Jeremy Somers on building an AI-assisted creative agency, 80:20 in Humans + AI, AI-amplified storytelling, and the future of agencies (AC Ep48)

Amplifying Cognition

“True creativity comes from humans because it stems from our unique individual experiences of life. “

– Jeremy Somers

About Jeremy Somers

Jeremy Somers is Founder and Director of AI-assisted creative agency NotContent.ai, and of We Are Handsome. He has extensive experience as a Creative Director, working for brands such as Asos, Canon, Mercedes-Benz, Qantas, Spotify, and W Hotels.

Websites:

www.notcontent.ai

www.jeremysomers.com

Instagram: @notcontent.ai

Beehiv: notcontent.beehiiv

What you will learn

• Exploring Jeremy’s journey from analog to digital in the creative industry
• The pivotal role of generative AI in transforming creative processes
• How notcontent.AI merges AI tools with human creativity for enhanced productivity
• Addressing common misconceptions about AI replacing creative jobs
• Strategies for integrating AI into traditional creative agency workflows
• The future of creative agencies in an AI-driven world
• Insights on maintaining human creativity at the core of AI-assisted outputs

Episode Resources

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Claude-3-Opus
• ChatGPT 4o
• Fireflies (transcription tool)
• Whisper Memos (app)
• Canva
• Ethan Mollick
• notcontent.AI
• Generative AI

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Jeremy, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Jeremy Somers: Hey, Ross, thank you for having me.

Ross: So you’re a leader in AI-assisted creative agency work. Tell me more. Tell us more.

Jeremy: The story begins long before the world of generative AI and AI creativity. My career and life history have always been about creativity. And I started in traditional analog photography, when I was in my teens, and trends went through the whole transition into digital photography. And then I taught myself graphic design. And then I learned it through a very, very early Photoshop version on a bubble, iMac, and the colored ones. And then started working in some of the very first digital agencies in Sydney. And learning through the transition of like, there was no social media and other social media, there is no e-commerce now there is e-commerce, so it’s in digital agencies working on big brands, Nike, and Pepsi, and Microsoft, Samsung, etcetera, etcetera, through this whole transition. And so a lot of my career journey has been in transitional periods of, like, massive shifts in the thing that I’m doing, not just the tools that are available to us, but just societal level shifts of how we communicate as designers and creators and branding people to the outside world.

And I happened upon open APIs, Darley white paper very early on, probably coming up on, two and a half years since it was released, I think I’ll check that. But I haven’t found this like paper and nerdily, read through the entire thing, and then read through it again. And then I fully understood what was going on, I had this moment of, sort of cinematic-like, flashback, flash forward moment of, I see the end result of where everything I’ve ever done, creatively, how I’ve done, it has changed, but this is going to change everything in a way, which we’ve never seen before. So I have this, Pivotal epiphany. And I was like, whoa, okay, how can I learn more? One, and two, once I was able to learn more, and you know, so your generative AI suddenly became a thing. I was just like, rabid for learning and looking at tools and learning about who’s doing what and how to kind of get access to it as a creative and as an agency owner, and I happened into the right places at the exact right time. And did a whole bunch of testing things and playing around and just like nerding out on stuff and taught me a whole bunch of new skills and the new taxonomy and way of thinking, and then I thought, okay, how can I take all of this time that I’m spending and turn it into something commercially viable? And I see this end result?

We’re not there yet. The technology is not there yet. The people are not there. we’re so, so early on all of this stuff. But how can I, if I can translate it into some sort of commercial vehicle now? And then we’re talking two years ago, I’ll set myself and be way ahead. I’ve seen all of these massive other shifts, and I recognize this is the start of a shift. And I was never early on anything else. So maybe I could be early on this one. That’s how we get to notcontent.AI is one of one of the world’s first creative agencies, today’s AI assistant.

