The best creative work still has fingerprints on it   

How is AI helping your team in the day-to-day creative process? 

When the bar for what’s possible rises, the creative bar rises. We used to be beguiled by seeing people fly in a Burberry ad or seeing thousands of bouncy balls cascading down the streets of San Francisco. But now anyone can create the most fantastical images, so the creative leaps need to be bigger. AI means we no longer have to worry about how we create, we only need to think about what we want to create. And that’s hugely liberating. AI allows us to experiment faster, think bigger, and bring ideas to life.   

One of the biggest benefits of AI is how it helps us more easily sell a vision to our clients. But that’s also the challenge: it can leave less to the imagination. The leap of faith between idea and execution is shrinking, and with that, some of the magic can be lost. There’s a danger that overly polished AI visuals can limit a director’s creative space.    

Used in the right way, AI pushes us to think more conceptually and collaboratively. Bringing design, direction and creative thinking closer together, it helps us build on one another’s ideas more easily and deliver a shared vision.    

Which platforms or tools have genuinely enhanced your creative thinking and workflow?   

We use a whole host of AI tools and the list grows every week as the industry and technology are moving so fast. But broadly speaking, we use two types of tools: those for research and those for creation.  

For research, we’re using AI-assisted search platforms like Flim.ai to help build quick visual mood boards from films, music videos and ads, much faster than traditional searches.   

For creation, we obviously use platforms like Chat GPT and Midjourney, but we’re finding that what truly elevates our workflow are integrated systems that combine multiple AIs. For example, Flora (a node-based sequential AI tool) lets us generate and mix images, videos and text in one ecosystem, which improves speed and efficiency. Once the concept is solid, we’re using tools like Sora, Runway/VO3, Veo, Topaz and Magnific for refinement and upscaling.      

Beyond the creative team, how is AI helping other parts of the agency - from strategy to production - work together differently? 

Much like the internet when it first arrived, AI is helping us do things we could never do before. Instead of spending hours in a library, we now type a few words into Google. AI is simply the next step on that journey, helping us reach better solutions, quicker.   

This is true across the entire agency.

Beyond the creative team, AI helps speed up laborious processes in strategy and research, like editing focus groups. But perhaps what’s even more interesting is that we now have access to  Aaru, which is changing the way we test theories and look for insights. This technology lets us simulate human behaviour and predict how audiences might respond to everything from brand platforms and creative ideas to live events, influencer campaigns and earned media. It’s transforming how we research and giving us a way to defend great ideas before they’re even made.   

How do you balance instinct and intuition with what AI can generate or suggest? 

In the age of AI, common sense doesn’t just go out of the window. It’s still important to trust your gut. If anything, you have to be more astute with your instinct and intuition. AI can generate ideas, spot trends and make suggestions, but it can’t feel what’s right for a brand or brief.   

And let’s remember, currently, AI is nothing without a prompt. It needs to be pushed in interesting directions. Use the machines, but always trust your gut. Abandon instinct and intuition at your peril, they may be our last great weapons. For now, nothing can replace a human who knows when something just feels right.    

Where do you think AI risks hindering creativity rather than helping it?    

AI will hinder creativity when we let it do the thinking for us. If you ask AI to make an ad, it will serve up derivations of the same thing based on what it already knows: a finished product that’s polished and perfect. The Instagram version, rather than the reality of being a human - the imperfections, quirks, the hunches and bits that don’t quite fit.    

AI struggles with charm and authenticity. It doesn’t witness the raw, human process of creating an ad - the chaos that comes from dissecting the brief and bouncing ideas. It doesn’t question the brief, push back on a suggestion or just shout an idea louder. It tells you what you want to hear. And that can be dangerous.   

Creativity isn’t meant to be easy. It’s meant to make you wrestle with an idea until it feels new. If AI takes that away, along with the lightbulb moments that we all get so much satisfaction from, it risks stopping us thinking all together. It has the potential to make us lazy and less creative, and that would be a travesty.  

