Creative production is in the midst of transformative change, driven by multiple trends. Organizations need to deliver more content, more quickly, while ensuring it is hyper-personalized for specific audiences. With pressure on budgets increasing, they also need to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible. Above all, AI, and especially the emergence of agentic AI, is disrupting operations, providing new opportunities, but also a range of challenges. In this environment, how can organizations structure their creative production teams and successfully move forward?
Building on the 2026 Industry Voices report, a recent webinar brought together leaders from across marketing, creative production, in-house agency, and advisory teams to discuss these topics and share their insights. I joined the panel alongside Todd Dunham, Christi Simoneaux, and George Friedman, with Claire Palk from We Are Amnet facilitating the discussion. The full webinar is available here, and this blog provides a top-level view of the key trends and insights it covers.
Insights from the webinar panel
The discussion brought together a range of industry perspectives:
- Todd Dunham, VP, Marketing Operations & Strategy, Prologis
Todd brings extensive experience across strategic planning, product innovation, marketing, and client engagement.
- Christi Simoneaux, Director, Creative Special Projects, Oldcastle APG
Christi is Director, Creative Special Projects at Oldcastle APG and co-head of the in-house agency The KEEP, where she supports creative initiatives and brand voice development across North America.
- George Friedman, Senior Director, Creative Content Development & Production, Tonic at Highmark Health
George is part of the senior agency and marketing leadership team at Tonic at Highmark Health, helping guide agency operations, strategic brand and agency vision, and creative direction across all brands.
The webinar spanned five key areas and trends:
1. The shift from generative to agentic AI
Organizations are now investigating how agentic AI can help transform their workflows, and also understanding the specific skills and safeguards it requires. For many, their current maturity levels mirror where they were with generative AI a year ago. Since then, employees have mastered generative AI prompt engineering, but the new challenge is to understand how agents can help creative organizations do more.
2. Working on the foundations first
Across the discussion, a clear theme emerged: organizations need to get the foundations right before rushing into new tools. This means focusing on data, skills, governance, and culture.
Data you can trust
Christi: “As anybody who has used AI knows, the output is only as good as the prompts and the data. So, we’re in a massive data cleanup mode so that when we implement the enterprise system we’re preparing to launch, we can really scale appropriately with information that is accurate, impactful, brand-specific, and within those brand guidelines.”
George: “For us, data is a huge opportunity. As we continue to grow our martech stack, it’s about how clean that data is. When you add automation and AI, it really stands out because you can’t automate if your fields don’t line up or if things don’t work properly.”
The right mix of skills
Creative teams need the technical ability to use new AI tools, but they also need the human judgment to appraise AI outputs effectively. As Christi highlighted, teams still need to know what good creative output looks like to ensure they continue to produce high-quality creative assets and campaigns.
Strong, well-defined governance
Organizations have now put in place company-wide corporate guidelines on AI use, with tool access controlled across the business. This is applied across creative production to enforce governance processes and minimize risk. As part of this, tools need to be applied to the right processes and workflows if they are to deliver value.
Todd: “You need really well-defined workflows, because any AI tool is going to model whatever that workflow definition is. You must have a strong handle on all the steps to understand the right place to plug an AI tool in. Workflow definition is key.”
A positive, encouraging culture
Some creative staff can have concerns about the spread of AI, either because they worry it may impact their job or they feel that it requires new skills that they don’t have. Panelists explained that change management is therefore vital, both to reassure staff and encourage them to learn new AI skills. George shared the story of one senior visual effects artist, who has embraced AI and said that it had engaged him by providing new ways to work.
3. Understanding and controlling the risks of AI
AI brings three key risks that the panel discussed in-depth: trust, control and intellectual property (IP).
Trust with customers
Todd: “Content is king in B2B marketing. Because we work on so many things that go right in front of customers, there’s a fairly high level of risk in not getting it right. You all know how long it takes to build trust with a customer and how quickly you can lose credibility if you put something in front of somebody that’s not authentic or inaccurate.”
Control through collaboration
Tonic is only releasing agentic AI tools to specific employees currently in order to control its usage and prevent over-experimentation that doesn’t deliver value. For generative AI, organizations (including Tonic and Prologis) have internal models that keep information within the business, and don’t share it with the wider world. Collaboration is necessary to provide control – the creative, IT, legal and leadership teams have to work together to build governance rules and put guardrails in place.
Protecting intellectual property (IP)
4. How AI is transforming creative production
Across creative production, AI is being used in multiple ways. Use cases mentioned by the panelists included:
Christi: Ideation, alignment on creative direction, versioning, and competitive research
George: Going beyond prompts and production to include strategy and ideation
Todd: Atomization of content, splitting it into other, smaller assets while retaining quality
5. Looking forward – the need for organizational change
AI doesn’t just transform how work is done, it also drives change in how creative production organizations are structured, the skills and partnerships they need, and how they operate day-to-day. A key theme from the discussion was the need to see AI as an opportunity, and to focus on how it delivers business benefits, rather than simply being deployed without a clear plan. This will help creative departments be seen as strategic enablers, delivering content at scale, while supporting organisational and marketing objectives in order to provide business value. This requires a mix of AI for volume production, human creativity, and offshoring partnerships to increase output while safeguarding quality.
Todd: “We’re seeing a huge—an enormous—shift in our operating model. We’re at an inflection point in three areas. One is our tech stack, another is our partners, and the third is the way we get work done—both process and people.”
Christi: “There has been a lot of consolidation—consolidation of tools, consolidation of people working together in more collaborative ways, and consolidation of who our external partners are. We’re evaluating to make sure it’s the right tool and it’s being used appropriately.”
Given the speed of AI innovation and the wide range of places where it can be applied, creative team members need to keep up to date and current with the latest tools and ideas. That requires ongoing training and encouragement from management to explore AI’s potential through continuing education.
As Todd pointed out, creative production is shifting, moving away from individuals solely producing creative work themselves and to managing a creative system that includes workflows and tools. Employees need to be open to this change to move forward in their careers.
Delivering the benefits of AI while managing risk
AI is driving unprecedented change across creative production, with the pace of transformation and innovation accelerating. The discussion highlighted how this shift provides a crucial opportunity for creative production teams to increase the value they bring to the business, better meet customer needs and embrace innovation, working with partners to boost efficiency and effectiveness across their operations.
Find out more and watch the whole webinar here.