Ross: So, AI-assisted creatives. Let’s dig into that. So I mean, you’ve been talking about image generation, of course. There are other forms of communication, occurring, words and videos and smells and all sorts of things. So let’s have a look at the high level, and perhaps you can sort of dig down into detail. So what does that mean, when you’ve got creatives as in presumably creative humans working with tools, and how together they’re creating something better, faster, cheaper, more superlatives in whatever way?

Jeremy: That’s it. So along this journey over the last two years, one of the recurring themes that we’ve seen out in the public through mainstream media, even through our social platforms, and especially like places like LinkedIn is like, oh, no, all of the creatives are going to lose their jobs because these tools are doing their jobs. And that’s true to a certain degree. But one thing that I’ve really learned having done this, is that I actually think that true creativity, which comes from humans, because it comes from our specific individual experience of life, and the things that I’ve taken in are the things that are my output, that is not going to be replicated by AI, to the degree that humans are able to do it. Ai is an open slate, it’s like it’s an encyclopedia of everything. And so if it knows everything, it knows nothing until you ask it something super specific, but true creativity and the true creatives and the way that we’re able to think based on my individual inputs, I think the true creatives are going to be more valuable moving forward, not less, and maybe to an amplification of, you know, 10x 100x.

And I realized that because what I was seeing as gendered AI became more accessible to call it the masses, there was no creativity. We were suddenly given a series of tools that allowed our imaginations to run absolutely wild, and do anything that we wanted. And as a group, what we did was the same exact thing that everyone else was doing. We were all able to see the output because of social media, and the platforms that existed, even some of the tools and platforms themselves. I was like, oh, as a group, we’re not very creative. This is why I have, you know, sort of a long and storied career spanning multiple different industries that are widely separate from each other from fashion to like, lighting design, for rock concerts, to graphic design, to photography, because the thing that kept me going was my ability to think creatively and have the output be agnostic, but it doesn’t matter what the output is. I just needed to learn a series of tools to be able to design lighting for a rock concert. But the true creativity came with me sitting with a piece of paper.

So true creators are going to be the ones that stick. And that’s why I say AI-assisted creative, whenever I’m talking about this, because the AI is my assistant, the AI is whoever’s working with the studio, the agency, the AR is our assistant in a whole bunch of ways. And as you allude to, not just image generation, and now video generation words and too much more intense degree, as we’ve been doing over the last six months. From a strategy point of view, so much creative work that we do is strategy-based and needs a strategic baseline to be able to produce really interesting ideas. And then, the AI is really good at taking the grunt work of the production.

Ross: I’d like to dig into that. What I describe as humans plus AI workflow, where humans and AI are both elements in a sequence or network of things which create a wonderful output. So let’s talk about strategy. So, unpack that, where does the human do? What does the AI do? What’s the process?

Jeremy: So let me give you the overarching, like, finding that I, that I really figured out. Of course, the regular 80/20 rule that applies to everything in life applies here as well. And I was really like, how does it apply, then I figured out it actually applies backward. Based on what I’ve just said about humans and creativity, right? Humans are doing 10% of the work upfront. And especially like for us internally 10% of work at the end, in terms of finishing brand integration for campaigns, checking over everyone’s work, the AI is what gets in the middle 80% is done by the AI. And that’s 80%. However, the whole thing is flipped around. Because the 20% that the humans are doing is actually 80% of the meaningful work that is output at the end, right, so it’s 8020. And then it’s flipped around to be at 20 Again but in favor of the humans.

What that looks like for us on any creative job that we may do, from a strategy lead job through to the file outputs through to just like a client’s like, you know, monthly content to where we’ve already done the strategy where they brought strategy from another agency or another creative or in house, whatever it happens to be, is that those, that process of three steps, human AI human is set all the time. And for us, that looks like sitting with a piece of paper away from the computer for that first 10%. Knowing how to use the tools is really key, humans have to know how to use the tools, right, that’s going to become increasingly less important, which is the point of the AI tools, right? And being able to talk in natural language and you know, going from GPT to GPT4o and being able to just have a conversation, we’re seeing that in real-time, right? Communication has been getting easier with AI for the last two years since we’ve been doing it. We’ve gone from learning how to prompt for every single individual model or tool or whatever happens to be having a lot of learning there to spending a lot less time on that. But it’s still we need a workflow and figuring out whatever the creative job is so that comes into the studio, figure out what the workflow is to even get the AI to do its 80% of the grunt work for production on that.

