Meet your M-AI-Ker | LBBOnline

In part two of today’s LBB & Friends Beach double-bill at Cannes Lions, we tried to forget the hype and scare stories in order to find out how AI is actually disrupting everyday workflow strategists and creatives. and producers. Where is it working well, what frustrations or gaps are becoming apparent, and what are we learning about live projects?

The panel included PJ Pereira, founder and creative president at Pereira O’Dell, Drew Weigel, senior director, 3D and immersive at Shutterstock, Carren O’Keefe, creative director at Digitas, Dan Gardner, co-founder of Code and Theory and Priti Mhatre, managing director of strategic consulting and AI at WPP and Hogarth.

Priti sees this working on three levels with increasing levels of depth: helping non-creatives with mundane tasks like writing emails, then on a creative level (“content creation, large-scale local content creation , hyper-relevant content, understanding data signals” ), and third, completely rethinking the content supply chain with AI, finding ways to do “AI-first work.”

As someone who has led a business at the convergence of technology and creativity for over two decades, Dan has taken a naturally contrarian point of view. Everyday life isn’t really what interests him. “We all use this tool because it’s a better tool. And the tools are evolving,” he said. “But that’s not what’s interesting.” What interests Dan is that “the internet sucks” and AI could help us all change that.

Carren admitted that the joke of Cannes this year is asking people “have you heard of AI?” We are all overexposed to thought leadership on how this will change everything. But it’s true. “It’s going to be a big, fundamental change and we’re going to remember this moment,” she said.

There has always been a suite of tools using AI, Shutterstock’s Drew noted. They have improved recently. But with demand for 3D content growing, he highlighted how AI has the power “to meet that demand at scale.” This is the app that Drew is passionate about.

In true creative president style, PJ compared the shift from traditional ways of working to AI to riding a horse when you’re used to riding a bike. “It makes decisions no matter what you want – it’s a different way of managing computers.” Another metaphor if you prefer from PJ – “A friend of mine told me that using AI is like having a slightly drunk intern every day, so we don’t know what’s going to come back. “It doesn’t seem like something that would fit simply into advertising the way we do it, he suggested: “I’m not sure what we’re doing should be what we’ve been doing and it should probably be something completely new. it’s possible,” he noted, but admitted that it was more of a provocative question than an answer.

AI is difficult to get right, but Drew emphasized that it requires the right creative eye and process. “It’s a big challenge between expectations and reality,” he said. We’ve all had less than satisfactory results working with these tools. That said, it’s still pretty exciting. “If this is the worst it can seem, it’s a very interesting future,” he added.

It hasn’t been completely revolutionary, Dan continued, sharing his surprise at agencies from traditional backgrounds talking about a tool like it’s going to change everything. “One thing I was wrong about was that I thought the death of traditional advertising would have happened years ago. But you know what? Now all I hear is traditional ad agencies saying, “We’re so good at AI because we’re doing stable delivery, we’ve improved our process, and we can get data now.” » Like, great, welcome to the world.

These tools have allowed creatives to play a less hands-on role. “If you think of AI as automating and democratizing content production, the role of creatives becomes that of curation,” Priti said, although Dan disagreed, arguing that imagining things is much more intrinsic to the creative process than simply applying one’s tastes to decide which is best. good option.

The future is not bright, he said. It will be the opposite before long. “It will inspire and stimulate us to be creative.” It is in processing data to make sense of humanity that the power of AI lies. “I will understand human needs, wants and desires, I will build systems that can take all the crappy parts of the job and refine them. But at the highest level, it will inform me about user needs, wants and desires to come up with incredible ideas.