Bold brands don’t wait for AI clarity. They build it. Here’s how creative leaders are turning uncertainty into real impact.
What does it actually take to make AI work for creative teams, not just in theory, but in practice?
At Superside’s SHIFT Summit, we heard directly from the people navigating it in real time. From creative leaders rethinking workflows to building entirely new systems, one thing became clear: AI isn’t the breakthrough. How you use it is.
Across sessions with creative leaders from Superside, AirOps, Wistia, Clio, HelloFresh, and more, a consistent theme emerged: the teams winning with AI are experimenting more and structuring better.
These weren’t polished predictions. They were honest reflections from teams deep in the messy middle, figuring out what sticks, what scales and what actually drives creative impact.
Here are the biggest takeaways from the summit.
1. AI should remove friction—not creativity
The biggest misconception about AI? That it replaces creative work.
Jennifer Rapp, Chief Customer Officer at Superside, reframed the conversation entirely: AI’s role isn’t to generate ideas—it’s to make space for them.
“There’s two extremes… one is that AI will fix absolutely everything… and then there’s the other narrative that AI might flatten creativity.” — Jennifer Rapp, Chief Customer Officer, Superside
Her take is more grounded: neither is true.
Instead, AI is most valuable when it removes the operational drag that slows teams down: manual production, repetitive tasks and disconnected workflows. The real opportunity isn’t speed alone. It’s creative capacity.
“AI at its best should remove friction, not the craft of creativity. Human creativity is what continues to matter.”— Jennifer Rapp, Chief Customer Officer, Superside
The shift from output generation to workflow transformation is where most teams are still catching up.
And it matters. According to our recent Breakpoint report, the current reality isn’t exactly ideal. “We know that 86% of teams are beyond capacity and 70% of the creative leaders we have spoken to report burnout. That is hardly an environment for great ideas and great creativity.” said Rapp.
AI doesn’t fix that automatically. But used correctly, it can.
2. Most teams are stuck in the “messy middle”
If AI feels chaotic, you’re not alone.
Leaders from Clio, Wistia, Typeform and AirOps all agree: teams are experimenting in silos and struggling to operationalize.
Speed has improved. Clarity hasn’t caught up.
“Speed improves first… but it doesn’t remove the need for human judgment and taste.”— Danielle Giroux, Creative Director, Clio
AI makes it easier to generate ideas, assets and variations—but everything that follows still requires alignment, decision-making and context. And that’s where teams are feeling the strain.
That shift, from creating more to creating smarter, is powerful. But it also requires teams to rethink how they plan, produce and distribute content from the start. At the same time, expectations are rising across the business. Creative teams are being asked to move faster, deliver more and adopt AI, all at once, and without clear systems to support it.
“Everything is changing, there is no stability yet and it’s adding this extra layer of frustration,” said Dimitra Papastathi, former Head of Creative at Typeform
Jessica Rosenberg, Head of Brand at AirOps, captured the moment perfectly:
“Most teams aren’t asking, should we use AI? The question is: why does this still feel chaotic?”
At the same time, trust in AI is still fragile—largely due to quality concerns and lack of training.
The result? A “messy middle” where teams are:
- Testing tools in isolation
- Lacking shared frameworks
- Struggling to scale what works
Even though AI has come with its own set of challenges, there’s still hope on the horizon. According to Papasthathi, “AI has added to the mental load, but at the same time, it has brought hope because it has given us creative freedom, and accelerated the early stages of the process.”
“We’re really trying to use AI to get more out of what we already have,” said Taylor Corrado, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at Wistia. “It changes how we produce content… it really allows us to get more out of one thing.”
The takeaway: AI speeds up creation, but without clarity and systems, teams struggle to turn it into impact.
3. Making AI stick requires culture, not just tools
So how do you move out of that messy middle?
Jessica Rosenberg, Head of Brand at AirOps, argues it starts with something most teams overlook: environment.
“Fear and stress are creativity’s actual enemies. The best ideas don’t happen when your nervous system is in survival mode.”— Jessica Rosenberg, Head of Brand, AirOps.
Before tools or workflows, teams need the right conditions: psychological safety, curiosity and room to experiment.
Her approach is simple but powerful:
- Lower the stakes (start with safe experiments)
- Build habits of exploration (hackathons, office hours)
- Create shared learning environments
“When you build a culture that prioritizes psychological safety and calm, not as a nice-to-have but as a strategic decision, something shifts. People get curious. Curious people experiment. And that’s where creative breakthroughs happen, not from pressure or urgency, but from those conditions.” — Jessica Rosenberg, Head of Brand, AirOps
One standout example: her team built internal tools using AI to eliminate repetitive design work, freeing them to focus on higher-impact creative.
