It’s not about AI or humans. It’s about the right split.

The last six months have been wild. I've worked in marketing production for over 20 years, and I've never seen technology move as fast as it has since the turn of the year.

What we discussed a year ago as “exciting possibilities” is production reality today. At XO, AI agents run daily, trained on our clients’ brands, producing at a volume and speed that a short while ago required an entire team.

And yet I’m going to do something that might sound odd coming from a CTO in the middle of an AI wave: defend the craft.

Because the debate I most often encounter — “will AI replace people?” — is, in my view, the wrong one. The interesting discussion isn’t either-or. It’s about where the cut should fall. What should the machine do, and what should the human? And that’s exactly where the battle for effective campaign execution is won or lost.

What the machine is good at

Let me be concrete. A 360° campaign today has to ship in 40+ formats, across 18+ languages, to OOH, social, print, video and web — often simultaneously, often within days. That’s an enormous amount of repetitive work: versioning, format adaptation, batch translations, exporting to the right specs for each medium.

This is the kind of work that has historically kept talented creatives trapped in bottlenecks. And it’s exactly the kind of work AI is brilliant at. Our agents can take a master file and version it to 50 markets in the time it takes me to write this sentence. More importantly: because they’re trained on each client’s guidelines, past campaigns and tone, they don’t just produce fast — they produce in context.

What the human is indispensable for

But here it stops. Because there are decisions that can’t be automated without losing what makes an agency a quality agency.

Does a translation land culturally, or is it merely grammatically correct? Does a layout feel on brand, or has it hit an unfortunate tone? Does the finished output live up to the intent the campaign was born with? Those judgments require human discernment. They require someone who knows the brand, knows the client, and dares to say “this isn’t good enough yet”.

Every single file that leaves the house has passed a human stamp of approval. The day we let go of that, we stop delivering what clients come to us for.

Why “decoupling” matters more than ever

This connects to a movement I believe will define the industry over the next few years: decoupling. Separating creative development from production itself. The creative agency delivers the idea and master design. A specialised production partner takes execution across everything.

When AI simultaneously makes the production engine markedly faster and cheaper, that model becomes even more compelling. But — and this is the whole point — only if the production partner has command of the cut between machine and human. Pure automation gives you speed without brand safety. Pure craft gives you brand safety without scale. The winners will be those who master both at once.

What I’d tell a marketing team today

If I had to give one piece of advice to a marketing team in the middle of all this: stop fearing that AI takes the job, and start asking your partners the sharp question — where does your cut fall? What do you let the machine do, what do you insist on keeping human, and why?

For us, the answer has become the business itself. The last six months have confirmed that the future belongs neither to those who automate everything, nor to those who refuse to automate anything. It belongs to those who find the right split.