Most creative teams do not struggle to generate ideas. They struggle to deliver at pace, at scale, with quality, and with a review process that keeps everyone aligned. That is why Creative Operations matters. When teams ask whether AI will transform creative, the more useful questions are operational: will it reduce rework, increase iteration speed, and enable more variations without losing control of quality or brand?
A capability can look impressive in isolation and still be difficult to operationalise. Switching to an unfamiliar workflow has real cost, particularly under pressure. The more stakeholders involved in approvals, the more that cost shows up. Tools that win in production are often the tools that reduce friction rather than the tools with the longest feature list.
However, it is not enough to expect AI to slot into today’s ways of working. To get genuine value, teams’ skillsets, creative operations, and production behaviours need to change. The way we brief needs to become more structured and more explicit about intent, constraints, and what ‘good’ looks like.
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The way we think about production and shoots also needs to evolve, with clearer decisions about what is captured, what is generated, and what is best achieved through hybrid approaches.
Dan Hunt
COE Lead, Content Automation ICP
This is an operational shift, not a single tool decision. It affects how work is planned, how roles are defined, how iterations are managed, and how quality is safeguarded.
Organisations that treat AI as a workflow and capability change, rather than a plug in, tend to make faster progress and avoid repeated rework.
There is another structural factor worth acknowledging.
By 2027, top-performing marketing organisations are four times more likely to consolidate over 50% of their technology stack.*
Some large agency networks increasingly deploy proprietary or network standard tooling across their client bases. That can create consistency at scale, but it may also reduce flexibility for teams that want to evaluate and adopt additional specialist tools.
This is one reason ICP’s role can be distinct. As a tech agnostic partner, we can evaluate options across ecosystems, work with what is already in place, and recommend changes based on operational fit rather than on a preferred vendor path.
*StackAdapt 2026 - The State of Programmatic Advertising 2026