How big brands make AI useful: 4 Lessons from Superside’s Shift summit
At Shift Summit, leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Figma, Skyscanner, Apollo, and Superside showed how they bring AI into real creative workflows without losing taste or trust. The short version: visuals beat explanations, workflows beat lone prompts, culture outperforms every shiny tool, and human taste is still the secret ingredient that makes AI useful.
AI promises speed, efficiency, and scale, but most creative teams are still figuring out how to turn that promise into something practical. At Superside's Shift Summit, leaders from Airbnb, Microsoft, Figma, Skyscanner, and Apollo shared what is actually working inside their teams right now, not theory, just real workflows and real wins.
These are the lessons you’ll want to take back to your team (and even your CMO).
Finding your grip on AI adoption
Three takeaways:
- Meaning before speed, AI helps only when direction is clear
- Adoption is emotional; people need clarity and confidence to experiment with AI
- Alignment scales better than scattered experiments
Teams are dabbling in AI, but very few are rowing in the same direction.Jasmine Price, Senior Lead Design Operations at Airbnb, joined Nina Caplin to unpack a core truth: AI can generate movement, but humans still decide where that movement goes.
The challenge teams feel today is simple, the tech is speeding up faster than humans can align around it. People launch pilots, test tools, and try experiments, but often in isolation. When everything is moving without shared meaning, energy turns into noise.
We are shifting out of the playful experimentation era and into the integration era, the one where structure matters as much as enthusiasm.
Airbnb’s solution is the Tooling Accelerator Collective, a lightweight layer that aligns design, engineering, business, tech, and creative teams. It runs on four pillars: one central place to track tooling requests, a clear workflow for taking ideas from spark to evaluation to adoption, consistent communication, and full transparency into decisions.
The bigger insight is that small teams move fast because they share context. As companies scale, that context fades. People are not slowing down; they are just spinning without visibility.
Show, don’t tell (aka the scamp comeback)
Three takeaways:
- Scamps make ideas visual, which speeds alignment
- Visuals unite teams across functions
- One strong idea can scale into a global system
How do you get stakeholders to align on a creative direction quickly?James Bradley, Visual Creative Director at Skyscanner, showed the power of AI scamps in their Travel Trends campaign.
Instead of endless decks explaining the vision, the team built quick Runway-generated assets that let people react with their eyes, not long meetings. For a campaign spanning 19 markets, 13 languages, and 14 global events, that clarity was gold.
Their concept centered on a stylized hotel lobby where global travel trends meet. Instead of dazzling mood boards that might miss the mark, the team used rough AI scamps to validate whether the space and system could work in 3D and scale.
The process was intentionally scrappy, quick images helped kick off meaningful conversation, tighten decisions, and move into crafting a lot faster. They even generated multiple hotel styles so partners could help choose, building trust along the way.
The result, instant understanding and faster momentum.
Just use AI, how hard can it be?
Three takeaways:
- AI accelerates execution, humans define what is good
- Fast prototyping saves weeks and reduces burnout
- One workflow can generate an entire campaign system
When you have the right systems, AI goes from novelty to workflow.Phillip Maggs, Júlio Aymoré, and Lucia Quiroga from Superside proved it live, building a full campaign from brief to finished ads in minutes.
The session highlighted a theme across the entire summit: prompts do not scale, systems do.
Superside’s Brand Brain pulls from patterns across customer work to understand needs, store tone and personas, and help teams write strong briefs with almost no effort. For the live demo, the team built a 10-year anniversary sneaker campaign starting from one simple brief.
From there, the workflow unfolded fast:
- Creative direction in Figma using AI-generated assets
- Video creation in Weavy using both lifestyle and pack shots
- Automated headline and CTA generation through ChatGPT
- Mass production using Figma Buzz to auto-fill templates
The outcome: 15 videos, 15 UGC variations, and 90 statics, all produced in about 20 minutes.
Staying curious when everything is urgent
Three takeaways:
- Learning is part of the job
- AI clarifies and organizes work
- Curiosity drives adoption more than any tool
Leaders everywhere are asking the same thing: how do we make space to learn when the work never slows?Lulu Hoffmann from Figma, Katie Parkes from Apollo, and Steve Foyle from Microsoft joined Kae Neskovic from Superside to share their approaches.
Figma leans on an annual hackathon that encourages curiosity without pressure. “This year, someone even built a video game with their kids”, says Lulu Hoffmann. It is not about output; it is about exercising creativity so AI becomes a tool, not a shortcut.
Steve from Microsoft emphasized that AI demands a higher cognitive load. He shared how teams are constantly evaluating, comparing, and refining. Without formal time to learn, teams drift apart in skill and confidence.
Katie from Apollo shared practical tools they use for briefs, program creation, and social content, plus how AI acts as a creative analytical partner, especially on platforms like LinkedIn, where social listening is limited.
Across all three, one message stood out: taste is still king. You cannot outsource it; you grow it by experiencing the world, talking to people, and consuming real culture.
So, what?
The brands winning with AI are not the ones with the fanciest tools. They win because they build structure, culture, and creative discipline.
Five themes cut through everything:
- AI removes the boring work so humans can focus on ideas
- Systems scale, prompts do not
- Human taste decides what ships
- AI scamps make alignment faster
- Craft plus speed is the new competitive edge
The tools will keep changing, but the heart of the work won’t; creativity still belongs to the humans brave enough to try something new.
Want to see it in action? Watch the full Shift Summit recordings.Want weekly creative and AI insights? Subscribe to Creative Brief.
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