There’s a lot of AI talk. A lot of hype and speculation about what it can or should do: everywhere you look, Artificial Intelligence is described as disruptive, transformative, and inevitable. And let’s face it, who isn’t guilty of using ChatGPT as their all-encompassing life coach slash main decision-maker?
All jokes aside, and whether we care to admit it, the term ‘AI’ has become a must-have buzzword within our industry. From overconfident Creative Directors to wide-eyed interns, everyone talks (and brags) about it. But in the middle of all that noise, it’s easy to lose sight of the real question: How is AI changing the creative industry? And more importantly, what does it mean for our clients?
Replace creativity or make space for it?
For us, AI isn’t some distant promise of the future or a reason to excessively brag about our capabilities. It’s more like an enabler of efficiency.
In the last couple of years, AI tools have become a key part of how we think, create, and deliver at Yield, not in the “replace us” kind of way (yet), but in the ‘help us become more efficient’ way. We see and use it as a creative multiplier that helps our ideas ripen and move faster toward beautifully executed work. At its best, AI doesn’t take over the creative process; it accelerates it, allowing us to spend less time on “how to make it work” and more on “why it matters”.
Talk is easy. Proof is better.
So instead of adding to the noise, let’s bring it down to earth and share how we implemented AI tools to make our workflow more impactful in the context of our latest campaign for the Ontario Medical Association: We Won’t Give Up
- Brainstorming and idea expansion: This is a controversial one. Chatbots helped us explore and project hundreds of random seed thoughts that eventually became public-facing headlines. But wait, aren’t all the ideas supposed to come from humans? Well, they still do. If you ever used a Chatbot (like ChatGPT or Gemini) to generate new ideas for your campaign, you hopefully already know that your 5-year-old can come up with a better idea. Chatbots suck at idea generation but are masters of idea expansion. Feed it something good and let the magic begin!
- AI-generated storyboards: We used a combination of image-generation tools, and a storyboard artist (yes, you can still find those around) to land on the perfect frames. When I say, “the perfect frames,” I mean things like testing different facial expressions three minutes before a client meeting, swapping the gender of a doctor, or reimagining an entire scene to convey a new emotion. All of this can happen in real time. Adjustments that once took hours now take seconds.
- AI voiceovers: There is a big debate around AI-generated voices at the time we are releasing this article. Whether it is because we can’t yet fathom expressing an emotional response when we know a voice is machine-generated, or because it ‘still doesn’t sound authentic enough’ (some say), regardless, being able to generate AI voiceovers on demand was a huge advantage for this project. By testing a wide range of AI-generated voices at the rough-cut stage, we were able to narrow down and have a solid point of comparison directly impacting the final decision.
- Text-based video editing: A game changer since its inception, and a tool that cuts editing time significantly by turning spoken words into editable text. It lets us shape video like we would a script, finding the story faster, refining it in real time, and turning hours of sorting through raw footage into effective storytelling. Our campaign featured multiple talking head/interview style supporting videos where text-based video editing played a key role.
- AI note-takers: Creative people are great at capturing what was said in brainstorming sessions and love taking notes on client meetings, don’t they? Well, they don’t. Luckily, there’s also an AI tool for that. We’ve been implementing the use of high-efficiency notetakers responsible for saving hours of tedious work by summarizing long brainstorming sessions and intensive feedback meetings into cohesive contact reports.
So what?
The biggest impact of AI isn’t measurable in the tools themselves, it’s in what they give back. They return time to create, clarity to collaborate, and sharp focus to tell the stories that matter to our clients. For a small, tightly knit team like ours this means everything. It means we can create better, deliver more efficiently, communicate seamlessly and give our clients more value.
Click here to read the We Won’t Give Up case study.
