For someone who has mostly worked in what some of the business grown-ups perceive to be the realm of Crayons and Colouring-in [AKA Creative Comms and Strategy, Advertising, Brand, etc], some of the more meta strategic and trend questions I’m asked in any given workday can seem a little abstract or grand:

So, what’s your take on an AI Winter?

Is AI the new creative alpha? [and Yes; someone actually used those words!]

Is anyone paying top dollar for creativity anymore?

When these kinds of questions arise, I tend to revert to my Dreamers Believers Soldiers and Cynics [DBS&C] model to both interrogate the questions and explore any potential answers. Not just because it’s convenient, but because it works.

One quick note on language and understanding on ‘AI Winter.’ Now there are some who seem to interpret this as a professional deep freeze created by the onslaught of AI hoovering up jobs: a sort of freezing mass retreat from employment due to finding one’s skills suddenly redundant. Though offering a rather dramatic Napoleonic visualisation, this is in fact incorrect.

For the purposes of clarity, this trough of despondency they imagine has many names currently. ‘The Great Decoupling’ – where productivity and profit cease to be dependent on human labour; ‘The White Collar Bloodbath’ – more of a ‘Does what it says on the Tin’ encapsulation of the problem; ‘The Precariat Age’ – illustrating how human workers will exist in an increasingly precarious employment landscape due to AI; rounded off with the odd jaunty more positive, meme-minded summary, such as the ‘Superworker Era,’ more intent on bigging up humans and their superior though now augmented protein computers.

Just not AI Winter. On that, AI happily and correctly describes its wintery fall from grace thus:

An AI winter is a period of reduced funding, interest, and research activity in the field of artificial intelligence. These periods occur when the high expectations—or “hype”—surrounding AI advancements fail to live up to reality, leading to disappointment and a “freezing” of investment

So, with what kind of winter and for whom clarified, to rummage around in these topics a little more, let’s start with conflating the Seasonal model that sits behind statements like AI Winter and the four personas that make up the Dreamer, Believer, Soldier & Cynic model

First off I need to assert the bleeding obvious: that we’re seemingly in the sunny highlands of an AI Summer right now. The continued tsunami of investment churning towards AI is staggering, the hyperbole undiminished. And the call to AI arms by most every organisation shows no sign of slowing. AI Joy is all about us. Every organisation wants an AI glow up!

With these two coordinates clear, I can start to map all things AI onto a DBS&C framework. When I do, it reveals a very simple and aligned model.  

The Dreamer persona is an AI Spring personified. Moon-shot minded, everything was possible in this period of ‘What if’ for the Dreamer. Transformative. Life changing. World changing. The future. The binary mind on steroids was unstoppable.

The Believer is the perfect persona for our current AI Summer. We’ve got AI. We’ve got a team. We’re on a mission. We’ve got more cash than we know what to do with. Build. Build. Build.

Which brings us to the matter of Autumn. This is the domain of the Soldier persona. Directional. Applied. Practical. This season exists at the crunchier end of the spectrum of proof, reaching far beyond the proof of concept of the Dreamer. You may have an audacious AI strategy, but ‘Does it Work?’ Really? To find evidence of that, you need to apply it; in every quarter on every front. Test and learn. Fail fast. Keep moving forwards. What could possibly go wrong? This is the season where we might start to hear and feel the voice of the Winter Cynic at work. It is in this tipping point of Autumn that whisperings begin. On which point:

Some experts have made murmurings about us having already stepped into our AI Autumn, with an AI Winter being closer than we might like to think.

This isn’t just about cultural and ethical push back. The astronomical costs of training models ($100M+) and the diminishing returns of simply ‘adding more data’ have led some to wonder in their quieter moments whether the current AI bubble might eventually pop or at the very least, deflate. If it does, hello Winter. If AI’s hyperbole and overpromise starts to bite and the shortfalls, disappointments, increasing tech debt and plain snake oil slipperiness of it. all take hold and multiply, the retreat from AI will be significant.

