AI can generate hundreds of ideas, produce countless variations of an ad, and churn out storyboards in a matter of seconds. But speed and abundance do not produce work that connects with people.

That distinction is shaping how Ogilvy approaches AI. Carol Reed, global chief innovative officer at the agency, laid out the thinking at EMARKETER's Future of Digital summit last week.

Reed sees that focus on automation as too narrow, particularly for creative and strategic work. The question is not how AI replaces human effort, she argues, but how it enhances human effort.

“Let's reframe the conversation from automation and more about augmentation,” Reed said. “How does it become a part of how we do our work?”

Keep humans in control

AI has an easier time with the parts of marketing that follow a clear process. Creative and strategy are harder for it to pin down because they rely on intuition, taste, judgment, and an understanding of how people think and feel.

That makes the goal of AI in creative work different from simply eliminating tasks.

“Humans should always be in control,” Reed said. “We should always maintain responsibility over what we want to execute.”

Instead of asking AI to move from a brief to a finished campaign, Ogilvy is looking for specific points within the creative process where the technology can make people faster or expand what they can do.

That could mean rapid storyboarding, capturing and organizing ideas during workshops, coaching teams through a process, or reminding them about compliance requirements.

“There’s ways to have it be there, but don't ask it to do your work,” Reed said. “Don't ask it for the end result.”

That distinction matters as marketers face pressure to use AI to produce more work with fewer resources. Treating efficiency as the end goal risks skipping the harder question of whether the resulting creative is actually any good.

Humans provide judgment

Generative AI excels at producing variations. Give it a framework and it can change language, imagery, or other creative elements across dozens or hundreds of executions, giving marketers more material to test.

But generating more options is not the same as understanding why something resonates.

“It'll never tell us why it works,” Reed said. “And that's why we need the strategists, we need creatives, we need you, all the marketers to understand the consumer, the product, the people.”

Human creativity also has an advantage precisely because humans do not always follow predictable patterns. Creatives bring different instincts to the work, Reed said: Some are observant, some empathetic, and others instinctively contrarian.

Those differences can produce unexpected ideas that stand out, while AI tools are built to recognize and complete patterns

“You cannot replace the human piece,” Reed said. “You have to keep AI in a box. It's a tool. It's a tool for us to leverage, and we have to figure out the best ways to use it.”

Creative efficiency cannot come at the expense of craft

AI can help marketers with the ads designed to get someone to act, whether that means tailoring a message, offer, or product to the person most likely to respond.

But not every ad is meant to drive an immediate click or sale. Brands also need creative that makes people feel something and shapes how they see the brand long after the encounter.

Reed invoked David Ogilvy’s famous line, “If it doesn't sell, it's not creative,” before adding a qualification for the AI era: Creative also needs to make someone feel or want to do something.

“You can't compromise the craft and you can't compromise the quality,” she said.

For marketers, that shifts the AI question away from how many people or hours the technology can replace. Instead, AI can help creative teams move faster, react to culture more quickly, and explore ideas that once would have been too time-consuming or expensive to execute.

The goal may be for AI to fade into the creative process much like CGI or a green screen.

“It doesn't matter what you use or how you got there,” Reed said. What matters is the endpoint.

AI makes producing creative easier, but that puts more weight on deciding what deserves to reach consumers. The work is to name the stages where AI expands possibilities, speeds up production, or handles repetitive execution, and to hold responsibility for the final product at every other stage. Taste and judgment stop being the bottleneck and start being the filter.

Watch the full session.