We speak to World Creative Rankings table toppers and find that leading art directors and copywriters are taking a pragmatic view when it comes to AI as the technology consolidates around them in 2025.
Pondering whether to use AI or bin it off
AI isn’t really new any more and perceptions of it are changing rapidly across the creative industries. If 2023 was about existential threat and 2024 was about upskilling and working out which are the right tools to be using, 2025 is about knowing the limitations and strengths of AI before getting on with the task at hand.
While there are still clear uncertainties around the future of any creative practitioner’s work, writing and art directing with humanity and using AI as another tool where relevant is a pretty solid plan.
As we focus on the People section of our World Creative Rankings this week, I spoke to copywriters and art directors to find out where AI features in the process of making award-winning work – if at all.
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Serviceplan Group senior copywriter Shruthi Subramanian is the world’s most successful in her field this year. Generative AI has, for her, become “a tool for self-reflection in the creative process,” primarily to give her an idea of what she might sound like while brainstorming with a creative partner.
“It’s incredibly helpful in weeding out the unoriginal, the most logical answers, all to push your brain to think beyond a chat window,” she says. And when this happens, “you can sit down to craft something that tops it all.”
“In a way, you [and the machine] are prompting each other, but in the end, as a human, you have more agency in the process to actually bring your ideas to life. You’re in the lead.”
Like Subramanian, fourth-placed copywriter Taro Taniwaki from Tokyo-based Hakuhodo uses AI as a jumping-off point so he can avoid coming up with something expected. “As copywriters, our real job is to step away from conventional answers based on past data and come up with something fresh that breaks away from the norm,” he says.
“So, I start by letting AI provide the standard, ‘correct’ ideas and then I explore entirely different directions. This approach has helped me come up with unique, original ideas much faster than before.”
This perspective does give rise to the idea that AI isn’t always as clever it tries to be. In many cases, of course, it will be absent from the creative process entirely.
The third-place copywriter in the rankings, FCB New York creative director Pieter Claeys, points to the ‘Spreadbeats’ project he worked on for Spotify, which was the 19th most awarded campaign last year. It was a campaign aimed at media buyers coded entirely in Excel.
He asks: “Could we have used AI? Absolutely. It would’ve been faster, easier and way more efficient. It would’ve been the sane choice because, frankly, it would have saved us a whole lot of sleepless nights. But we didn’t.
“Excel is a tool from the 1980s and we wanted every part of the process to feel like it came from that era. No shortcuts, no fancy automation, just pure, old-school commitment. By resisting AI, we embraced the imperfections like the little quirks and happy accidents that made the piece feel human and real. You could feel the people behind the work. And that’s what made it charming.”
For Claeys, the project gave him and his team a chance to reflect on what it means to be human as creators and designers.
“Creativity isn’t about knowing how to use AI; it’s about knowing when not to. Sure, use AI to speed things up, refine execution and push ideas further. It’s here to stay. But the real test isn’t whether you can use AI; it’s whether you know when to stop.” Or, as he puts it even more bluntly: “It’s about what you refuse to let a machine create for you.”
For the art directors we spoke to, AI is fully integrated into their creative process, which is the case for David New York senior art director Victoria Rocha, who ranked as the sixth-most successful art director in the world.
Where relevant, Rocha is using AI as an extension of what’s already at her fingertips. “From an art direction standpoint, I particularly enjoy using AI that is seamlessly incorporated into the tools I use every day, such as Adobe’s generative AI, which is integrated into the latest updates of Photoshop and Illustrator,” she says.
Beyond this, as others have shared, she uses it as “a creative partner for research and optimization” and adds: “It’s great at helping me find ultra-specific insights, which might have taken me hours of scrolling the internet to find.”
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This experience would encourage her to advise other art directors to “not treat AI as a single answer input/output tool,” says Rocha. For her, the trick is to instead “make sure you input as much information and detail as you can and prompt a range of responses. You can then take the best parts of the information and create something unique yourself.”
FCB New York art director Sy-jenq Cheng is placed fifth this year in the art director rankings. She says that AI has become a part of the creative process when it comes to building visual worlds and storyboarding.
“As we continue to navigate this new terrain, one thing is clear: AI is unlocking new avenues for creative expression while challenging us to rethink how we bring our craft to life.”
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