In the creative world, burnout isn't just a buzzword — it's an epidemic. A staggering 78% of in-house creative professionals report feeling burned out, buried under mounting requests, more than half of which are labeled "urgent."
With creative departments struggling to do innovative work, one solution is emerging as a game-changer — artificial intelligence. But before you dismiss this as just another tech hype cycle or fear it as a job replacement threat, it's worth understanding how AI is actually transforming the creative landscape.
In my recent conversation with Jen Rapp, CMO of Superside, she unpacks how AI is serving not as a replacement but as a ray of light for overwhelmed teams.
This interview is part of G2’s Q&A series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.
To watch the full interview, check out the video below:
Let’s start with a status check on how in-house creatives are doing.
What headwinds are they facing daily? As we all know, the creative services industry is experiencing a rapid transformation with AI. What key shifts have you observed in how enterprise clients approach their creative needs?
If we look at the state of the in-house creative team, one thing comes to mind: they are overcommitted and under-resourced. And this is part of, you know, having run creative teams for over 10 to 15 years now. We just did a study about this that focused on the state of the in-house creative teams. We called it overcommitted.
We talked to 206 creative leaders in the tech and enterprise sectors and discovered a concerning trend: 78% of creatives reported feeling burned out due to excessive workloads and insufficient resources. Alarmingly, 55% of incoming requests are marked as urgent, adding to their already overwhelming pressure.
Overwhelmed with tasks, these creatives find it difficult to breathe. The sheer volume of work leaves little room for innovative or bold thinking, which is essential to their roles.
However, there is hope on the horizon with the integration of AI tools into the creative process. We're seeing AI really help accelerate time to market, speed up creative projects, and increase the ability to iterate or create multiple versions of the same asset. We're seeing AI as a ray of light for all of our customers and my internal creative team as well.
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As you mentioned, the volume of incoming requests keeps rising. As demand continues to scale, how have in-house creatives had to reimagine the way they work?
Today, creative teams are having to reconsider what is considered a high priority. Everyone, from HR to marketing and recruitment, has urgent needs, and they really have to look at what is considered high priority and what has the biggest impact and start there.
Second, they've had to reconsider how they leverage external partners. Historically, large corporations relied on creative agencies for big campaign ideas, leaving the daily production tasks — such as performance marketing ads and social media posts — to in-house teams. However, this dynamic is shifting.
They've had to reprogram how they're working with external partners because, frankly, the internal team, in many ways, has been hired because of their creativity. And they have the power and the ability to do that big, audacious work. As a result, we’re seeing internal teams increasingly partnering with firms like Superside. And what we do is alleviate the burden of routine production work, enabling internal creatives to focus on the impactful and innovative projects they were originally hired to pursue.
Creative teams are also becoming more strategic in their hiring, seeking talent skilled in AI to enhance their capacity and maintain competitiveness. Every CMO I know today is going to creatives and saying, “How are you bringing AI into your workflows?” So, if you have that skillset of AI tools and AI processes and models, you are gonna be hired faster, quicker, and probably make more money today.
"Today's need to upskill in AI parallels the transition from film to digital photography. Like photographers, creatives who master AI will become indispensable."
Jen Rapp
CMO, Superside
With these shifts in creative workflows, the role of AI has become increasingly significant. We're seeing AI tools that can generate everything from copy to images to video.
How has this affected your conversations with clients about the value of human creativity and expertise in their creative processes?
What we have found is that AI is a tool that humans can leverage, but it's not a replacement for human ingenuity and creativity. Not at all. While AI can serve as a brainstorming partner or a production partner, it's a multiplier. It's really only effective as its operator. If you ask me to create a prompt, you are going to get a horrible result because I am not a trained creative with these tools.
AI can also be used as a storyboarding partner. It can create really amazing first drafts of imagery. Then, the human comes in and improves it. So it's a massive time saver. It's also helping teams. For example, here at Superside, we save a ton of money because we can do one photo shoot and use AI to leverage, alter, and improve those images. But we take an original image and use it as the basis for everything we then create with AI. So, instead of doing four photo shoots throughout the year, we can do one.