Because at the moment, it’s not a single tool. For any job, we use probably half a dozen to a dozen tools on any particular job. A lot of them are AI, yes, a lot of them traditional, you know, there are things that I just cannot replace at the minute. And then both human school human skills and tools, 3d models being one of them, right, like, you know, this year at some point, by the end of the year, we’ll see a relatively good text to 3d model, AI model. However, we’re nowhere near there yet. So we still need 3d models, we still need retouches, we still need brand integration, we still need all of these things. So the first thing that we do for that first 10% is sit down and plan out what the workflow looks like, for the fastest route to the end of this job. What AI tools of the suite of many 1000s of them that we all have access to? is going to be the best? And how do we also amplify creativity? How do we do the best thing strategically for the client? So that requires that 10%? Once you have that figured out, then it’s a matter of just getting into the machine and letting the machine do its thing that you’ve asked it to do. And then the other end is just finishing and making sure that we all have our eyes on it. Is this what we said we were doing? Is this brief? Is this on brand, etc, etc? How can I dive into more detail for your OS?

Ross: I would imagine, though, then in the middle that there is, it’s not just a pre-framing, and then AI does the job then you’ve tidy up at the end. Because there’s a lot of curation, in the middle so for example 10 different versions, and I like that one, and let’s iterate on that one. So there’s a lot of presumably curation and iteration or you tell me what else is happening in that middle?

Jeremy: Yeah, there’s a lot of guiding, right? And within that middle 80% that the AI is doing, we’re switching tools back and forth, back and forth. So a good example, if you will, like a real-world example is there’s a website called inc file, which is just rebranded to be called busy. It’s a US website that lets you register your LLC, in any state that you want, does it all for you provides accounting, and like anything for your startup business, they will do you know, the paperwork and the registrations, and there’ll be a virtual mailbox, that sort of thing, right? Pretty dry. So they brought us in to produce mountains of content, the amount of content that they produce to be like the top of Google, right in terms of long-form blog content and their social. And that sort of thing is just and they’ve been doing it for a long time, is just massive, and they wanted to figure out a way to stop using stock photography, because it all looks the same, right? And try to use AI tools and AI-driven content to form this for them. From a visual perspective, at the moment, they still have a team of writers who are doing all of this and doing their written content, they’re not quite ready to skip over to AI-assisted written content. But from a visual perspective, they’re like, can you design us a system, a scalable system, not just can you give us some content that looks like humans doing, you know, entrepreneurial work, they’re very story driven, the founder of the company is like obsessed, I think he used to work at Nike. And he’s obsessed with just like the storytelling of how Nike runs.

Now, he’s got this very, very dry, boring, you know, SAS product, which he wants to apply branding and strategy and storytelling in a very Nike style. And so what we do is concept a way of not only producing the end content and making sure that that’s going to be great for them moving forward from a visual perspective, how can we use AI to amplify that, to make sure that it is one outputting more than they’ve ever seen and the amount of content that they need? And that it’s at the Brand level? And it’s the quality that is required? But two, how do we make it scalable? How do we make it so that when you have that 10% As a human, you’re concentrating on the real creative element, and everything else is almost automated? Alright, and so we trained a series of GPTs to tell stories about entrepreneurs, real-world stories, real-world right stories that mimic the real world about entrepreneurs. And each entrepreneur was given a name and a backstory because as an entrepreneur and as a business person, you have so much more going on than just what your businesses and so we trained the GPTs to help us create stories about people and make them feel as real as possible.

