Why AI for strategic & creative work needs a different approach

Most organizations are struggling with AI adoption, and the reason isn't technical complexity—it's conceptual confusion.

There's a fundamental difference between using AI for automation and using it for creative work. The fine-tuned translation plugins and AI-assisted features that your engineering team builds require precision and control. But constrain a model too much and you strangle the surprising leaps that make it a worthwhile creative collaborator.

Creative output lives in dimensions we can barely map, making it nearly impossible to benchmark. More importantly, AI doesn't just execute—it responds, pushing back against your assumptions and blurring the line between tool and collaborator. Most organizational structures weren't designed for this kind of reciprocal intelligence.

The good news? As Ethan Mollick notes, the expertise to harness AI already exists within your organization. You just need someone who can serve as a dimensional translator.

As a Creative Technologist, I don't operate through rigid role definitions—AI resists that kind of bureaucratic thinking. Instead, I navigate through these principles:

AI Adoption Principles

• One Vision, Many Lenses. Anchor the organization around a single AI north star, then translate it for each domain. While our AI team optimizes for accuracy and precision, Creative Technology experiments at the edges of possibility.

  
  

• Circulate, Don't Gatekeep. Move fluidly between departments to sense organizational pulse and facilitate change. Being a generalist becomes essential when you're bridging multiple domains of meaning.

  
  

• Live at the Frontier. Serve as both conduit and filter for this rapidly-evolving technology. You want to maintain the north star while protecting teams from hype fatigue and tool disappointment.

  
  

• Cultivate Intuition, Not Instructions. Your copywriters and researchers understand their domains better than you ever could. But they need someone who can help them feel the model's alien logic so they can improvise with it rather than against it.

  
  

• Fight the Default. AI intuition means developing sensitivity to when the model gravitates toward statistical mediocrity. In an age where everything tends toward the same beige average, this becomes your most valuable skill.

  
  

• Draw the Lines Early. It's tempting to let Meta generate your ads or surrender creative direction to algorithmic convenience. But AI without human intention will steadily erode what makes your brand distinctive.

  
  

• Efficiency Into Discovery. AI efficiency shouldn't just create more volume—it should create appetite for exploration. Use those productivity gains to push into territories you couldn't reach before.

This is how I navigate a space where nobody has complete answers: one foot grounded in operational precision, the other pushing AI into uncharted creative territories.

We automate the routine not to do more of the same, but to expand into the truly groundbreaking.