Events Creative Operations Australia 2026 A Survival Guide for Creative Leaders Swimming Upstream

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.

This candid, practical talk describes how creative leaders can swim upstream: away from low-complexity output and toward the spaces where creative judgment has greater organisational value.

Describing, frameworks, relationships and strategic moves required to reposition a creative function

Covering, building trust, sponsorship, cross-functional alliances, clearer decision systems, and better language to support the value creative teams create.

For creative, design and operations leaders

  • Who feel the ground shifting and want more agency in the future of their teams and careers
  • It’s not about resisting AI, worshipping the idea of taste, or hoping the work will speak for itself
  • It is about building the conditions in which creative judgment can be seen, trusted, and acted on before execution even begins
Display Date and Time
10 November, 9:40 AEDT
Track
1
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Speaker Groups
Speaker
Individual Course Speaker
Events Event Speaker Mike Kevan
Programmatic Date Range
-
Session Title
A Survival Guide for Creative Leaders Swimming Upstream