We tried a series where we go in and I can go in now and say, I don’t know what my, you know, I like setting up like starting keywords for this stuff. And it says GPT go Whatever it is, right? Or it says inc file go. And it prompts a couple of questions for, hey, here’s the character we’re creating today. It’s an awesome question. But then if I bring, I can bring in too much information or as little information as I wanted to give it some basics so that we’re not just doing the same thing all the time. But it now has to, it knows to go away and give that character a name and a backstory, where they live et cetera, et cetera. And then it checks it with me and gives me their bio and a backstory to write to their LinkedIn bio for them. And just like, we’re trying to create a person that mimics someone in the real world or with all the intricacies and all that sort of thing we asked for, it knows to give us certain personality traits. And it’s being creative and making a bunch of these things up based on the training that we’ve given it. We did all this manually for a bunch and then gave it all the information, and then sent it out to look at different places on the internet and different writing styles. So we train all these separate things and pull them together into this one model. And then it goes, Okay, cool. Do we love this and we craft it, we go back and forth a little bit.

And then we say, Okay, give it to me. Then it starts with write-ups and visual prompts. And it gives us all of those your prompting for a full series at the moment we do about 50 50-60 images per character, of basically a day in that character’s life of being an entrepreneur, where they live, you know, the time of year that it is their type of customers, you know, we have things that are like cool, we want to see them working at a computer for 35% of it, because busy is a technology company. And it’s about how we want to see them on their phone, because you can be busy on your phone, right? But we’ve given these parameters, we want to see them with other people, we want to make sure that we’re hitting diversity across everyone, not only with the type of people we’re creating but the type of people that they’re interacting with. But we want it to be specific to this person in Boston. So we sort of know that diversity breakdown of Boston, et cetera, et cetera. We want to see them doing grunt work as an entrepreneur, you do everything. So you want to see people doing things like carrying boxes to the post office, right, and scrubbing the floors or setting up a new studio or just doing that, as well as doing the stuff where you get to go in with your peers.

And you might be at a conference and literally, so it knows to create a huge series of prompts for us for all of this taking into account, all of the creative information that it’s come up with already about their character’s backstory. And we then take those, we’ve literally just last week. I managed to automate it so that those go into a bot that we built, which then sends it off to send things at the moment to two different sets of bottles we send mid-journey. And we can create a bot even though they have no IPI, we created a discord bot, basically to run all of those things without us having to touch anything around overnight to create all those images. And then we do it also through a comfy UI. It goes off with the comfy UI node and produces them through several different stable diffusion models, upscales them, and then outputs them at the other end. So then we come back at the other end of the, for the last 10%, and are able to pull everything into a FEMA board and look at it and go through it and see where we might need to wrangle things, all that sort of thing. That’s a process.

Ross: Nice! like thanks for sharing the details. I think that really brings it to life in terms of the amount of work that goes in, and prep work is everything.

Jeremy: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons why I’m not seeing a huge amount of competition, at least for us as an agency at the moment which they will be, is because everybody thinks that generative AI is a silver bullet for your creativity, right? The idea that you can go to any model, run by, you know, hundreds of different companies, and type in an apple here, or whatever it is, and get out a beautiful looking image that’s too irresistible for people to then be like, well, this is my job, I’m like, I’m just gonna go and do this and sell this to clients. Whereas that’s not the type of agency we are, or aspire to be. And so those types of things like connecting all those different tools and being able to do that, like there’s a lot of creative thinking and, and like, knowing what’s going on in the world of AI and the stuff that’s got actually going on in the world of AI where we sort of play is in like tiny little discord servers and like people on Twitter with like 300 followers who are creating the models to be able to then ask plug into several different sets of technology or workflows to output something new, right?

Ross: So we play too, around some of the specific tools you use, but let’s look at traditional agency. All right, you’re not a traditional agency, you’re able to shape it exactly the way you want from scratch so that’s kind of nice and easy. So then we’ve got traditional creative agencies across the marketing world and they know it’s easy to say other you know, the dinosaurs but you know, they’ve got Some great people have got some great clients, they’ve got some good processes. But their workflows, as we were talking about, are all kind of traditional. Either way, you get your briefing from the client, and then you get people involved to discuss it. And you do scoping, you do storyboard, you allocate to people and maybe get some freelance outside, and then you create some photos, and you show it to clients, whatever. So just at a high level, how do you think the workflows of existing creative agencies established creative agencies could or should be changing or evolving today?

