Content creators have never been short of threats to their long-term livelihood, with every new design technology making it that bit easier for laypeople to do jobs once only performed by professionals.

However, none of those previous threats comes close to matching the impact of generative AI, while the billions of dollars being invested in new AI capabilities suggests its overall impact is still some way from realisation.

For the marketing sector, the rapid emergence of AI has fuelled endless debates as to what its role should be.

On the one hand is the desire to protect creative process, brand equity, and public trust. On the other is the desire to produce content with greater diversity at a speed that was never possible before – and at a lower cost than human creators.

This last factor is especially compelling in an era where budget tightening is rampant, but where the desire to engage customers with personalised content and offers is the mantra of the day.

Not surprisingly, many creative marketing teams are experimenting with AI, striving to find the sweet spot for adoption while constantly testing the boundaries as new capabilities come to market.

While the specific spend for AI use in creative marketing processes is hard to define, the trends are compelling, with Statista finding that AI in the marketing industry was worth US$47.32 billion in 2025, up from US$12.05 billion in 2020. Use is widespread, with Survey Monkey reporting that 88 percent of digital marketers used AI in their day-to-day tasks.

Helping hands

At Seven West Media, AI has become an integral tool for senior graphic designer Jessica Hankinson and her colleagues in their quest to produce brand and marketing assets in support of the he integrated media company’s various activities.

“Whether that is through print ads, digital, video, audio, radio, events – the whole shebang comes out of our marketing team,” Hankinson said.

For the past year the creative teams have been augmenting their outputs using Adobe’s Firefly generative AI tools, which provide a prompt-based capability for image generation.

“As a creative it can be really hard to explain what’s in our heads to non-visual people,” Hankinson said.

“So even just putting a few keywords into this platform to describe the picture that we are seeing in our minds, and being able to have something come up, is so much faster than if we are to sketch it out.”

Initial success with ideation led the teams to consider how it might also assist with customisation, and helping the team to quickly storyboard ideas.

As comfort with AI has grown, its use has increased across the group, with the video team now using AI features in Adobe’s After Effects for tasks such as stem separation (isolating different audio elements) and cleaning up dialogue.

Having travelled to Adobe’s annual Max conference in Miami last year Hankinson, said she was excited by demonstrations of new capabilities, including the ability to create a whole video production generated by AI.

“Authenticity and audience trust are key in our industry, particularly as public scrutiny around AI in media continues to grow,” Hankinson said.

“When used, AI is typically part of a broader creative process like storyboarding or mixed media artwork, not a replacement for human storytelling.

“Our focus is obviously making sure that we are very reactive to the way the public are responding to things, so if they're become more comfortable with the use of AI, perhaps we'll evolve into using it more. For now, the plan is to use it more for workflows and streamlining things. But, as AI evolves, so do we.

“I don't see AI as taking over our jobs. If anything, the need for content is creating more jobs. So, I see it as counteracting the fact there is such a need for all this content and it's helping us keep up. It's helping us get it out there.”

Artificial embrace

While much of the discussion regarding AI in creative processes has focused on the potential for displacement and job losses, the experiences of many organisations that have embraced it have been very different.

For the past two years the marketing team at the investment management firm Challenger has been using the content creation tool Jasper AI, with positive results.

“The team love it, because content creation is so easy,” said Challenger’s general manager of marketing Carly O’Keefe.

“What the team has found is the pieces we produce now, are a lot more creative. We've been able to get the right balance, and I think the team have really honed their prompts so we get the right output.”

O’Keefe said the tool had also proven useful for analysing existing content and repurposing it into different formats or isolating specific themes and topics.

“It saves the team a lot of time and it makes them feel really supported, because they don't need to come up with the words themselves,” O’Keefe said.

“The other thing I like about Jasper more than other models or platforms is that it’s closed, so other people aren't learning from our stuff.”

While the long-term future for AI in content creation is far from clear, it seems certain that its use will grow – especially as its capabilities grow.

At the finance firm NOW Finance, chief marketing officer Chris Maccan said selective use of AI in creative development would evolve as AI capabilities evolved.

“We're actively using that within some of our socials – so lower stakes creative – but really trying to build that muscle in terms of how we use AI, even for basic stuff like first drafts,” Maccan said.

“The quality that we get from generative AI images, video, and so forth is getting much, much better.

“Six months ago, it was probably a bit shaky, but it's very much getting there.”

Whereas once his team might have only had capacity to manage six different variants of a campaign, now that number might be tenfold.

“It enables us to scale in ways that for a small team and a resource constrained team, we otherwise wouldn't necessarily been able to do in the past,” Maccan said.

“So, it really does enable us to scale and think more broadly around to what level of granularity we can personalise because it becomes a lot more feasible.”