ai – Wandering Wandering Star

As AI democratizes creative production – just as high-level languages democratized programming – we need to rethink how agencies create value.

Conventional wisdom suggests that when technical execution becomes commoditized, taste becomes the differentiator.

But this assumes a universal standard of taste exists. It doesn’t. What’s cool to Gen Z might be cringe to millennials (or is it the other way around?). What’s respectful in Tokyo might be too formal in São Paulo. What’s premium to one group might seem wasteful to another. One VC’s Patagonia vest and Allbirds is, well, let’s just leave that one alone.

What we’re really talking about is cultural intelligence: the ability to navigate multiple frameworks of value and meaning across different contexts.

Consider what happens when anyone in an agency can generate compelling visuals, write decent copy, or produce serviceable pitch-quality videos using AI. These technical aspects of advertising – once a moat protecting established agencies – become table stakes. But what replaces them isn’t simply “good taste.” It’s something more dynamic.

Agencies that creatively thrive will excel at three things:

First, cultural navigation. They’ll understand how meaning and value shift across different contexts, communities, and cultures. They won’t impose a single taste framework but will move fluidly between many.

Second, collective intelligence. Success won’t come just from individual brilliant minds but also from diverse teams that bring multiple perspectives to creative problems. This diversity isn’t just demographic – it’s cognitive, experiential, and cultural.

Third, adaptive judgment. They’ll combine human insight with AI capabilities, using data and research to inform creative decisions while maintaining human empathy, cultural sensitivity and an unquenchable curiosity to keep learning and playing with what’s new.

This has several implications:

Creative leadership becomes even more about orchestrating diverse perspectives than only imposing singular vision.
Small agencies can compete through specialized cultural expertise and adaptability.
Client relationships evolve into learning partnerships, where both sides develop better cultural intelligence together.

The irony is that many agencies are optimizing for the wrong things – not just in terms of tech-driven production capabilities of faster and cheaper or achieving ever more massive scale – but in their very understanding of what makes work resonate.

They’ve built only ‘hierarchies of taste’ when they should have been building networks of cultural intelligence. It’s the difference between saying “we know what’s best” and saying “we know how to learn from everyone.”

What matters isn’t developing only “good taste” but rather building the capacity to understand how different communities create and perceive value. This requires humility, curiosity, and constant learning – qualities that can’t be replaced by AI but can be enhanced by it.

If this sounds too abstract, consider the opposite: an agency that believes its taste is universal, using AI to scale that limited perspective and make a lot of things faster and cheaper. That’s not just a failing business model – it’s a form of cultural myopia.

The future belongs not to those with “the best taste,” but to those who best understand how taste is constructed, challenged, and transformed across different contexts. Everything else – including our current notions of taste – is being disrupted.

This isn’t just about survival. It’s about creating work that matters in a world where meaning itself is increasingly fluid and contested. That’s one of the real challenges – and opportunity – of the AI era.

A few minutes of a recent interview with Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity) has been triggering strong concern from leaders in the advertising community. And for good reason. https://youtu.be/n8MnVElwvfY?si=esJe7-8yqjUzq231&t=895

There’s a future scenario where we could witness the most fundamental shift in consumer decision-making since the birth of mass media. While the advertising industry has weathered tech disruptions – from television to social media – AI agents represent something far more profound: the potential disintermediation of human choice itself. AI agents making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers. With people perhaps never even seeing the ads.

Consider this: For decades, we’ve mastered the art of persuading humans through emotional storytelling, cultural resonance, and psychological triggers — let’s call this Advertising. We’ve built entire frameworks and successful creative businesses around human decision-making patterns.

But what happens when our target audience becomes an AI agent optimizing for parameters rather than responding to persuasion? When algorithms, not emotions, determine which toothpaste ends up in your basket?

The paradigm shift is profound: brands will need to advertise to the agents themselves, but consumers will have unprecedented power, able to instruct their agents to ignore certain brands entirely without advertisers ever knowing. This creates an asymmetric dynamic where brands might have no choice but to play by these new rules if that’s what consumers demand.

However, this isn’t an obituary for advertising – it’s a call for reinvention. We need to stop thinking in false dichotomies of human VS. machine and instead architect for a hybrid future.

Here’s how:

First, rebuild creative organizations around “dual-stream intelligence.” One stream continues to master human psychology, cultural anthropology, and emotional storytelling. The other develops expertise in parameter-based communication, understanding how to translate brand value into quantifiable metrics that AI agents can process. Or in Pelle Sjoenell‘s BBH Labs post from back in 2018: ‘Selling to Machines, our next customer.”

Second, evolve the creative process by starting with the decision architecture. How will this product or service be chosen in a world where both humans and AI agents influence the purchase? This means developing creative that can simultaneously spark emotional connection with humans while optimizing for AI comprehension.

Most importantly, brand building doesn’t become irrelevant – it becomes bifurcated. Humans will still set their agents’ preferences based on their beliefs, values, and emotional connections to brands. This means the long-term game of building brand equity remains crucial, but the tactical execution of purchase decisions may increasingly shift to agent-to-agent communication.

The agencies that will creatively thrive in this new era won’t be those with the most sophisticated AI tools or the biggest data sets (sorry mega-holding-company-mergers!). They’ll be the ones that can seamlessly bridge the human and machine realms, creating work that resonates across both spheres.

The future of advertising isn’t dead – it’s being reborn. And for those willing to embrace this transformation, the creative possibilities are limitless. After all, we’ll be going beyond creating ads – we’d be architecting decision ecosystems that bridge human emotion and machine logic. That’s not the death of creativity – it’s an evolution.