Jeremy: One faster, much, much faster. The grunt work, like a lot of the stuff that happens in the timeline of a job in a career in a traditional agency, is not so much the creative work, right? They are a creative agency. But at least half the people if not three-quarters of the people sitting in that agency are non creatives. Right, which already doesn’t start to make sense because those people are doing a lot of work. Which, with a shortened timeline, because the production is if we lean on AI services, and tools to do production, there is no management of production. Because production is so fast, right? It’s almost like what’s a good analogy for a sushi train: a sushi train gets rid of the server, used to order on an iPad. And then the food comes out, I don’t need someone walking, I don’t need to chat with the server. Right? Which sometimes we like. But it’s just to try and get rid of it. You order an iPad, don’t need anyone to take your order, your water comes out, your food comes out, it comes out in a little current car or a train or whatever it is, and then it goes back to the kitchen. You don’t need that. Guess what, when you need to pay on the iPad, iPads doing it? Beep, beep, tap, you’re done.

Now, what do I need for that? In that scenario of a sushi train, would you need someone to prepare the food? I mean, they could strip it back to that. Yeah, right. At this idea. Yeah, you, you know, you might need someone to clean the table, etc, etc. And from an agency perspective, it’s the same thing, this whole middle section is. I’ve said in the past that it can completely cut out count managers, project managers, etc, etc. Which, at one point in the future will be the case for the foreseeable future. And I’m talking this sort of mid-range future of agencies, maybe five to even 10 years, right? We’re gonna need those people to be moving faster and taking on more work by using AI tools, and automation tools to be able to run instead of walk. Right, everything is the first thing that I said to you was everything’s going to be faster, everything needs to be faster, right? And so that’s it, we run into an agency with zero account managers, zero-project managers, right, and we use traditional project management tools, things like Trello, Basecamp, or whatever it happens to be. We use some AI-assisted stuff like motion to help with tasks, distribution calendar time, and that sort of thing. But I’m really interested in doing the extreme. And how big of an agency can I make whilst being at the extreme end, with none of this middle, these middle people, only creatives, we have creative directors at the top of the organization in which a brave comes in, and these are career creative directors who you would probably pay, you know, 1500 2000 $5,000 a day for their their brain, right.

But we now don’t need to pay them for a day, because we’re only having them do ideation. So we can make up for having them in for half a day, four hours, maybe five hours. Because these people are so good at what they do they can look at a brand they’ve never seen before. And I just know what that brand needs. This is what we’ve been training for. Right? We’ve done our 10-20 100,000 hours. So you have top-level creative directors who work very small amounts on a brief, they make a reverse brief, they might call together a mood board and we’re you know, as creative directors were really good and really quick and doing that stuff. Then it skips down all of those levels. It doesn’t have to go to anyone, it doesn’t have to be seen by anyone. It goes down to another level of creatives, which are really good on the AI tools. And they go and produce a ton of stuff based on the brief that we see. It will go to the client one time and the person who does that is generally in a narrow agency. It’s me because I’m the one who has sort of created this England scratch. And I’ve also had to create whole new ways of talking to clients and setting their expectations. They all know they’re coming into a brand new style of agency with a brand new set of rules. The majority of clients, as I’ve learned, talk to people hold their hand, and guide them through to this new world of creativity and how we produce things. Majority, you’re like, Yeah, great. Where, you know, we’d have had issues were instances where, even though they’re like, yeah, yeah, this is great. I can’t believe that Thailand’s reduced by 90%, and our outputs going up 3x, all of this sort of thing, where they struggle within the process to get their heads around this new way of doing things.