Instead of repeatedly designing things like webinar graphics, social posts and one-pagers, they built internal AI-powered tools that allowed marketers and other teams to generate on-brand assets themselves. By codifying their brand into what she described as a “skill” (essentially a style guide for machines) they gave non-designers the ability to create content that still met brand standards.
That shift freed them up to focus on higher-impact creative, campaigns, concepts and systems, while empowering the rest of the organization to move faster on their own.
The takeaway: AI adoption isn’t just a tooling problem. It’s a culture and mindset shift.
4. Systems unlock scale
If there’s one shift defining the next phase of AI adoption, it’s this: moving from tools to systems.
Individual prompts can generate outputs. Systems generate outcomes.
Across sessions, leaders emphasized that the real unlock comes from embedding AI into workflows, not layering it on top.
That means:
- Connecting tools to brand knowledge
- Capturing learnings across projects
- Building repeatable processes that improve over time
As Rafael Costa, Creative Lead at Superside, put it: teams are moving from “scattered tools and uncertainty” to “systems confidence”.
AI becomes powerful when it remembers brand nuance, past performance, creative decisions, and applies that context automatically.
Without that, teams stay stuck recreating work instead of scaling it.
The takeaway: Prompts can generate outputs. Systems are what make them scalable.
5. Your output is only as good as your input
If AI only works when it’s structured, the biggest opportunity lies at the very start of the process: the brief.
That’s where most creative work breaks down.
“People in this day and age don't need more tools, they need more context,” — Phillip Maggs, Director of AI Product, Superside.
Creative teams don’t struggle because they lack ideas. They struggle because brand knowledge is fragmented, feedback is inconsistent and every project starts from scratch.
“Brands are made up of thousands of micro decisions, but they rarely get captured,” said Maggs.
The solution isn’t more prompts. It’s systems that remember.
By capturing past projects, preferences, feedback and performance data, teams can turn scattered inputs into structured, reusable intelligence—what Superside calls a “Brand Brain.” We recently launched Brand Brain within Superspace, our creative management platform, as an intelligence layer that captures your brand, decisions and past work—so every project starts smarter and stays aligned.
That system enables:
- Smarter briefs grounded in real brand context
- Faster execution without sacrificing consistency
- Stronger outputs built on what’s already worked
- Continuous improvement with every project
Instead of reinventing the wheel each time, creative teams build momentum.
And that’s the real shift: from one-off outputs to compounding creative systems.
The takeaway: Better creative doesn’t start with execution. It starts with better inputs and systems that remember.
6. Great creative in 2026 will favor thinking over output
If AI makes execution easier, what becomes more valuable? Thinking.
In the final session, Kae Neskovic, GM of Creative Studios at Superside and James Hurst, VP of Global Creative at HelloFresh explored what “good” creative will look like in an AI-first world, and the answer wasn’t more content. It was better decisions.
“We can create anything we want and we can do it faster than ever, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be good,” said Kae Neskovic, GM of Creative Studios at Superside.
“We have confused quantity with quality, we still have to ask, what’s the problem we’re actually trying to solve? I've sat through so many conversations where people have presented something which is definitely a solution, that's looking for a problem to solve.” — James Hurst, VP of Global Creative, HelloFresh.
As output becomes cheaper and faster, differentiation shifts upstream:
- Stronger problem definition
- Clearer strategy
- Braver creative decisions” said Hurst.
The teams that win won’t be the ones producing the most—they’ll be the ones dedicating time to thinking and putting an emphasis on the problem they’re trying to solve.
“AI is a tool… we need to think about how we use it at specific points in the process.” —James Hurst, VP of Global Creative, HelloFresh
The takeaway: As execution gets easier, strategic thinking becomes the real competitive advantage.
Creativity isn’t changing, how we work is
The SHIFT Summit made one thing clear: AI isn’t replacing creative work, it’s redefining how it happens.
Rapp showed that AI should remove friction, not ideas. Creative leaders revealed the reality of the messy middle. Rosenberg demonstrated how culture makes AI stick. And Hurst reminded us that thinking, not output, will define the future.
Across every session, the message was consistent:
The teams that succeed won’t be the ones using the most tools. They’ll be the ones building the best systems, asking better questions and making smarter decisions.
And in a world where anyone can create anything, that’s what will set the best brands apart.