Relying too much on AI also puts us at risk of destroying human ingenuity. These platforms are pulling from the same sources to paint a very specific picture of how things are. It doesn’t understand the difference of our experiences or how we’ll respond to an idea. And we’ve all seen the way AI writes, which is already creeping into our everyday language. It’s rhetorical, it’s predictable and sometimes you can feel the American influence. Copywriting used to be an art, creating a brand voice with rhythm, cadence, tone and character. But does AI care about style and tone like we do? I’m not sure it does.   

I’ve always liked the Chuck Palahniuk quote “All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring”. That’s the real risk with AI. It could make us all sound the same. And the one thing creativity should never be is boring.    

If AI builds from existing work, what does “original” mean to you now?      

Has AI played a role in FCB’s recent campaigns, and if so, where in the process has it been most valuable?        

How are clients responding to AI in creative development - with excitement, caution, or a bit of both?           

It depends on the client. Some worry about its authenticity and how fake it can feel. Others think it can do everything far more quickly and for a cheap price, which at the moment just isn’t true. Not if you want it to be good.      

Education is still key, because many think it can do more than it can. We have to continue to show that we still need craft, copywriting, a human eye and human emotion to really move people and have a meaningful business impact.   

Has AI changed how you visualise and present ideas to clients or internal teams?              

AI has been transformational in the way we visualise and present ideas to clients. It helps us bring our creative visions to life, moving from storyboards or drawing to presenting almost finished visual concepts. But that’s the problem - these outputs aren’t truly finished. There’s still a lot of work and skill required to fully realise a great idea, and I can’t do that as well as a great director or photographer. As I’ve often told clients, the final execution will look different when we shoot it, and that difference is where human creativity and expertise make all the difference. 

How do you handle the current public scepticism or negativity around AI in creative work?              

I think it’s helpful to remember the debate isn’t binary. It’s not as simple as “is AI good or bad”, or “are the machines better than humans” or vice versa. The truth is this: AI isn’t great at producing creative work on its own and humans can create even better work with the help of AI.    

While AI can help shape an idea, it can’t give it that spark of imperfection that makes something feel alive. It’s like the difference between a flawless CGI performance and a real actor nailing a scene with quirks you didn’t expect. One moves you, the other just looks like an impressive trick. People can spot when something’s been over-polished a mile off. The best creative work still has fingerprints on it - a bit of chaos, a wobble, some soul. That’s what makes it human.   

Scepticism is good, but reluctance is counterproductive. Hoping innovations like AI will all just go away is running away from amazing new possibilities. The trick is to use AI to get to stronger ideas faster, but never to replace the messy, emotional, human part of creativity. That’s where the magic lives.   

What part of creativity do you hope AI never replaces - and what part do you think it could genuinely improve?             

The feeling you get when you have a great idea, or you see a great idea created by another person. I’m not sure AI will ever replace that connection between human beings. Do I want to go to a gallery to see art created by a machine? Or read a poem written by ChatGPT? Would Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano concerto be so beautiful if you didn’t feel his emotion when he wrote it and a real orchestra played it? I think there is something in the emotional leap another person makes that really hits us.

"You just don’t get the same dopamine hit from AI that you do when you have an original thought or appreciate someone else’s feelings and emotions. We’ve all experienced the joy of a lightbulb moment - the feeling like the sun coming out when you have a good idea. If a computer does that for us, it takes away the reward, which is a very human thing and may even be the reason we’re creative."

For Lee, the real test of creative work hasn’t changed. It’s not how it’s made but whether it connects. Campaigns like Andrex’s 'Get Comfortable', created during his time at FCB London, cut through because they tap into something recognisably human - insight, empathy and a point of view.

 AI may transform how ideas are brought to life, but it doesn’t replace the thinking behind them. And that, ultimately, is where the difference still lies.