And that can lead to, you know, like, okay, cool, we need to pause, or they’re upset by something, or whatever it happens to be, this is always going to happen, we’re breaking the mold, right? And the bigger the client, the harder it is to do that the more hand-holding, they need to get them into a new process. As I explained to all of our clients, when I hold your hand through, especially the first job that a client comes in, for, at some point through this process, usually about halfway point, it’s going to click for you, and you’re gonna see what I see is the end result of more creative, this is going to change what you guys do creatively in your business forever. Not for this year, not for this campaign, but from here on out right when they get it. So a lot of my job at the minute is to have figured out how to describe and walk them through this new world that not only have I created, but I am still trying to create just so much of my AI-assisted creative agency journey has been the thinking and strategy work around. How do you charge for something like this? How do you charge when time is not a factor in your work anymore? All of this stuff? The creative part, the AI tech, the tooling, that’s almost like, it’s probably where 18-20.

Again, probably that’s like 20% of like, you’re learning how to use the tools and getting the outputs and putting the workflows together for the actual AI tooling. And the 80% of it is again, human thinking, strategy, creativity, how do we go about this, right? So many things, you’re trying to create a whole brand new agency that’s never been done before? Every part of it all the people who I’m sucking out of the middle part, are gonna forget, how are we doing their jobs? How do we do those jobs, which I’ve never done before? I’m like, I’ve always said that as a freelancer, or as my own agency, I’ve always had, I’ve been in between project management tools, because that’s just how my brain works. I’m just not good with, you know, I need visuals and like all these things. So it’s a, there’s a lot to go on and a lot to learn, a lot to invent, a lot of processes to invent. We’re trying to remove all of these sticking points around traditional agency and simplify it and make it faster. And there’s some of that stuff like, we’ll we’re in a stage now where there’s enough work on to have someone to help us with traffic management with Project Manager, right? And I’m like, what skills does the New World Project Manager have to have? We’re in the middle of figuring that out. I’m like, does that person exist? Or do I have to find someone to train them on a bunch of new skills and take their existing stuff and train them on how to do it again? I don’t know the answer to that yet. Oh, we’re literally in the middle of that right now.

Ross: It’s, yeah, there’s a lot to invent and reinvent. And in this world, and that’s partly skills, which we have is partly how you bring people together. And I think the big piece, which you kind of touched on is clients, and sort of where what happens on client side, because a lot of clients think, Oh, we got these tools too good. So we could, we can do things. And sometimes that’s a bit dangerous. But you know, it does also change, what happens on each side of that, hopefully, co creative relationship between the agency and the client.

Jeremy: And then we look, we run into, we run into that conversation a lot, where the client says, look at our art director, our designer, like they have been using a new journey, they’ve done all these things. And my answer is great. Like, I want you guys to go away and figure this out and use it. That’s one thing. But you’re still sitting here listening, like listening to me talk about AI. And you’re here to see if you can work with us, right because we’ve managed to do some we can do stuff that your designer has not figured out how to get out how to do your designer has access to a tool the AI tools our tools just like that’s like saying three years ago, well but our designer has access to Photoshop we have Adobe Suite we have Canva it’s the same thing it’s just faster with a better output the playing field has been leveled for base output to anyone on the planet is able to is able to output right. We it’s the same AI tools are just like you can make anything as they acclimate in Photoshop or Illustrator, anything you give it enough time, but it can do it in several seconds instead of several weeks. Right And so I don’t look at that as a oh, what does that mean? So let’s see, what does that mean for us? Moving forward? How do I do this? I’m like, we’re creating something just like a creative agency is creating something where the creators that we have is what we go from. Right production, as is insight, I tell clients, consistently, we are creative direction as a service, we get access to creative directors. Now, you could never afford to pay to bring in a house, right, either full time, or on a contract basis. That’s just like, impossible, you now have access to those brands, we are creative direction as a service production as an output is just what we do physically.

Ross: Yep. What are just any particular tools you like a lot in what you do?

