Daring to Operate Differently

The challenge

When organizations grow quickly, complexity increases naturally. Clarity does not.

Our response

Drawing on experiences across fast-growing digital startups, creative production, and highly regulated industries, an exploration of how Creative Operations goes beyond process management to become a creative force for clarity, collaboration, scalability, and trust.

Keys to success

At SAS, assets ranging from trade show graphics and employee-services menus to software product screenshots follow a single approval workflow. Once approved, automation publishes each asset to the right channels and retires it on schedule. Integrations with image stock providers and SAS’s social platform also streamline distribution. Katrina Powell and Misti Vogt will show how the workflow works, what was automated first, and where it saves the most time each week. 

AI is accelerating a fragmentation problem that already existed in how creative organizations are structured. As teams quickly adopt AI tools, they risk rebuilding the same silos in technology that their organizations have spent years trying to break down. This is fundamentally an operating model problem, not a technology problem; AI just makes the cost of getting the model wrong show up much faster. We'll explore how to spot this pattern early, where human judgment must anchor AI-driven work, and a practical model for testing AI use cases externally before scaling them in-house.

Scaling Content Production from 0 to 300 in 6 Months

The challenge

What it takes to build a high-volume social content engine while simultaneously laying the groundwork for its infrastructure? 

What we did and what we learned

The real-world operational challenges, learnings, and breakthroughs of scaling a production studio from a handful of weekly assets to 300 posts in just six months. 

When everyone can make an image, what happens to the photo studio?

AI is pushing us to redefine the studio. Not as a black box where images are produced, but as an author and steward of customer-centric content ecosystems.

In this talk, we’ll follow one product through its expanding universe of assets. Along the way, we’ll explore the decisions that matter beyond technology: Where does AI belong in the workflow, and where doesn’t it? Why have we kept AI content production within the studio? And how can we build creative systems that are not only scalable, but responsible?

Better Together

Reality check
Hybrid models are no longer the headline. In 2026, the real differentiators are:

Opinion

Most agencies are approaching AI backwards, chasing tools before understanding the problem they are supposed to solve.

Why acting before thinking is the wrong way to go

Based on 17 years leading transformation work, and experience inside creative and media agencies, a practical, low-drama path to AI adoption is the best approach.

Key Steps:

When Every Tool Has AI

Context

AI is rapidly being added to every layer of the creative technology stack. Organizations are accelerating AI-assisted workflows, while many struggle with fragmented systems, inconsistent context, and disconnected operational intelligence.

What happens when AI becomes an active participant in Creative Ops workflows

Generative AI has made creative production dramatically easier. But for brands, the harder challenge remains: knowing what to create, why it should work, and how to scale that intelligence across every campaign, channel and market.


The next phase of creative AI will not be won through better prompts or disconnected tools. It will be built through AI-native creative systems that bring together audience insight, brand knowledge, competitive intelligence, platform context, human judgment and automated execution.