Let’s be honest. Most people in our industry fall into one of three AI camps:

• The Doomsday Prophets – “It’s coming for our jobs!

• The Tech Bros – “Let me sell you a tool that writes your pitch deck in six seconds!”

• The Ostriches – Heads buried in the sand, hoping it all just blows over.

But what if we stop panicking or posturing, and start practicing?

We’re telling our students: don’t fear AI – collaborate with it. Treat it like the agency dog – bad at strategy, brilliant at running around, absolutely tireless, but needs lots of training. We’re already finding dozens, maybe hundreds of ways to train AI not to make a mess in the studio.

AI gives us power. But it’s human judgment that makes work that works.

AI can’t feel jealousy, or joy, or the excitement of a Friday flight to Ibiza, to drop pills with friends from university, twenty years later. It doesn’t know what it’s like to sit in a pub garden with a tax bill in one pocket and a dream in the other.

But artists do.

They know what it feels like to be heartbroken. To feel seen. To feel invisible. And great creative work feels. That’s what people are hungry for – not artificial polish, but emotional resonance. Authenticity.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: no matter how many tools we have, if the work doesn’t carry a human pulse, it’s just static noise. AI can remix what’s been done, but it does a piss-poor job of showing good taste – and it can’t make you care.

The new creative partnership

The old formula was art + copy. It’s becoming something else.

At the School of Communication Arts, we’ve thrown out the traditional team model. For the first two terms, students joining in September will work solo, but always with machine collaborators. As solos, we’ll teach them how to come together in groups, to bounce off each other, and to recreate the energy and unpredictability of messy human conversations.

That’s why we’ve redesigned how we teach creativity. Instead of starting in teams, we start with individuals and groups. They get sharper, faster, bolder. They learn to stress-test their instincts, dig deeper into insights, and make work that doesn’t just sit on a slide – it moves, speaks, lives.

Creative cultures matter more than ever. People need places where ideas are exchanged, challenged, and sharpened in real time. We don’t want sterile idea farms. We want electric rooms where sparks still fly.

By term three, our students can do in a day what a junior team used to take a week to prototype. That’s not a threat. That’s an upgrade.

If you’re hiring, don’t just look for a polished book. Look for someone who can think with AI and still knows how to make other humans feel something.

If you’re an agency leader, don’t wait for your teams to “catch up.” That was last year. Train them now. I’ll help if you ask nicely.

AI won’t replace us. But creatives who learn to embrace it? They’ll replace the ones who don’t.

So let’s stop wringing our hands and start getting them dirty. The tools are here. The rules have changed. And if you’re not training the next generation to think in stereo – to mix artistic intelligence with artificial intelligence – then you’re just hoping your microwave never learns to cook better ideas than you.

Marc Lewis is a prominent British educator, entrepreneur, and creative industry leader best known as the Founder and Dean of the School of Communication Arts 2.0 (SCA) in London. His career is marked by a commitment to nurturing creative talent and reinventing vocational education for the advertising and communications industries.