In the age of AI, is the current creative studio fit for purpose?

A bunch of designers, a couple of video whizz kids, and, if you’re lucky, a writer. It’s a familiar configuration. A creative studio built for briefs that asked for logos, decks, maybe a film or two. And for a time, it worked. Until it didn’t.

What we’ve called “creativity” in commercial settings has, in many cases, calcified into a set of repeatable outputs rather than the pursuit of unexpected answers. A team built to deliver visuals will deliver visuals. They’ll do it well. But when creativity becomes synonymous with execution, we lose something vital: the possibility of true invention.

The future model needs a fundamental rethink. But first, let’s go back a bit.

The Bauhaus wasn’t a design studio; it was a radical school of thought. A salon. I doubt they knew what a deliverables deck or brand guidelines even were. They were poets, potters, weavers, sculptors. Artists trained to see the world differently and compelled to shape it in ways it hadn’t been shaped before. This wasn’t about craft versus concept. It was about both. It was about solving real problems with imagination, not style.

Contrast that with today’s creative teams. Many are built around specific tools, formats and deliverables, which is fine when you’re asked to make what you’ve already made before. But as we head towards a world where AI can generate a beautiful logo or a looks-like-it-was-filmed-at-Leavesden launch film in minutes, the currency of creative value shifts. Pretty doesn’t cut it anymore. Speed doesn’t either. The edge is not in making, it’s in meaning.

So, here’s a potentially biased thought from an ex-copywriter: the most important role in tomorrow’s creative team might be… the writer.

Yes, the copywriter you’ve buried under banner ads. The brand storyteller who’s mostly proofreading someone else’s vision, mission, values deck. Let’s look at them differently – the writer as artist, as strategist, as prompt magician. Because the future of creative work will depend on the ability to ask better, stranger, more specific questions, ones that nudge the machine toward the unexpected or fantastical.

AI, for all its generative brilliance, is a mirror held up to our inputs. It cannot hallucinate brilliance on its own. It needs intention. Direction. A spark. And that spark, increasingly, will come from the person who knows how to wield language as a tool of creative alchemy.

And yet, not everyone will want to live in the digital slipstream. Nor should they.

There’s another path. A counterweight. The return to the real. Today’s creatives might rediscover relevance not by racing AI, but by escaping it. By stepping off-screen. By working with actual materials in actual space, where no prompt can replicate texture, time or touch. Perhaps we’ll see the reemergence of the Arts & Crafts movement within the guts of brand consultancy. Hand-stitched stories. Sculpted strategies. Creativity that leaves a fingerprint.

Maybe the super-team of the future isn’t a pack of designers and a videographer or two. Maybe it’s a constellation: writers fluent in digital manipulation, partnered with a rotation of artists-in-residence who challenge the brief from inside out. Imagine what might happen if we replaced “resources” with provocateurs. If the goal wasn’t just deliverables, but discoveries.

No, AI won’t replace the current generation of creatives as a breed. But it might knock off those who can’t expand their idea of what creativity can mean. Those can’t adapt, won’t explore, don’t ask better questions. The ones who stay in the lane they know and hope the lane still exists next year.

It’s not novel to say AI won’t replace human creativity, but it is true. I really do believe it won’t and can’t. But the question knocking around my noggin’ is this: has what we’ve been offering for the past few decades truly been the best of human creativity? Or just a refined kind of production?

The shape of the creative team must change, not just to survive, but to matter. To make work that’s not just seen but felt. Not just efficient, but electric. Whether we channel our humanity into the physical or the digital, the undeniably real or the fantastically artificial, creatives, we’re under the microscope, so let’s show’em what we can do!