The Creative Singularity: When AI Becomes the Brief

If AI can now brief, brainstorm and build decks, what’s left for us?

There was a time when the creative brief was sacred, part strategy, part aspiration, part provocation. It framed the problem. It hinted at the soul of the brand. It asked something of the team.

For most of my advertising career, the brief was the bible, the ideology, the belief structures, the very essence of the challenge.

The best ones were often short, but extremely powerful creative shaping devices.

A great brief, is a powerful thing in stimulating creativity and thinking.

But something curious is happening.

We’re entering a moment where the brief is no longer the start of the process. Increasingly, it’s the output. Or to put it more precisely:
the AI is writing the brief, shaping the insight, and even proposing the idea, before the Human team shows up.

Welcome to what I’m calling the Creative Singularity, a moment where the boundaries between insight, ideation, and execution are collapsing into a single, generative loop.

What does this look like in practice?

Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can now synthesise audience insights, market trends, competitive reviews, cultural moments, in seconds.

Marketers are simply prompting: “What would be an effective campaign for [X brand] targeting [Y audience] during [Z moment]?” And they’re getting concept ready answers.

Creative teams are using AI to prototype visuals, taglines, and scripts before a strategy deck is even shared.

The AI isn’t just assisting the process. It’s now initiating it.

But not all AI is equal

This shift shouldn’t just be about speed. It should be about quality of thought.

Generic AI tools are great at remixing what's already out there. But they struggle with the "unobvious" the surprising insight, the left-field reframe, the line that makes a planner sit up straighter in their chair.

That’s where the next generation of AI powered tools like Brainwaves will be worth watching closely.
Brainwaves is a new wave of strategic intelligence platforms built specifically for agencies, designed to beat creative block, surface novel opportunities, and even help draft on brief, insights and rich creative platforms.

Full disclosure, one of its co-founders is an old Media Agency mate of mine, Ben Crawford, so I’ve been lucky enough to have a good play with it.

Unlike generalist AI platforms, Brainwaves doesn’t just offer answers, it finds better questions. It reframes problems, proposes territories, and maps diverse angles across campaign strategy, brand platforms, and creative briefs. It’s less “content machine,” more “thought partner.”

The platform gives me a healthy dose of faith that we are not actually entering the age of average.

In a world where average execution is cheap, thinking differently becomes priceless.

If your curious, Brainwaves early access is now available by invitation, so just email ben@brain-waves.io

But what does this mean for creativity?

The idea isn't “found” through brainstorms, or just spat out from a general prompt, instead via these tools, it will be surfaced and refined through rapid iteration, between Humans & Machine.

Human creativity becomes less about invention, more about curation.
Our Human superpower? Knowing what has the spark, and what doesn’t.

But in this new world, you still might ask:

If the AI is doing the briefing, the thinking, and the drafting, what’s left for us?

The answer, I suspect, is where the real value will lie:

Judgment, Taste, Timing, Truth.

If AI can give us 1,000 ideas, we will still need to know which one matters. If AI can optimise for performance, we humans will still need to optimise for meaning, and its the meaning that has always truely mattered.

Perhaps a concise way to sum this all up is simply this:

If AI can now brief, brainstorm and build decks, what’s left for us?

A lot actually.

The magic, the mischief, the meaning.

The eye and the heart of creativity.

End of musing