By Bob Winter, Chief Creative Officer, Supergood
AI is an incredible, mind-blowing, ever-improving tool that lets us be faster and more efficient than ever before. It’s why we use it every day. But here’s the thing — we’ve all seen what happens when you just let it run. The work feels like it. Robotic. Predictable. Like it was made by something that’s read everything and felt nothing. Because it was.
If we really want to make work that connects with humans, we still need to be, you know, human. We need to guide the machines, but we also need to bring the things they genuinely can’t replicate: wildly inventive, unexpected ideas, and something even harder to fake — empathy. Turns out we’re still needed after all. Hooray for us.
Use AI to facilitate creativity, not replace it.
Creativity is the ability to generate original, imaginative ideas and translate them into real value. Original is the key word. AI is extraordinary at pattern recognition — it knows everything that’s been done. These days, agencies can build AI audiences so sophisticated you can ask them what worries them, what music they love, what their favorite sandwich is. You can have them watch every ad in a category and map the white space. That’s genuinely powerful. But white space isn’t an idea. It’s a coordinate. You still need a human to go there and build something that didn’t exist before.
Think of AI as the world’s greatest assistant, ask it to get you everything you need to be inspired.
Could AI have written “Got Milk” or the VW “Lemon” ad? Those ideas didn’t come from finding a gap in the market — they came from someone willing to ask a strange question, or call their own client’s product a defect and trust that honesty would land harder than polish. That’s not a process. That’s a sensibility. AI can help us get to the edge faster. But someone still has to jump.
Act with empathy. For your audience, your clients and your coworkers.
Kindness, on the other hand, is way more than just being nice. It means reading the room. Understanding what your audience actually needs in this moment — not just what they’re likely to click on. It means not walking into a dinner party and asking who’s going to cut the lawn. Not throwing a laundry list of RTBs at someone when they really just need a laugh. Or better yet, finding a way to give them both.
In a recent campaign for Sanders Chocolates, the premise was simple: everyone assumes the Easter Bunny is generous, but it turns out he’s been hoarding the Sanders chocolates for himself. It cut through a season drowning in sugary-sweet content, and we built it in just 13 days instead of weeks or months — because AI handled the scaffolding while we protected the idea and leaned into the craft. That’s the model. AI as infrastructure. Humans as the source of the original, true, unexpected thing.
So yes, AI is amazing. And we use it to help us be twice as fast and twice as effective. But we’ve all seen it used poorly. And we’ve all seen content that felt robotic, fake and super AI-y. But we’ve also seen, and hopefully made, really magical work that made the hair on our arms stand up. The kind that can only come from humans. The kind of work that unites us and inspires us and motivates us. Sometimes it even motivates us to go and buy the thing they were talking about, where we will promptly take out our credit cards and happily pay… a robot.
