The stack that survived
Eighteen months ago our production floor tried 41 AI tools. Today, 8 remain. Here is what earned the seat.
- Writing and research. Long-context LLMs for synthesis, first drafts of long-form, and research extraction. We do not let them write final copy for clients.
- Design ideation. Image models for thumbnail-level concept exploration, never for finished assets.
- Video roughs. Generative video for previz and mood, handed to a human editor for finish.
- Edit assistants. Voice-to-text, scene detection, color matching.
- Ops. Meeting notes, transcript search, internal knowledge base.
The tools we quietly dropped
- Full-stack "agent" platforms that claimed to replace a team.
- Image tools optimized for portraiture at the expense of brand control.
- Anything priced per-seat in a way that didn’t scale to 80 people.
What we are still missing
A production-grade generative tool that a creative director can hand to a client and not flinch. The gap between "looks great in a thumbnail" and "looks great in a 48-sheet poster" is still enormous, and it is the one gap we still cannot close with AI alone.
That gap is why we still hire humans.
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