Jeremy: I mean, where it kind of like you said to almost like school, agnostic, I test a lot of tools. One of the really fun, like nerdy things of the last couple of years is because I’ve been so early, and in those communities, like I get to do alpha and beta tests, like a ton of stuff, right? And we just use different tools for different things, depending on what it is right? And different tools, depending on the complexity of the client and how large the client is. We’ve had a bunch of clients at sort of like Google and Yahoo and Tommy Hilfiger level, where they have full legal teams, and they’re like, here’s a list of tools that we know about you. Journey, even like Leonardo AI, like they, some of them know, and some of them, like, send us the terms of conditions. But the tools that you are planning on using right now, like, cool, no, no, no, we just don’t know enough. Now we’re not opening ourselves to any sort of litigation or anything. So we’ve had to create new ways of doing things around tools. So I like that we are tool agnostic, if we can learn our tools, and you know, get the same output, then great. So, I mean, look, things that we do like using where we had to say greven, like LLM agnostic, and like things are so close now between attaching to T and claws, like I really liked him, he was good, we feel as a as an ability to think more creatively than necessarily to Chat GPT, but there’s a bunch of follies that come with it. We’ve trained a lot of our own custom GPT’s, with touch with the team. To do specific things for specific clients or specific jobs, we find that a lot harder to do with a board. And then there’s visual models that we also have different tools that allow us to, to train.

Again, you haven’t heard me say the word like developer or coder or anything, because we’re all creatives, right. So we also need to figure out ways in which there are tools that exist, which make it easy for us as non tech people to do it and use. And we, we have people also create some of our own tools based on workflows that we’ve created. So we have a bunch of internal stuff that we do, a lot of things come from company UI workflows, because you just have a ton of nodes and different models that you can just bring in. And we’re now at the stage where we’re creating internal front end facing apps for just us internally based on our company UI workflows to make it faster and easier for people internally to use, which at some point will have, you know, commercial relevance to be able to output those and b2b or, you know, tell them inside other agencies, whatever happens to be, but for the moment, we’re just in into creating things that make our work better faster.

Ross: So just to round out the next two or three years, what’s exciting where? What does your organization look like? What are the underpinnings of it? Of this new AI? First of all, it’s a C++ agency.

Jeremy: In my two or three years in the AI world, Ross has like 900 years. Okay, so we will be completely tool agnostic, most likely, you know, if we’re talking two or three years, any major model or anyone that we have access to be Adobe’s canvas, open AI’s? And like all, almost all models will be multimodal.

So for us, it’s for us. It’s tool agnostic, right? Which means also it’s fully conversational. So it’s one tool, right, whichever one we decide to use, or a series of thereof, or whatever. But essentially, it’s one tool where we can now talk, we don’t we don’t need even the bottom level, the creative directors will be able to do the work and it’ll come out almost at the time of return on brief, which means so much faster than even we’re already doing it and we produce campaigns faster than almost anyone on the planet. It’s going to be a race for creative brains. Right? And the thing that I’ve really realized is like, do truly creative people who understand who are style agnostic. And as they say, like media and output agnostic, etc, etc. There’s no substitute for time in the market for that, right? The people who I’m talking about who are these creative brands, everyone is at least 40. Right? Like to be able to take any client or any group or any brand that comes in to be able to do it. It requires like Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 Hour Rule, it requires a half a lifetime of experiences being creative inputs in locking that stuff away, knowing where to go out to find more inspiration, like all this other stuff, that stuff that AI is not going to be able to replicate and not in a true creative way. And so I think that the true creatives are going to be much scarcer. And as I say, much more valuable. And I think that there’s like a version of the agency, which is just like, a dozen really good creative directors, and is able to, we’re able to just like, do anything that anybody wants, with a bunch of AI tools at our disposal, plus automation. I think that’s what the property looks like. I think it’s just like, less and less and more talented people.

Ross: Right, well, it’s so we’ll be watching closely, over the next few years , how this unfolds. And as I Well, we are a leader in this space, so very much looking forward to seeing where you get to it. So thanks so much for sharing your time and your insights today, Jeremy.

Jeremy: All good. Glad I can help. Thanks, Ross.

The post Jeremy Somers on building an AI-assisted creative agency, 80:20 in Humans + AI, AI-amplified storytelling, and the future of agencies (AC Ep48) appeared first on amplifyingcognition.