The Future of Creativity & AI Event Wrap

AI is fundamentally changing how we work and how we create. Our AI Working Group brought together industry experts at the cutting edge of this space to share their insights at our recent ‘The Future of Creativity & AI’ event on 9th April 2026. Here are our top outtakes - plus we’ve created a NotebookLM AI podcast if you like to listen on the go 🎧

The AI creative market has already split, but most people haven't processed it yet.

Heath Waugh Creative, and Founder of Matter Studio has 24 years in commercial photography and has been deep in AI tools for the last 3 years. He shared that the market has already split into two tiers. Tier 1 is high-volume, low-stakes work (social content, performance creative) and tier 2 is everything else (brand campaigns, broadcast). AI handles tier one easily. Tier two still requires experienced creatives.

Heath’s three key outtakes:

1. The timeline has changed permanently. Feedback comes earlier, stakeholders collaborate in shared environments from the start, and creative work is no longer tied to physical supply chains, so your physical product can be overseas, but with these AI tools you can still get production underway.
2. Volume is easy. Quality is not. Standard AI output is 1K/72dpi - roughly the size of a business card. Print-ready for large-format work requires 8K/300dpi. You still need someone that understands craft to ship the work.
3. Craft is the new bottleneck. Don't hand AI tools to your most junior person because they grew up online. Hand them to an experienced creative. Someone with genuine subject matter expertise, working in unison with AI, That's the 10/80/10 rule - AI handles the middle 80%, humans set it up and finish it
   
   

On copyright: NZ's Copyright Act 1994 is more AI-friendly than most countries, but you're not covered by default. Three actions (1) Prompts alone do not equal authorship (2) Check your platform terms today (3) Update your contracts.

Using AI well isn't a replacement skill set. It's tool fluency layered on top of existing ability to deliver real work" - Heath Waugh, Creative | Founder, Matter Studio

We’re navigating modern software with ancient hardware.

Emily Isle, Chief Digital Officer MBM was fresh back from SXSW, Austin Texas with outtakes from the global culture and tech conference attended by over 300,000 people. Emily’s observation is that technology is compounding exponentially while human adaptation is linear - so there’s a gap. She shared her three pro tips to close this gap practically in ways that enhance your workflow and your creativity: 

1. AI can know you better than you know yourself. Train AI in your own voice so it reflects how you communicate, and train it on your team's emails and Slack messages to enable you to create flash groups and project teams. 

2. Talk back to your tools. AI gets better when you challenge it so don’t be polite. Push back on outputs, expose errors, and give it honest feedback.

3. Know your consumer in new ways. Social listening helps you understand what people think about your brand. Layer on a synthetic audience panel and you have a qualitative research room available any time. A synthetic audience panel replaces real recruited research participants with AI-generated personas built from existing data - social listening, brand trackers, customer data. You prompt the AI to respond as those personas: how would this person react to this ad, this price, this message? The appeal is speed and cost. Hootsuite CMO Billy Jones shared at SXSW that he believes synthetic consumers will be inside every marketing department within 12 months - MBM is already working in this space.

AI’s Jagged Frontier: Start using the tools.

Jake Chalkley, a Senior UX Designer has been at Google for 13 years. His opening - the jagged frontier - was the most useful frame in the room for where AI sits right now. AI doesn't improve in a straight line and it's remarkable in some areas and can be poor in others. The key message is don’t wait for the technology to be fully smoothed out. It won't be - so just start working in the tools. Jake walked through a live example which was building a 30-second ad for the Pixel 10 using only Google's AI tools. Gemini for the script, Nano (inside Gemini) for image generation, Flow/Veo for video, AI Studio for voiceover and the final edit in Adobe Premiere. Overall the new AI creative workflow is circular and iterative - which is nothing like traditional linear production. The tools he used and that are worth getting familiar with now are Gemini, NotebookLM, Flow and Veo.

The overall outtake of the event was that AI rewards people who bring real expertise to the tools, not people who outsource their thinking to them. Heath put it in terms of craft. Emily put it in terms of self-awareness and consumer understanding and Jake Chalkley put it in terms of experimentation. But the practical instruction is the same - get in, build familiarity with the tools, and bring what you already know with you.

🎧 Listen to some of the event highlights in the 12 minute IAB NZ Insights Podcast thanks to the power of NotebookLM and AI.

Check out the full event photo gallery here, and see if you can spot yourself or a friend 📸

Thank you go our event sponsor: