Oh, The Places We Will Go: Why I Might Be Wrong About AI and Young Talent
I’ve been carrying a bias. Time to put it on the table.
Every time someone asked me about AI and the creative industry, I’d circle back to the same concern. The entry-level job is disappearing. The tasks that young creatives used to cut their teeth on — the resize, the copy variation, the spec ad, the deck draft — AI is eating those for breakfast. And if you take away the tasks, you take away the learning. You take away the apprenticeship. You take away the moment where a young creative sits across from someone who’s done this for thirty years and absorbs, through proximity and repetition, what good actually looks like.
I still think that’s true. But I’ve started to think I had the question backward.
The question I was asking
I was asking: how will young creatives learn what good looks like, what craft feels like, and what it takes to build a successful creative career, if they are not even in the room?
This assumes that knowledge transfer runs in one direction. From experienced to inexperienced. From battle-tested to untested. From the people who know what good looks like to the people who don’t yet.
That assumption is not wrong. It’s just incomplete. And in an AI world, incomplete assumptions are expensive.
The question I should have been asking
How are we going to learn from them?
Yesterday, I read an article that Justin Halim posted, written by Geia Lopez, Google’s Head of Creative and Creator Partnerships for Southeast Asia. And it has been living rent-free in my head all day, and was still there first thing this morning.
The article is about the Young Lotus workshop at ADFEST 2026 - twenty-nine young creatives from fifteen cities who responded to a real YouTube brief: they were not handicapped by what they don’t know. They were liberated by it.
They haven’t learned the rules well enough to be intimidated by them. They don’t carry the scar tissue of a thousand “that’ll never get approved” conversations. They didn’t grow up in an industry that told them to be realistic. They grew up in an industry that didn’t exist yet — and they built it anyway, on YouTube, on TikTok, on platforms that the previous generation was still trying to figure out how to monetize.
They are not digital natives. They are AI natives. The tools aren’t new to them. The tools are just… Tuesday.
One plus one equals more.
Young AI-native creatives don’t have a calibrated sense of what great looks like. Not because they’re not talented. Because that is built from exposure, from failure, from the accumulated weight of watching ten thousand pieces of work and developing the gut instinct to know — in the first five seconds — whether something has it or it doesn’t.
That takes time. There’s no prompt for it. This is earned.
Here’s what I have after thirty-plus years: experience. The pattern recognition. The ability to walk into a room, look at a brief, and feel the shape of the right answer before I can articulate why. The battle-tested judgment to know which idea matters, why it will land, and when to trust your gut over the data.
Here’s what our younger, emerging talent brings to the room: something entirely different and equally irreplaceable. AI fluency so native it’s invisible to them — not a tool they learned, but a reflex they grew up with. An instinctive understanding of how platforms think, what communities want, and how culture moves at speed. And perhaps most importantly: no inherited assumptions about what’s possible. They didn’t learn the industry’s rules. They didn’t memorize the playbook. They arrived after the playbook had already been set on fire — and they brought marshmallows.
The Bangkok team won Young Lotus this year. And what they did wasn’t just clever — it was a different kind of thinking entirely. They didn’t work around the YouTube algorithm. They didn’t accept it as a given. They partnered with it. Treated it as a collaborator, a co-author, a creative asset with its own logic and appetite. They asked not what AI allows them to do, but what the platform wants to become — and then built something that answered that question. That’s not a technique. That’s a mindset. And it’s one that flows naturally from people who arrived at the table without anyone ever telling them the algorithm was the enemy.
Imagine pairing that — the marshmallow energy, the algorithm-as-collaborator instinct, the beautiful refusal to accept that anything is fixed — with thirty years of knowing exactly what great feels like the moment it walks into the room.
Experience plus audacity. Depth plus altitude. The calibrated eye plus the unconditioned imagination. Not AI replacing the human. Not youth replacing the veteran.
The pairing. That’s the real force multiplier. And it’s sitting right there, in most organizations, completely undeployed.
The organizational opportunity
Here’s where I stop being a commentator and start being an advocate.
Not just for myself — though I won’t pretend this isn’t personal. I’m 61, and have watched the industry I love tell people like me, with increasing frequency, that our time has passed. That we’re expensive. That we don’t move fast enough. The future belongs to someone younger, cheaper, and more digitally fluent. All of which is bullshit.
The organizations that are going to win in this AI era are not the ones that replace experienced talent with AI. And they’re not the ones that bet everything on young AI-native talent alone. They’re the ones that are smart enough — and brave enough — to put both in the same room and let them work. Together.
Here’s what that pairing actually looks like in practice. The young creative brings velocity, platform fluency, and the beautiful audacity of not knowing what’s supposed to be impossible. The experienced creative brings something that cannot be prompted, generated, or faked: the calibrated eye. The sense of what good looks like. The craft instincts built from decades of making things, breaking things, and learning — slowly, painfully, magnificently — from both.
Young talent will soak that up. Not reluctantly — hungrily. Give a genuinely talented young creative the freedom of these tools and access to someone who can tell them when they’ve made something truly great versus something that merely looks like it? That’s not a mentorship program. That’s an unfair competitive advantage.
But it requires organizations to make a deliberate choice. To resist the instinct to age out their senior talent in the name of efficiency. To recognize that experience, in an AI world, is not a cost to be managed. It is a multiplier to be deployed.
So this is me, advocating. For myself, yes. But more importantly, for every seasoned creative strategist, writer, director, and thinker who is being quietly edged toward the exit at the exact moment their value has never been higher.
Don’t go. And to the organizations making that mistake — reconsider. Fast.
The bias I’ve been carrying? Gone. Replaced by something better. The absolute certainty that the most dangerous creative combination in any room right now is a 25-year-old who doesn’t know what’s impossible, sitting next to the veteran who knows exactly how to make it real.
Because the idea is rarely what kills great work. The organization is. The politics, the approval layers, the stakeholders who need to feel heard before they’ll say yes. Navigating that — keeping a bold idea alive through all the friction that wants to sand it down to nothing — that’s not a skill you’re born with. That’s thirty years of scar tissue, deployed strategically.
Dr. Seuss wrote a book called “Oh, the Places You’ll Go.” It’s ostensibly for children graduating into an uncertain world. But read it again. It’s a brief. For exactly this moment. For the experienced creative who finally has the tools to match the scale of their thinking. And for the young creative who hasn’t yet learned what’s impossible.
The destination is the same. Unbounded.
Oh, the places we’ll go.
