This piece is from our President, Ted Iobst — originally published on TI on AI, his personal essay series on AI and marketing.
Nikesh Arora said something recently that most companies will nod at and then ignore: what kills them is "adding AI to their existing workflow instead of rebuilding the workflow around AI." Everyone agrees. Then they keep the org chart.
In creative work, the org chart is the workflow.
The structure most agencies and brand creative teams run today is a relay. A strategist writes a brief. The brief goes to a creative PM, who routes it to a creative director, who assigns a junior creative, who makes the asset. Then it travels back up — internal review, notes, revisions, another trip down the chain. For a big campaign idea, the relay earned its keep. That's what it was built for, in an era when creative production was scarce and craft-gated.
But look at what the relay does to the everyday work — the resize, the new hook on a proven concept, the twelve variants for a performance test. Every iteration re-travels the chain. And something quieter happens at each handoff: context decays. The strategist knows precisely what the platform is asking for — which audiences are fatiguing, which hook died, what the signal says to try next. By the time that intent reaches the person actually making the asset, it's been translated three times.
What's replacing the relay inside our agencies isn't one structure. It's two, built for different work.
For iteration-on-theme and performance-testing creative, the structure is a volley: the strategist trading fast exchanges directly with a creative agent connected to the platform. No brief, no routing, no translation. The person reading the performance signal is the person iterating the creative against it — punchy, direct, dozens of variants in a working session. A growing share of our volume creative already runs this way. We're not done, and some of the work is learning exactly where the volley belongs and where it doesn't.
The bigger, novel, foundational creative — brand platforms, the campaign idea itself, a new visual world — gets the second structure: the loops. Same creative team as before, arranged differently. A creative PM conducts from the middle of the cycle, with junior designers, agents, and tools iterating fast around them — the PM's job stops being routing and becomes keeping the cycle honest. Periodically the cycle breaks and the work takes a lap out — to the creative director for craft direction, to the strategist for a reality check against the signal — then drops back into the cycle and the spinning resumes. The rhythm is circular, not vertical. Senior judgment enters the work at moments, not as a gate the work queues behind.
Notice what happened to the creative team in that second structure: more time on the foundational work, not less — because the twelve-variant requests left their queue entirely and now live in the volley.
The agencies that come out ahead will be the ones that nail that balance — when to lean heavily into AI and when not to. But knowing the answer turns out to be the smaller half of the problem. Even once you've figured it out, pivoting a large agency — or a large brand organization — to actually run this way is tough: moving people, changing who owns what, accepting a couple of awkward quarters while the new structure beds in. Which is why most of the industry will take the other road: add AI to the relay, watch it get 20% faster, and call that transformation. The invoice-scanning trap, exactly as Arora describes it. We're taking the harder road — with our own teams first, and with the client partners we work with on Stellar Scale.