When AI Joins the Team, Humans Still Want Final Cut
GDP, Rich Talent Group and Sid Lee reveal their strategies for harnessing AI while preserving what makes their work distinctly valuable.
At La Fête, a kyu House event held earlier this year to showcase the kyu Pulse companies, Sid Lee and Digital Kitchen hosted “Blended Creativity,” an exercise in AI personas. With a different large language model (OpenAI o3, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Claude Opus) standing in as a creative team member (copywriter, marketer, strategist), the audience was encouraged to put the AI through its paces by crafting a brief for the models to fulfill. The reviews of the output were mixed (creativity is subjective!), but watching the possibilities surface in seconds was still an impressive feat.
What comes next is the big question: How are people with decades of creative excellence and professional experience reshaping their practices? What happens when world-class thinkers meet a new class of intelligence? We spoke with a small group of makers and thinkers at multidisciplinary global creative agency Sid Lee, creative agency GDP, and executive recruiting firm Rich Talent Group (RTG) to find out how AI is impacting their work and what they are doing to meet the moment.
The AI story moves quickly — tools are updated, partnerships announced, studios established — but the companies of kyu are trying to navigate the change thoughtfully.
GDP: Embracing an Inflection Point
As a creativity agency with journalistic DNA, GDP has been carefully considering how to apply AI to its work. The company recently set up an AI working group, moving from curious experimentation to intentional formalization. GDP’s small working team has dedicated leads looking into intellectual property, copyright, privacy, safety, and ethics; internal best practices (with an eye toward fun, easier and efficient outcomes) and external client services.
That latter means “the AI-led services, or AI-informed services that are going to be most helpful and allow us to show up,” says partner, head of editorial Marcus Wohlsen. “Clients will want us to be out ahead.”
Creative provenance is a hotly debated topic, but thus far, GDP’s tech-heavy clientele has encouraged the agency to utilize AI. Wohlsen describes its work with Microsoft’s WorkLab, which includes communicating how businesses will be transformed by AI, as “uniquely valuable” in that it gives GDP front row seats to possibilities. “We’ve seen and helped them tell the story across functions,” he says, “from Legal to HR to Finance as they’ve used agents to transform their processes.” So while GDP might not be in the same place as Microsoft, its work does inform them.
Just getting comfortable using AI was a big step for GDP. “Creative folks, understandably, are a team with a lot of integrity and rigor,” Wohlsen says. “There’s an instinctive hesitation to say, ‘I got help.’”
“We all are figuring this out together, and the best way to do that is to be open,” he advises. “You can look at the hero art on the Work Trend Index we did in collaboration with Microsoft and see the illustration; the credit is a human and AI.”
Wohlsen’s take is that AI adoption should always be about improving outcomes or the work. AI might be “raising the floor” by elevating the minimum standard of work, but he wonders if that means it will be harder for everyone to stand out. AI offers efficiency, but differentiation and creative excellence require human input and effort.
As an editor, Wohlsen says he treats an AI collaborator as he would any writer: “You can get a piece of text to where you like, but the further down the road you get, sometimes, it’s diminishing returns.” In those instances, he’ll take over. Like any creative partner, AI has to meet GDP’s standard every time.
Sid Lee: Futurecasting
Sid Lee continues to refine its “Blended Creativity” exercise with different audiences, most recently at C2MTL in May. These real-time displays are just one way Sid Lee is keeping apace, having decided early on it should be at the forefront of this creative revolution. Yanick Bédard (EVP, Innovation Design & Strategy) and Jean-Francois Lavigne (Creative Director, Innovation Lead) describe themselves as “change management pushers” helping Sid Lee’s creative, strategy, account, and production teams adapt and adjust their ways of working.
An innovation team was formed in January to “push the boundaries” of AI; experimentation is encouraged. “Every time there’s a new model, we get asked for access,” says Lavigne.
Thus far, Sid Lee’s internal initiatives include tools such as their AI chat platform, built on open-source software with custom-deployed models like Corina, which helps maintain the agency’s tone of voice and is based on a real Sid Lee employee.
The team is excited by the potential of polymorphic experiences — AI-powered interfaces that adapt tone, visuals, and behavior in real time based on each user’s mood, needs, and cultural context. These systems go beyond utility to enable brands to interact more like humans do — empathetically and intelligently. (Think: a digital mirror that not only suggests outfits, but changes its tone and appearance depending on how the shopper feels.)
As Sid Lee’s internal boot camps evolve, their impact has extended beyond the agency. A major Canadian grocery chain recently requested its own AI training session, eager to explore how these tools could reshape its customer experience.
Like GDP, the “artisan-led” Sid Lee wants people to have the last word on the output. “We will remain human owners of our ideas and creative work,” agrees Bédard, cautioning, “AI is an amazing liar.”
“We decided early on to provide the tools and the guiding principles for all employees,” says Bédard. In addition to human sign-off, that could mean avoiding AI altogether on projects that require absolute confidentiality, or pushing for greater diversity in their results, given that AI often lands on consensus.
The pair know there are still open questions, from the ethical — “If you generate an image using Invoke [an AI tool] then spend 30 hours refining it in Photoshop, is it still an AI asset” — to the financial — “If the general principles of a recommendation are provided by the artificial intelligence, is a true recommendation? Should I bill full price or half?” but Bédard and Lavigne are trying to anticipate these discussions for Sid Lee.
“Don’t be afraid of it,” advises Lavigne.
RTG: Asking the Right Questions
RTG doesn’t have the same creative remit as Sid Lee or GDP, but it, too, is leaning into the shift. There, AI is being leveraged as a tool to enhance its human-centric services.
As a start, RTG mapped out its entire internal and client-facing processes to identify pain points, including heavily manual, time-consuming tasks. Tapping AI in at those moments, and to supercharge its research, has freed up time for more strategic work and relationship development, says partner Yumi Prentice. It lets the “small but nimble boutique shop punch well above our weight.” She credits IDEO’s emerging technology managing director, Savannah Kunovsky, for joining RTG in a fireside chat back in 2023 to help RTG get an early read on AI and its application across sectors.
In addition to using it to optimize their workflows, Prentice says RTG looks to take advantage of AI for data-driven intelligence. AI analysis of recent search requests can help the team spot market movements and glean insights. In the course of its work in assessing and advising around human capital, RTG is always focusing on “asking the right questions.” It’s no different when it comes to leveraging LLMs and getting the most valuable answers from the most insightful queries. With this AI immersion comes a very clear set of guardrails; the sensitivity of RTG’s work requires ensuring privacy protections.
AI fluency hasn’t been a significant prerequisite for candidate qualifications in many of RTG’s C‑level searches, notes Prentice, but she suspects that consideration isn’t too far off.
Along with Thrive for CRM and Owler for market intelligence, AI is just one component of RTG’s technological toolkit. Yet for RTG, the real work lies deeper than efficiency gains — it’s about serving clients and delivering results that matter. Until the technology and intelligence can cultivate meaningful human connections, says Prentice, it can’t replace the strength of RTG relationships, trust and credibility.
What Happens to the Next Generation?
A common concern about AI is how it affects new entrants into the field. When junior-level tasks shift to AI, are our next-gen colleagues missing out on training, or failing to develop the critical judgment that develops over years of experience and mentorship?
GDP’s Wohlsen isn’t worried. He’s confident this new cohort of “true AI natives” will be adept at adapting to new technologies — and even lead the way. Bédard agrees that the scenario will mimic the introduction of other new tools. “That’s their baseline,” he says. “When I started, the fax was my baseline. Now, faxing is not a thing anymore.”