google discussing #creativity and #AI, I was in.
What I found really encouraging was how little of the discussion was about shiny tools or replacing people, and how much it was about helping people do better work, whether that’s creatives in the studio, marketing teams at head office, or people anywhere, in fact.
With all the hype around AI, that feels like the bit that often gets lost.
We’ve all been told it’s either going to replace us, or it’s going to magically solve everything.
Tuesday was a reminder of something much more useful and much more human.
The way I see things, and this was echoed around the room, is that the real opportunity with AI isn’t about doing more for less. It isn’t about cutting humans out of the process. And it definitely isn’t about chasing quick, lazy wins.
It’s about what happens when some of the more mundane parts of our work start to fall away.
In marketing and creativity, a lot of time gets swallowed by what’s necessary, but not always where the greatest value sits. Reporting. Drafting. Chasing. Amending. Visualising. Maintaining. Co-ordinating. Tracking. POing. Invoicing.
None of that is pointless. But it does take up space.
And if AI can help clear some of that space, even partially, then the opportunity isn’t just speed.
It’s headspace.
More time to think. More time to question. More time to try. More time to understand the customer, the context, and the problem we are really trying to solve.
One idea that came through strongly was that AI can raise the baseline.
It can help us get to a decent starting point more quickly. It can surface patterns we might miss. It can remove some of the friction that slows everything down.
But it doesn’t replace judgement. It doesn’t replace taste. It doesn’t replace creative thinking. It doesn’t decide what is worth doing in the first place.
And that, for me, is the interesting bit.
The advantage won’t come from simply using AI. Most people are already doing that in some form. The difference will come from what people choose to do with the time and space it creates.
Some will use it to produce more. More versions. More content. More activity. More noise. More slop.
Others will use it to think better, decide faster and create with more care.
That’s where I think the real opportunity sits.
Because if all AI does is help us move faster in the same direction, we may not have gained very much at all.
But if it helps remove some of the clutter, so that people can focus on the work that really needs human thought, creativity and judgement, then that feels like progress worth leaning into.
A big thank you to PMG for hosting such a thoughtful session, and to all the speakers including Mark Blundell from Geely Auto UK, Matt Reed from Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland Ltd, and Mark Evans for sharing such practical perspectives.