AI Won’t Replace Creatives. Creatives Who Ignore It Will Replace Themselves.
A practical take on where AI belongs on a creative team, and where it doesn’t.
I lead a creative team. I’ve watched the AI conversation in our industry, and in the office, swing between two equally useless positions: panic that the work is over, and dismissal that it’s all a gimmick.
Neither position helps a designer at 4 p.m. with three deliverables due and a brief that changed twice since lunch.
So here’s where I’ve landed after actually using these tools with a working team, not just reading about them.
What AI is genuinely good at (and you should stop pretending otherwise)
The first 30%. First drafts, first layouts, first ten headline options, first pass at a content calendar. The blank page is the most expensive part of creative work, and AI kills the roadblock it in seconds.
The last 10%. Resizing, versioning, captions, alt text, transcriptions, translations, the fifteen aspect ratios every social platform demands. This is the work that can cause burn out for talented people, and none of it is why they got into the field.
Research and synthesis. Reading forty pages of partner feedback and telling you the four things that actually matter. Pulling patterns out of a season of engagement data. Drafting a recap so you can spend your time on the insights and metrics.
Being a sparring partner. Asking it to argue against your concept before leadership does.
If your team isn’t using AI for those things, you’re paying senior people to do junior work, and you’re shipping slower than teams that are using AI.
What AI is bad at (and always will be, for our purposes)
Taste. It can generate a thousand options. However, it cannot tell you which one is right for this brand, this city, this moment. That judgment, and thought leadership, is why you hired for the job.
Relationships. It has never sat in a locker room, argued with a partner, or read the room when a player wasn’t feeling the shoot. Creative in sports is a people and relationship business first.
Culture. It reproduces what already exists. It cannot originate from inside a community, and it will happily hand you something that looks like culture without understanding it. If you read my last piece on giving back to culture, you already know why that’s dangerous.
Accountability. When the work misses, AI doesn’t sit in the meeting. You do.
How I’m actually running it with a team
Everything gets a human name on it. No piece of work ships with AI as the last set of eyes. A person is responsible for every output, full stop.
We use it to raise the floor, not the ceiling. AI makes average work fast. The goal is to spend the time it saves making the important work exceptional, not to make more average work.
We’re transparent internally, and honest externally. The team knows what’s AI-assisted. We don’t pass off generated imagery as photography, and we don’t put words in an athlete’s mouth.
Craft still gets protected. Photography, design systems, the hero creative, the storytelling that defines the brand: those stay in human hands on purpose. Not out of nostalgia, but because that’s where the value lives.
The real risk isn’t the tool
The risk is that leadership sees the speed and decides creative is now cheap. That’s the conversation we have to get ahead of.
AI doesn’t reduce the need for creative judgment. It multiplies the volume of decisions that require it. Every option it generates is a choice a human has to make. The teams that understand this will use the tools to become more strategic. The teams that don’t will use them to become a content factory, and content factories get their budgets cut.
Which is why this connects to everything else in this series. Speaking the P&L, building real experiences, showing up for culture: none of that can be automated. It’s the part of the job that gets more valuable the faster everything else gets.
Practical ways to start
Pick one repetitive task your team hates. Automate it this week.
Pick one piece of work that defines your brand. Declare it human-only and mean it.
Have the budget conversation with your leadership before they have it about you and your team.
Fourth in a series on marketing, brand, and the business of sports. Previously: Creative As A Line Item, Giving Back To Culture, and Why The Game Is The Least Important Part. Next: The Brand Is The Business.
// A Nine28 Publication