The future of creativity isn't artificial

An inside look at how independent global brand design agency JDO is evolving with AI – and why the people still matter more than the tool.

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By Paul Drake, Co-founder & Executive Creative Director at JDO

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When I started my career, everything was drawn by hand. Your hand skills were sacrosanct. It was what you were recruited for: have great ideas, draw them beautifully and bring them to life in a compelling way. If you made a mistake, you started again.

Twenty-five years later, things are different. First, Photoshop arrived and suddenly, you could undo, revisit, layer and refine with a keystroke. The technology was so liberating that I remember making a mistake while drawing and instinctively reaching for Command Z, as if I could undo something I had put on paper.

Then came 3D software, Cinema 4D and increasingly sophisticated rendering engines. JDO adopted those tools early and pioneered CGI work within the branding space, helping set our agency apart. We could make ideas feel more compelling and real, helping clients see their potential much sooner.

As Photoshop led us to draw less, 3D tools meant we used Photoshop less.

Nothing replaced creativity. It simply gave us a more powerful way to express it. AI is the latest chapter in that story. It presents an enormous opportunity for our industry and, in some ways, an existential threat. It offers pace and possibility on an entirely new scale. But it is still a tool and, like every tool before it, its value depends on the people using it.

JDO was founded by Ben Oates and me, two industrial designers. I think that is significant because, in industrial design, a product cannot simply look good. It has to be good. You need to get under the hood, understand how things work and solve the problem properly.

That mindset still shapes JDO, now a global, multidisciplinary brand and communications agency with studios in the UK, New York and Shanghai. The scale of our work has changed, but the instinct has not. We remain problem-solvers, excited by new technologies and new ways of bringing ideas to life.

Our early view was that AI could do the wow, but not necessarily the how. It could create eye candy, fireworks and extraordinary visual moments, but what it struggled with was the nuance and subtlety our clients pay us for: the difference between a pretty picture and a brilliant piece of work with depth, thought and meaning.

At JDO, we deal in the how. We consider how a global brand presents itself across continents, cultures and regions. How it speaks to different demographics. How it creates an accessible entry point while supporting a premium proposition. How it lives across that entire universe.

Like 3D, we saw AI on the horizon and grabbed it with both hands. We use it across strategy, research, development and implementation. When building brand worlds, it allows us to reach a more complete, cohesive expression much sooner. Used well, it gives clients the understanding of what a brand could become before committing to the foundations of an idea.

But the important words are “used well.” AI can deliver what clients want faster when it is in the hands of incredible creative talent. Real people, with a deep understanding of brand and design, must puppeteer the technology, guiding it towards solutions that are appropriate, relevant and ownable.

I often use the analogy of walking into a department store filled with every paint colour, fabric and furnishing you could need to create a beautiful interior. Everything is there. But how many people can put that interior together brilliantly? You still need an eye. You need taste and curation. You need to understand how light affects the room, which materials work together and how to create depth through layering.

However, applying that kind of judgement is about more than what you create. It is also about how you create it. While exploring everything AI can unlock, we are also maintaining real rigour around how, why and where it is used.

Intellectual property, ownership and ensuring that what we present can genuinely belong to our clients are incredibly important. Speed is useful, but not at the expense of responsibility or trust.

We actually couldn’t find anything in the market capable of understanding what makes a piece of work feel distinctly JDO. So, true to our product-designer mindset, we began developing our own AI product. We now have an in-house team building that capability with the potential for clients to access it in the future. It is already influencing how we design day to day, but we are still developing, testing and learning.

Clients often ask about JDO’s stance on AI. I don’t think they are particularly interested in which technology we use or whether we can push it further than our competitors. What they are really asking is: can we have what JDO does, but faster and more affordably?

In many ways, that is how the industry has always moved. Arguably, it is how any business evolves. It took us from drawing to Photoshop, from Photoshop to CGI and from CGI to AI. We have always moved forward. Not by relinquishing quality, but by finding better ways to achieve it.

AI allows us to move faster in some areas, giving us more time for what matters: questioning, judging, refining and creating work that is right for the brand. It means stronger, more complete work for our clients, more possibilities for our teams and more opportunities to bring JDO thinking to new challenges.

Every new technology has redrawn the boundaries of what is possible. AI has done it again. Now comes the interesting part: seeing how far we can push them.