Automation first, creativity later: Is AI changing how agencies create?

The advertising industry has never been short of tools that promise to change everything. But the arrival of generative AI has triggered a more fundamental debate. It’s not about what AI can do, but about what it is actually being used for, and whether that use is quietly reshaping the creative product itself.

According to Anthropic’s latest labour market impact research, which draws on millions of real-world professional interactions with its AI model Claude, the dominant pattern of AI use across industries is automation, not creative collaboration. The report introduces a metric called ‘observed exposure’, measuring not what AI could theoretically do, but what it is already doing in practice. The findings reveal a significant gap between AI’s potential as a creative partner and its current reality as a production workhorse. Computer and mathematical tasks account for roughly a third of all professional AI conversations and nearly half of API traffic. Creative tasks, by comparison, remain a far smaller share of actual usage.

Separately, Anthropic’s Economic Index data shows that augmentation (AI assisting humans) now accounts for 52% of interactions, having recently overtaken automation at 45%, suggesting the balance is slowly shifting. But the direction of travel for the advertising industry is still being actively negotiated.

In India, that negotiation has a particular texture. The country’s ad market is driven by scale (festivals, cricket, regional languages, a billion-plus consumer base), and AI has slotted naturally into the machinery of production. Variant generation, rapid asset resizing, script drafting, media scheduling: these are the tasks that agencies have handed over most readily, and the efficiency gains have been real. The harder question, which the industry is only beginning to confront seriously, is what happens to the quality of ideas when the process of making them becomes frictionless.

The volume trap

VML India, one of the largest integrated creative networks operating in the country, has been direct about the risk. Kalpesh Patankar, Group Chief Creative Officer at VML India, frames it not as a question of AI’s capability, but of how agencies are choosing to deploy it. The concern, in his reading, is that automation has made it easier to produce more, and that ‘more’ has become a trap.

“Automation has made it easier than ever to produce more work, faster, but abundance has not translated into impact. In many cases, it has diluted ideas instead of strengthening them. The next phase of growth will not come from flooding channels but from committing to fewer, stronger ideas that can evolve into enduring brand narratives,” says Patankar.

The argument cuts to the heart of how creative strategy is being reframed in the age of AI. If the technology removes the friction from execution, what remains to force the sharpening of an idea? Patankar answers that the discipline must now come from choice, specifically, the choice to resist the pull of volume. His position on AI’s role in the creative process is unambiguous: “Data and AI are powerful enablers, not creative authors. Without human judgement, cultural intelligence, and taste, optimization becomes directionless,” he adds.

The cost that didn’t disappear
One of the most persistent myths circulating through agency conversations is that AI has democratized high-quality production, that the cost of making something great has been driven down dramatically. The reality, according to practitioners working inside the production pipeline, is more nuanced. The cost hasn’t vanished; it has migrated.

“AI video tools may promise affordability, but cinematic quality still comes at a creative cost. The expense doesn’t vanish; it just evolves. What once went into logistics and on-ground shoots now fuels GPU-heavy rendering, advanced post-production, and specialized AI operators who can fuse art with precision,” says Siddhant Sethi, Senior Manager at the Founder’s Office of White Rivers Media, a full-service digital agency known for its work across entertainment, lifestyle, and consumer tech brands.

In the Indian context, where content strategy must simultaneously address scale and emotional resonance across regions, languages, and income groups, this distinction matters enormously. AI can compress timelines and multiply outputs, but the craft required to make something feel true (to make it land) is not a function of processing speed. Sethi is precise about what this means for agencies navigating the transition: “In India, where content must marry scale with emotion, AI is less a shortcut and more a new craft discipline. True cost-effectiveness lies in mastering the technology, not merely adopting it,” he says.

Constraints and the creative core
Within the creative department itself, the arrival of AI has altered the rhythm of ideation in ways that are not yet fully understood. The efficiency gains are real and acknowledged: variant generation, rapid prototyping, and initial concept permutations. What is being watched carefully is whether the removal of friction also removes the productive struggle that forces ideas to become sharper.

“Doing more with less can sharpen ideas because constraints force you to focus on the emotional core of a story rather than decorative flourishes. We’ve seen campaigns where a single, simple insight, executed honestly, outperforms a high-gloss spot that tries to do everything,” says Priyank Dattani, Associate Creative Director at White Rivers Media.

The concern is not AI itself, but the misuse of the time it frees up. When the brief is essentially cost-cutting rather than creative ambition, Dattani notes, the work starts to recycle itself. The tools accelerate iteration, but only human judgment can determine whether that iteration is leading somewhere worth going.

“AI has moved routine work out of the way, which gives us more time to interrogate whether an idea actually matters. It’s not about replacing intuition; it’s about accelerating iteration so human judgment gets to the interesting questions faster. The trick is to use AI to broaden the thinking, not to substitute for the human decision that makes a piece of work honest,” he explains.

The idea, the execution, and what clients have forgotten
The question of production budgets and creative ambition has an older history than AI, of course. Enormous Brands, an independent strategic creative agency, has navigated that tension long enough to hold a considered view on what AI changes and what it doesn’t. Pranoy Kanojia, Vice President and Head of Strategy, distinguishes what the industry would do well to keep in focus. “Creativity is 80% idea and 80% execution. Production is vital to bringing the idea to life. Some ideas definitely need the exact ingredients to leave a certain kind of envisioned impact,” says Kanojia, invoking Sir John Hegarty’s formulation on the inseparability of idea and craft.

The broader client expectation problem, Kanojia argues, has been compounded by social media’s viral economy. Brands have watched low-budget content perform well online and concluded that production value is optional, without accounting for the quality of thinking that drove the idea in the first place. AI, to the extent that it makes low-cost production even more accessible, risks deepening that misunderstanding.

“They have learnt from social media that smaller budgets can also make things go viral. But they forget that the things that go viral are because of the idea and how it was delivered. Everybody quoting Nike and Apple advertising in their briefs must also know they work with Hollywood A-lister directors,” he says.

The throughline across all these perspectives is not a rejection of AI, but a resistance to a particular version of it, one where speed becomes the dominant value and the creative product is treated as a downstream consequence of the efficiency stack. Anthropic’s own data suggests this version is, for now, the dominant one. But the agencies building their practices around the harder questions, like what makes an idea worth making, what separates craft from content, what remains irreducibly human in the act of storytelling, are already working on the answer. The industry that emerges on the other side of this transition will belong to those who used the time AI bought them not to make more, but to mean more.