The Next Creative Team

My neck hurts. There's Irish cream in my morning coffee. My brain is already days beyond the 5am email that kicked off this thought train. It's moving like there's some sort of grand plan. Damned if I know what it is.

I got laid off this morning.

I'm not sad. Relieved, mostly. Turns out a month of bracing for something is harder than the thing itself. While bracing, I realized the AI-augmented design tools and processes I was building at Oracle aren't proprietary. They're the blueprint of what creative work is about to become. And smaller businesses will take to it faster than the big ones. They always do.

A small, cross-disciplinary pod. Tight. Trusted. Ad agencies figured this out decades ago with the art director/copywriter team. Small businesses are made of these pods by default.

The next creative team will have a bench of agents and skills connected to a proprietary knowledge base. An AI-augmented design team can be sure work meets their company's quality standards, brand voice, safety requirements. Not just opening a fresh chat with Claude and hoping the default training of the model is enough. It isn't.

Without your company's unique knowledge layer, you get the same AI thinking everyone gets. Real, relevant creative work happens when you give your AI the rug that ties the room together. The knowing. The why behind the what. The lessons learned to get to this point.

Your job has changed. You'll spend less time making and more time validating. Tastemaking. Scrutinizing. Deciding which of the five things AI brought to the table is worth pursuing and why. Big picture thinkers and detail people are both still essential — humans are still the only reliable source of truly novel creative judgment.

I may have spent months developing this kind of process at one of the largest tech companies in the world, but it's not just for the big boys. It's for any company that wants to grow, let alone survive. I built one for myself. A personal knowledge layer — my thinking, my patterns, my years of knowing what good work feels like. It works. Which means it scales down as far as one person and up as far as you need it to go.

You might wonder why I'd want a knowledge layer when it's everything that's already in my head. Two reasons:

1. My brain has always needed an external storage and processing unit that actively works with me. This is v67.0 of my overall attempts, but the first time my expectations meet my ideal
2. The more your teammates get to know you, the better you work together. AI is your teammate. The more it can get to know about your specific needs, the better it will get at working with you. And that scales to all sizes of business, too.

A couple of months ago I joked to my colleagues that I should quit and become an AI YouTuber. Maybe I'll give that a shot. I've got time on my hands at the moment.

Do you have questions about AI-augmented design you'd like to ask? hello@jeremyfuksa.com. You can follow what comes next here. And if this corner of the internet has meant something to you, now's not a bad time to become a paid subscriber or leave a one-time donation. Or hire me to evolve your creative team into its next form.