Creativity Isn’t Losing Its Seat at the Table.

6 Oct

It’s Finally Being Given the Whole Table.

For years, creative leaders have been told we need to earn a seat at the table, as though creativity were a slightly unruly guest waiting outside the boardroom until the serious conversations about strategy, technology and growth had finished.

We’ve been expected to prove that creativity drives effectiveness, defend the commercial value of brand and explain why originality matters, only to be brought into the process once the important decisions have already been made. The strategy is set, the technology selected, the customer journey mapped and the process designed, then someone turns to the creative team and asks us to make it engaging.

AI could expose how backwards that model has always been.

I was thinking about this while listening to Jo Pettifer, Vice President of Marketing at Salesforce UK and Ireland, discussing the rise of what she calls the “A-shaped CMO”. Her model rests on two pillars: technical mastery on one side and humanity, creativity, and storytelling on the other. The crossbar brings them together through collaboration between humans and autonomous agents.

On the surface, this sounds like another argument for marketing leaders to become more technologically fluent, and they absolutely should. As Pettifer pointed out, it is difficult to lead an organisation through this change if your experience of AI extends no further than using ChatGPT to polish an email.

But through the eyes of a Creative Director, a more interesting shift is taking place. Creativity is no longer simply responsible for what the system produces. It is becoming responsible for shaping the system itself.

That is a much bigger job.

The technology isn’t the differentiator. AI can already analyse customer data, create synthetic audiences, generate campaign variations and optimise activity dynamically. Pettifer described autonomous agents that can move investment towards the campaigns that are working while equipping marketers with the insight needed to make better decisions.

Those capabilities are impressive, but they won’t remain distinctive for long. As more organisations gain access to similar technologies, the ability to produce, personalise and optimise at scale will become expected rather than exceptional.

The real advantage will lie in knowing what any of it is for.

Technology can help produce more content, but it can’t rescue a weak idea. It can create endless variations of a campaign, but if the original proposition is bland, all you have created is more efficient blandness. It can optimise towards the outcome it's been given, but it can’t decide whether that outcome is meaningful, whether the story is worth telling, or whether the experience feels remotely human.

Those questions demand creativity, judgement and a clear understanding of people. They shouldn’t be left until the end of the process, because by then the most important creative decisions have already been made.

Brand guardianship can’t be a final check

One of the most revealing moments in the discussion came when Pettifer said she no longer sees himself as leading only human teams. She now leads human and agentic teams, with some of those agents already interacting directly with customers as brand ambassadors.

If autonomous agents speak on behalf of a business, help customers, and shape how they experience its brand, creative leadership cannot be reduced to checking the tone of the final output.

Someone needs to define how those agents behave, what they prioritise and where their boundaries sit. Someone needs to decide what makes the experience recognisably yours, rather than another polished but generic interaction built from the same technology everyone else is using.

This is where Pettifer made an important distinction. The usual language around AI keeps the “human in the loop”, but she argued that the human needs to be “at the helm”.

That is not the same as retaining final approval. Being at the helm means setting the direction before the work begins, rather than waiting at the end to correct what the system misunderstood. It means defining the idea, ambition, standards and guardrails clearly enough for human and digital teams to work from them.

If AI is becoming part of the workforce, brand thinking has to become part of its infrastructure.

Creativity is moving upstream

Perhaps the most significant implication is that creative leadership can’t remain focused solely on outputs. If AI is reshaping workflows, customer experiences and decisions across the business, creativity has to be present when those systems are designed.

Questions about which data matters, what the system should optimise for, where personalisation becomes intrusive and when human intervention is necessary may sound technical or operational, but they directly shape how a brand behaves and how people experience it.

They are creative decisions, whether or not a creative person is in the room to make them.

This is why I don’t think creativity is fighting for relevance in an AI-led organisation. It is being presented with a much larger area of responsibility, one that moves beyond campaigns and content into the systems, experiences and behaviours that define the brand.

But we should be careful not to celebrate too quickly, because being handed the whole table comes with an expectation that we understand everything happening across it.

Creative leaders will need enough technical fluency to challenge how systems are built, enough commercial understanding to connect creativity to growth, and enough confidence to bring a human perspective into conversations dominated by efficiency. Instinct and taste still matter, but we also need to become better at articulating why something works, what makes it distinctive and how creative judgement can become a principle rather than a final flourish.