This post was created in partnership with Monks and Leonardo.Ai
If everyone can generate a masterpiece in seconds, the masterpiece itself is no longer the point—the why behind it is.
During a CES 2026 ADWEEK House session co-hosted with Monks and Leonardo.Ai, Will Lee, CEO of ADWEEK, sat down in conversation with Donna Smith, SVP of global partnerships at Monks, and Dwayne Koh, head of creative at Leonardo.Ai. Together, they explored how high-touch creativity and high-tech tooling are reshaping brand experiences. AI delivers speed at scale, but the emotional core of a brand still comes from people.
Accelerating the creative timeline
The discussion centered on a pivotal shift in the creative landscape: AI is no longer treated as a standalone innovation, but as core production infrastructure—akin to a “water supply” that quietly powers every stage of the process. For Smith, this evolution is characterized by an exponential increase in speed, enabling agencies to meet client demands in real time.
“A campaign that was taking us maybe a few weeks to create six or eight months ago is now taking us a few days to create because the tools are getting so much better,” Smith shared.
She noted that Monks remains technology-agnostic to ensure they can integrate with any client’s tech stack, using the company’s proprietary tool, Monks.Flow, to streamline the journey from brief to execution. “It’s about how quickly we can get product to market for our clients.”
However, the session made it clear that speed is only half of the equation. Koh, who previously led design at Nike’s Jordan brand and worked on Sora launches at OpenAI, demonstrated a recent project involving an AI-generated film about a monkey in space. The project highlighted reasoning models that could autonomously generate witty sub-copy and authentic billboard locations in Japan based on a single high-level theme.
Despite these capabilities, Koh argued that the technical magic is secondary to the narrative. “We’ve reached a point where there’s this almost very fine line between what’s AI and what’s not, and you can’t tell anymore,” Koh explained. “And that’s where the importance of storytelling comes in. Because with storytelling, if it’s great storytelling, no one’s going to worry about whether it’s AI or not AI. It’s just a great story.”
The human at the center of the craft
As the barrier to entry for high-end production vanishes, the human prompt becomes the ultimate differentiator. Smith emphasized that the quality of AI output is inherently tied to the passion and specificity of the human creator.
“AI is not trying to take away the human element,” Smith noted. “We need the human element to give the really good prompts—to give amazing output.”
