The Risk

Everyone's daring to be different with new tools, AI, and endless optimisation. But chase that too hard, and you build systems with more admin, more upkeep, and more stress than they remove. Risking losing the humans meant to use them, along the way. 

How We’ve Kept It Simple

The journey of building The Corner Shop, 7-Eleven Australia's in-house creative agency, from the ground up - and the unglamorous discipline of intentionally staying simple, when the world’s your oyster. 

When More Creative Creates Less Impact

AI and new creative technologies are making it possible for brands to create, test, adapt, and scale content faster and at lower cost than ever before. But as the market fills with competent, endlessly optimised, and increasingly forgettable content, brands face a new threat: invisibility through mediocrity.

How Backing Difference Built In-House Agency of the Year

As the demand for creative output continues to skyrocket, we're forced into a vicious cycle of reactivity to do more, keep up, stay relevant, stay important... But how often have we stopped to deep dive into understanding what the real problem is we're trying to solve? Particularly for a charity, this challenge isn't unique to creative - it's organisational. 

Taste Won’t Save You

Context

As AI, automation and restructuring reshape the value of creative work, the most visible parts of what creative teams do, speed, volume, versioning and output, are becoming the easiest to optimise, automate and devalue. The deeper threat is not AI itself. It is the long-standing tendency to reduce creative labour in the process of production. And creative value is tough to measure but easy to cost.

More work, tighter timelines and growing expectations are putting creative teams under pressure to scale. 

But how do you increase output without sacrificing quality or brand control?

Nicole Kaminski, from Canva, shares a practical look at how teams are approaching this challenge. From building smarter brand templates with built-in guardrails to using AI to take on repetitive tasks. 

Through real-world examples and lessons learned, the session explores what it takes to build modern Creative Operations that can scale output without losing control.