Which brings me to the contradictory inflection point we seem to find ourselves at now.

Why is that of interest to a ‘creative jonny’?

Well, the answer to that question lies in the word creative.

The current trend in the creative industries in which I work is very downward, and not in a life affirming yoga-dog-like way.  A closer look reveals that the slash and burn strategy being undertaken by the big Global holding companies will hit mainly in administrative and research roles – but that doesn’t deflect from the fact that large numbers of previously premium value creative resource are being tipped into the marketplace where roles are evaporating before our very eyes.

The big multinational companies like Omnicom, Dentsu, WPP and Publicis have stopped just leaking talent. The word Purge is trending. And all those smaller agency brands that once flourished in their sunlit lowlands, bringing energy and innovation and differentiation, are being absorbed into the great blancmange of Consolidation, Simplification, Cost Cutting, Transformation, and the almost satirically named Horizontality.

To some this feels like a Managed Decline strategy hiding inside a Relevance and Growth strategy.

Its the inflection point between AI and Creativity that I want to interrogate a little more.

If we apply the Seasonal DBS&C model to Creativity in Communications land, given the overarching strategic trajectory of. the big. global holding companies, the Cynical Winter appears to be upon us.

And therein lies the contradiction – the current Cynical wintery Knives Out approach to the creative industries seems to fall counter to what the big consultancy commentators are advocating.   

If you listen to the Deloittes, Forbes, Harvards, and PwCs of this world, Creativity is about to enter a Dreamer-like spring, reborn, with a rejuvenated sense of ‘what if.’  The story goes that the proliferation of AI, in the creative process at least, will lead to homogenised thinking, content ‘slop’, and the lowering of our cognitive creative ability – our killer app – in the process. Given this, they predict that, as AI drives the cost of the horizontal ‘good’ to zero, the value of the exceptional ‘great’ (human-driven creativity) skyrockets. Curiously, from that viewpoint at least, it seems that the very consultancies that spent decades trying to ‘rationalize’ marketing into a maths problem are now the ones waving the flag for ‘Creative Empathy.’

But that’s good for us Creatively minded folks surely?

Well, yes, but only if we’ve evolved. If we’ve climbed out of our Mad Men fever dream and learned some lessons and skills along the way, the new dawn looks exciting and desirable. Creative people armed with relevant and appropriate AI tools will be the secret sauce in sustaining and elevating unique differentiated business and brand propositions, communications, and identities in an increasingly vanilla world.

The only potential flaw in that glorious plan will be that the propaganda machine that fuels C Suite decision stays stuck on ‘Horizontality’ for a while longer yet. The Buyer will need a case proof argument to realise where the value lies before we spring into a new Summer of Creativity any time yet. Until they do. Blancmange it is.

But. But. But. The upside is that there is definitely a place for smaller, more agile consultancies of like-minded, AI powered Creative minds to fight the good fight for originality and differentiation. It’s just going to be a bumpy Winter exit.

The further upside for me is that this simple exercise has revealed to me that my DBS&C model has a role to play as a predictive tool, not just a diagnostic thinking one.

I’ve discovered that when applied to questions such as these, DBS&C can use its four personas to paint a simple picture of the psychological cycle of Innovation in which a category, sector, business or brand exists.

In helping them identify which ‘season’ they’re in, DBS&C can then help them to assess whether they have the right ‘persona’ people in place to understand, lead and optimise that phase in their seasonal cycle. Once DBS&C has helped to ground them in their seasonal cycle, it is also possible to predict with a reasonable degree of certainty where they might be going next – and build for it, defining immediate practical and applicable actions to make it happen.

Which brings us back to AI Winters and Creative Summers. The reality as always most probably lies somewhere between their polarities and possibilities of both, with an option to smudge the two into some uncomfortable yet exhilarating parallel existence.

So, Snow shoes or Bikini: You Choose

PS. & FYI If you want to explore how the Dreamers Believers & Soldiers tool might help your brand or business, email me at julian@thinairfactory.com