How the Collective Is Thinking About AI Now
We asked people across kyu companies how AI is shaping their work and creativity.
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Companies
BEworks, RedPeak, SYPartners, Sid Lee, Rich Talent Group, Kepler, GDP, BIMM, ATÖLYE
Featuring
When Hiba Ganta starts her workday, she no longer tackles challenges in isolation. The kyu product director turns to AI to “think and clarify a plan of action before building, i.e., optimizing for speed.” Ganta’s approach reflects a broader shift across our creative collective — moving beyond binary “optimist” or “pessimist” debates toward integration strategies that will preserve creative integrity while still gaining efficiency.
To get a pulse on where things stand in 2025, we asked how people are using AI these days, what gains they’re seeing, and what they are waiting for AI to achieve. We heard from individuals across 14 kyu companies, reflecting a collective that’s embracing AI’s collaborative potential while maintaining guardrails to protect the human elements that contribute to creative excellence.
From Hype to Strategy
Our initial AI euphoria has evolved into something more valuable: strategic confidence. Our respondents remain predominantly optimistic, but their enthusiasm now carries the weight of real experience. This measured approach reflects direct encounters with both AI’s surprising capabilities and its sometimes frustrating limitations.
Behavioral science consultancy BEworks CEO Wardah Malik exemplifies this evolution. While keeping her optimistic stance, she notes that AI has “definitely made improvements on speed” and consistency, but stresses that “there is still a lot of human checking required, which I think should remain.”
The sharpest thinking comes from those who’ve developed contextual frameworks for when and how to deploy AI. Growth marketing agency Kepler’s lead data scientist Jay Olman captures the complexity: he’s optimistic about AI’s technological trajectory, yet concerned about “American society’s ability to set up economic support systems to help ordinary people survive the change in eras.” This kind of both/and thinking — rather than either/or — characterizes how we’re grappling with these tools.
Beyond the Daily Grind
AI is now a part of our workflows: the majority of our colleagues use these tools daily through platforms like ChatGPT. More significantly, usage has evolved beyond simple automation toward genuine collaborative partnership.
kyu’s Ganta uses AI “to produce on a higher level than I would be able to on my own.” This elevation of expectation — leveraging AI not to reduce effort but to expand possibilities — represents a fundamental shift in creative relationships with technology.
Speed improvements have proven transformative, with two-thirds of respondents specifically citing acceleration as AI’s primary value. Kepler senior analyst Jennifer Dunn puts it bluntly: “I don’t know how we used to live without it!” Yet quality concerns persist alongside these efficiency gains, suggesting we’re re-evaluating the benefit of speed.
The Authenticity Dilemma
How do creative professionals maintain excellence when seemingly everyone is deploying AI to generate content? “I think it comes down to intentionality, staying relevant to the context and having taste, none of which AI can truly replicate,” believes strategic design and innovation consultancy ATÖLYE’s head of visual design Funda Çevik Dinsdale. This focus on intentional choice over technical execution is a popular differentiator.
Creative agency Sid Lee Global EVP Yanick Bédard envisions becoming a “creative curator or conductor,” crafting meaningful experiences in collaboration with AI. This reframing — from AI as a replacement threat to AI as a creative partner — represents our thoughtful response to technological disruption.
What We’re Still Waiting For
In spite of AI’s leaps and bounds in the past few years (months even!), we’re already anticipating its next evolutionary phase. Our big ask: something that approaches genuine partnership and not just elaborate imitation.
“When AI can work as a contextual partner, not just a tool, we’ll unlock its real creative intelligence,” says brand consulting and design agency RedPeak CIO Raychard Huang. This desire for genuine understanding rather than pattern matching reflects our growing sophistication in evaluating AI capabilities.
A respondent from strategy and innovation consultancy SYPartners wishes AI systems were “humble,” rather than delivering outputs with false confidence: “If they were smart enough to be honest about their limitations and could mention other possibilities, they could be a better thought partner.”
Digital agency BIMM operations manager Mel Heeney credits AI with revolutionizing her administrative workflows through transcription summaries and workflow optimization, while HDY senior director Kazuko Morita uses AI daily for research.
Creative studio GDP senior copywriter Zoey Preston remains skeptical about AI’s impact on her copywriting work: “If I wanted it to write for me, it would do so much faster. And much more poorly.” She defines creative excellence as “big ideas that nobody has thought of before. That’s still something AI can’t take away from us. Yet…”
Strategic Implementation
The most intentional practitioners are developing selective deployment strategies rather than wholesale adoption. Multiple respondents cite concerns about generic, “soulless” content that lacks human perspective and contextual understanding.
BEworks’s Malik advocates for strategic AI integration: “I think AI should be used selectively and not instinctively as the first step in a creative ideation process. I worry that we may become too dependent on AI to do the thinking for us. It can focus us on an idea that isn’t necessarily the best one.”
One individual from search firm Rich Talent Group notes: “It is immediately clear when human ’soul’ was put into a piece of art/writing/etc. and references a specific human experience.”
Our shared wariness of creative sameness is acting as a natural quality filter. By staying alert to AI’s blind spots, we’re drawing boundaries that harvest speed without losing soul.
Where We Go From Here
What emerges from these responses is a portrait of a creative collective developing deliberate, strategic approaches to AI integration, embracing its capabilities while maintaining sharp awareness of its limitations.
As kyu business development director Shun Ikegai puts it, “AI is not to create; it is to help people create more.” The measure of AI’s success for the collective won’t just be in the tasks it completes but the creativity it enables.