Creative directors are suddenly becoming the most indispensable role in the creative department.
Not because they are immune to the impacts of AI, but because they are not paid to press the buttons. They are paid to know which outputs matter and which directions have meaning.
They are paid to have taste.
A junior creative entering the industry tomorrow will walk in with two assistants from day one: an art direction assistant and a copy assistant, both AI-powered. Craft still matters—you should know how to write well or move a pen and tablet with intention—and execution will always have a place, because clients still need partners who can bring things to life with precision and care.
But craft alone is no longer enough when execution can be automated, accelerated, or generated. Craft gets you in the door, but vision and taste are what make the work unique.
Because in this new landscape something strange is happening. Everything is improving. Everything is faster. Everything is cleaner and more technically perfect. And yet everything is starting to feel the same. Not because AI lacks ability, but because most people lack the ability to make its outputs unexpected, distinctive, and tasteful.
AI can produce 400 variations before you sip your coffee, but it has no idea which one is actually good. It does not know why Moonlight blue feels intimate or why Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s portrait photography bends reality into something spiritual. It does not understand why some combinations feel inevitable while others feel accidental. It just replicates patterns until someone with taste forces it somewhere new.
AI is a firehose. Creative directors decide where the water goes.
Taste does not come from a model. It comes from exposure. From galleries and indie cinemas and obscure photobooks and festival films. From dusty jazz records and film essays and late night rabbit holes. From that TikTok you watched at 1:13 AM where someone accidentally reinvented German Expressionism. Taste is the accumulation of everything you have ever absorbed colliding into something only you could recognize.
Culture is the raw material. Creative directors are the blender that turns it into something new.
If clients want an idea, they can now ask AI. They hire agencies to know whether it is good, whether it is right, whether it belongs in culture, and what it signals about their future. They are not buying execution. They are buying judgment. They are buying vision.