We're also seeing this with a lot of our customers who do product photography or on-body product photography. We're able to now create AI models for them so that they don't have to do five shoots on five different people. And they're taking the cost per asset down from what used to be $200 per asset to $20 an asset. It's a huge cost reduction. We're seeing about a 70% cost reduction when you bring AI into the picture.
When it comes to AI tools for creative work, how do you decide which ones to integrate into your workflow, and how do you prove the value of creativity to various stakeholders?
We have an AI team here at Superside, and they are ahead of everything that's happening in the industry. In fact, we have a Slack channel where you can watch them experimenting with new tools as they roll out.
We will see them iterating and experimenting outside of the client environment so that we can see if this specific tool is able to generate images, video, or motion at what we consider to be almost human-level quality.
What I've observed is most of these tools are not where they need to be when they hit the market. There's like a six-month iterative process whereby our team experiments with them, leveraging the improvements that the AI companies are rolling out over time. We do a ton of experimentation outside of that customer environment to know which ones can be brought to the table.
As far as proving the value of creativity is concerned, creative teams are going to have to start doing that on their own or by partnering with someone so that an external partner has done all of that groundwork for them. This way they will know how to leverage it and bring the value in from day one. If the tool doesn't yield an impact or result, no one wins.
At the end of the day, creativity is always really hard to measure. What might be a great asset to one customer would be totally unacceptable to another.
"Today, what is judged as a good creative is a creative that performs."
Jen Rapp
CMO, Superside
But what can be measured is performance. Earlier this year, we launched a product called Super Ads. It's a platform that provides businesses with instant data, visual reporting, and AI insights. It basically says, this is why your creative is performing well — go create more of it or go create things like this for your Meta, your LinkedIn, your TikTok platforms, because this is why it's performing. And I think we're gonna see more and more of that as time goes by.
So, looking ahead a few years, how do you see AI tools advancing to support the creative industry? And how do you envision the evolving relationship between AI and human creativity?
Currently, the innovation with AI and creative tools is happening so fast that it's very hard for your in-house team to keep up. That's why we have a dedicated team here to keep AI advocacy at the forefront of everything they're doing and keep us at the forefront of all the emerging technologies.
I think in the future, teams are going to have a dedicated individual or a dedicated pod within their creative team that is entirely for testing, iterating, and using AI tools. Companies will start incentivizing people to stay ahead of the curve and incorporate AI workflows into their daily work, much like you would incentivize somebody to have more sales or win more customers.
"I think the time for us to be worried about AI and what it's going to do to our jobs is done. We've seen what AI can do today."
Jen Rapp
CMO, Superside
It's really important that marketers and creative teams stay optimistic about AI and the role that it's going to play. It's an incredible search tool and an incredible creative partner. It's great at helping kids do their homework better, but it hasn't yet taken away jobs. And I think we need to approach this as another tool in our toolkit and something to embrace and feel really positive about.
What advice would you give to budding marketers entering the creative services industry? Anything they should be looking out for?
For today's marketers and creators, staying ahead of trends and mastering AI tools is absolutely essential. The beauty of modern AI is its accessibility — anyone can explore platforms like Midjourney or Leonardo AI to develop their prompting skills.
These AI tools are also particularly powerful because of their user-friendly design. Anyone with curiosity can dive in and start experimenting right away. This hands-on experience will significantly enhance what you bring to the table.
I encourage people to become intimately familiar with how these tools function, as this knowledge will be invaluable in team settings, job interviews, and daily work tasks.
So my advice is simple: jump in, experiment fearlessly, and discover the possibilities — this practical knowledge will give you a tremendous competitive advantage in the creative services industry.
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Follow Jen Rapp on LinkedIn to learn more about the rise of AI in the creative services industry.
Edited by Supanna Das
