The Innovation Economy

How AI is transforming us into creative directors

I remember when the first version of ChatGPT came out. I showed it to my girlfriend and said, “Ask this anything.” We decided to have it tell us a joke. It shot back a rudimentary, comprehensible joke almost immediately. 

It was amazing. It was like magic. It was like nothing we had ever experienced before with technology. I thought there had to be a human on the other side of the screen penning the joke. Something magical was happening but we couldn’t put our finger on it. If you’ve used an AI tool like ChatGPT, I assume you have experienced this watershed moment too.

Fast forward 18 months, and my use of ChatGPT has drastically increased in volume and complexity. A few examples:

• It writes all of the code I need for my consulting job as an AI/automation consultant

• It generates custom graphics for my Substack posts (like for this essay)

• It performs research for essays I write 

• It brainstorms names and creates copy for things I build on the Internet

The list goes on. It’s become such an integrated part of my work and personal life: a constant co-pilot for my ideas. As a solopreneur, it’s like having my own team of collaborators with specialized skills that I can partner with at any time on any subject. It’s made me far more prolific, capable, and expansive as a maker.

Dan Shipper of Every, one of the most influential thinkers I’ve seen covering the topic of working with ChatGPT, defines this revolution of working with AI as a shift from the knowledge economy to the allocation economy; from makers to managers. From Dan:

We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not. 

It means a transition from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done. 

I love this analogy, and what it's gesturing at, something has deeply changed in the way we work when we work with AI, especially with an all-purpose AI tool like ChatGPT. But I might offer a slightly different take. Managers and allocators, to me, conjure up a modus operandi of organizing and deploying finite resources, with the most important skills being the ability to expertly develop systems, decision-making protocols, and collaboration practices that enable optimum outputs based on the maximization of these finite resources. 

It’s in the context of resource constraints that I see a difference between classic managers and allocators and what makers with AI are doing. Makers with AI have no constraints with the resources they are managing, except their own time and energy (which, as a tangent, this area of self-management might become the primary place for classic management skills in a workforce of automated AI agents…), because the costs of riffing with AI in a less-than-efficient way are marginal.

As a manager of teams of people, you have to be deeply skilled in cost/benefit analysis, opportunity costs, and human psychology to skillfully direct and operate an organization. Similarly, for capital allocators, you have a finite amount of money you can invest, so it’s in your deft ability to weigh one investment vs. another that makes you realize outsized returns. 

However, these skills don’t seem as applicable to makers with AI. Why? Because tools like ChatGPT have infinite capacity. They don’t need to be managed skillfully from a resource management perspective. If you go down a rabbit hole, you’re not wasting any real resources, save your own time. And if you riff enough with ChatGPT, you might come back with an output that redefines the problem you initially intended to solve.

So what does this mean? Makers with AI can be far more explorative, experimental, and unskillful with resource management than managers and allocators. They can quickly test, iterate, pivot, and move on with a velocity that would cause any traditional employee major whiplash. They can scrap projects and efforts without a second thought.  

Instead of us turning into managers and allocators, I would posit AI is turning us into creative directors. Our focus now encompasses a blend of strategic oversight and creative execution. A copywriter turns into a creative director, a graphic designer turns into a creative director, a software developer turns into a creative director, and so on and so forth ad nauseam. 

A set of core responsibilities in a traditional description of a creative director could look like the below:

• Developing the creative vision and strategy for projects.

• Providing creative leadership by guiding efforts and ensuring that the output meets certain standards.

• Project managing the creative process from concept to completion, ensuring projects are completed with cohesion to the rest of the work.

• Leading client and stakeholder interaction by acting as a bridge, presenting ideas, gathering feedback, and making necessary adjustments to creative strategy and execution.

This feels more akin to what it’s like to work with an AI tool like ChatGPT. It’s a creatively liberating experience. Traditional creative and innovation teams are often given the license to experiment and wander and test since they are charting new territory—attempting and scrapping ideas is in the DNA of their workflow. Managers and allocators are not given this same license. It’s in the most prudent use of finite resources that they shine.

So rather than AI allowing us all to become managers, I’d venture that AI is allowing us all to become more creative. I’m not managing the AI, I’m co-creating and brainstorming with it. I’m not allocating resources effectively, I’m offering an initial creative direction and then iterating and redirecting based on new outputs. I’m not working in an allocation economy, I’m working in an innovation economy.

With AI, we're unlocking a collective creativity that elevates our capacity to innovate, making every one of us a creative director of our future.