Across the advertising landscape, every few years or so a slew of headlines will hit suggesting it is the “end of advertising as we know it.” For some reason, new technology always seems to hit the ad-world quickly and harder than in other industries. Though this perception has real consequences in how agencies and in-house creative and media teams operate, like most headlines, the truth is often more nuanced and less clean-cut than those of us pontificating on the future would like to admit.

Such is the case in the age of artificial intelligence, which has upended the work of advertising and creative professionals, with tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude exploding onto the scene and impressively iterating with lightning speed. Agencies have had to quickly grapple with increasing pressure on efficiency while evaluating and learning about a rapidly expanding ecosystem with hundreds of AI-powered tools. Across creative industries the pressure to protect intellectual property and human-centered design and creative work is palpable. The labor strikes in Hollywood in 2023 were, in part, driven by the desire to protect writing and acting jobs that could be threatened by integrating AI into production.

Now, a growing focus on “agentic AI” is reshaping various parts of the workforce, beginning with more thematic use cases like customer service, where Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI will solve up to 80% of common issues without any human intervention.

Still, amidst the very justifiable concern over the impact that this technology could have on labor and differentiation, there is reason for advertisers and creatives to be optimistic about the future. In fact, McKinsey estimates that GenAI has the potential to unlock $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion across industries. Ironically, the integration of this technology is raising awareness around the importance of good design and creativity in brand-building.

Technology will never eradicate great advertising, because the industry has always been technology-agnostic. What do I mean? The job of the advertising industry is to not just stay ahead of trends in tech but to drive new trends in the service of one mission: capturing the attention of modern audiences and converting that attention into commerce. Human beings are still best equipped to craft, design, and sell brands to other human beings. They just now have more powerful tools to help them in that mission.

With that in mind, here are three ways that AI can drive stronger, more creative advertising in the years ahead.

Expanding access for more industry participants.

Technology, at its core, expands access by bringing the cost of entry down and enabling non-technical individuals to more easily participate without extensive training. Currently, we are in a period of modern renaissance, where social platforms like Instagram and TikTok are turning creators themselves into full-fledged brands, and design tools like Canva and Adobe Express are powering hundreds of millions of users to create content and digital experiences without traditional design capabilities.

For advertisers, AI threaded throughout the marketing stack is shortening the production lifecycle while amplifying the quality of output. Put differently, the floor is being raised on the quality of content, including podcasts, short-form video, ad creative, and more. Of course, making content much more seamless to produce can have drawbacks as well. As more entrants flood the industry, there will inevitably be a race to the middle, and consumers will need to wade through a sea of mediocre content to access the most impactful material. Which brings us to the next trend.

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Creativity as the last true “moat.”

Many futurists and industry leaders have called for a return to investment in creativity and branding, which is being further accelerated in the age of AI. As Squarespace Chief Creative Officer David Lee says, “creativity is the only job left.” And some brands like Airbnb have largely divested from “performance marketing” to reinvest in building durable brand reputations.

Creativity, it turns out, is even more critical in a world saturated with ads, where attention is increasingly hard to capture. Recently, System1’s Andrew Tindall shared research after studying more than 1,200 campaigns with ad data from 200,000 consumers. Among other findings in The Creative Dividend, System1 quantified the “profit multiplier” of creativity in advertising as 21x. In a world where tools have neutralized technological advantage, investing in creative storytelling and in highly engaged brand communities is the more effective differentiator. AI will only exacerbate this trend in the years to come. For designers, art directors, music producers, and other creative leaders, this should provide some solace that their skills will be needed more than ever in an AI-future.

Navigating a world of abundance.

Even for highly skilled, trained creative professionals, wading through an endless array of assets to find the perfect song, image, color, or font for a particular brand campaign can take an enormous amount of time and effort. AI is reimagining the way in which visual creativity can manifest and is reducing the amount of toil that can so often take up energy that could be spent on more truly creative work. Traditionally, the same handful of assets may be overused purely out of ease, but AI tools are democratizing expertise, and helping identify through context the right asset for the right project. This level of personalization shines a light on a wider range of creative work and when applied well helps create more vivid and distinct visual identities.

Additionally, for creatives responsible for designing hundreds of ad variations, or localizing campaigns by language, etc., AI is helping automate this process. Creative workers can now invest their energy into meaningful initial designs and then leverage these tools to extrapolate the campaign into new specs, languages, mediums, and more. This is especially important for large enterprises and agencies serving these kinds of organizations. In a world of abundance where there is a seemingly endless supply of assets, AI is helping stratify and streamline selection.

For advertisers, AI is just the next paradigm shift for an industry that has been evolving through change successfully for more than a century. It is up to all of us to ensure that these tools are responsibly integrated to enable more creativity, rather than simply as a way to power mediocre productivity.