Working alongside AI

Maria Nelson

Guest Columnist

November 9, 2026

A question I often hear from business leaders across Central Wisconsin right now comes down to a common concern: If AI can design the graphics and edit the video, what is left for people to do?

It is a fair question, but the answer is reassuring: Quite a lot is left, and it happens to be the most valuable part of the design process.

Think of AI as a fast, inexperienced intern

The most useful way to picture AI in creative work is as a talented, tireless intern.

It works instantly. It never complains. It can produce a dozen versions of anything you ask for.

It also has no experience, no taste of its own, and no idea whether what it made is actually right for your business.

You would never let an intern make final brand decisions unsupervised, and the same rule applies for AI.

In practice, AI is excellent for the first part of a design task and unreliable for the final parts.

A tool like Canva can generate a serviceable social graphic in seconds, and a tool like CapCut can rough-cut a video in minutes.

What neither can do, however, is know whether the result fits your brand, speaks to your customer base, or communicates something true to your business.

That judgment protects your reputation – and it stays with people.

Know which jobs should never leave human hands

On any creative project, three responsibilities should never go to a machine.

The first is strategy: you decide what to say, and why, before anything gets made.

AI can generate a hundred options, but it cannot tell you which one fits your goals because it does not know your market and your business the way you do.

The second responsibility is taste.

The trained eye knows when something is close but not quite right.

AI aims for adequate, and adequate does not build a memorable, impactful brand.

The third is truth: ensuring that the claims are accurate, the story is real, the voice is authentic, and the tone is genuinely yours.

This carries extra weight in Central Wisconsin, where business is still built on relationships and reputation; a message that feels manufactured lands poorly.

Divide the work on purpose

For leaders who want to put this to use, a simple split works well.

Let AI handle the replicable and the reversible: resizing, removing backgrounds, creating first-draft layouts, making rough video cuts, low-stakes production, or tasks that used to eat your team’s hours.

But ensure that it’s people who continue to make strategic and permanent decisions.

Human expertise is needed to create the core message and make the final creative call on anything that communicates your brand. 

Keep your own material at the center; the more fully an AI tool is fed your brand, your actual customer stories, and your genuine voice, the less generic its output becomes.

Give it nothing, and it hands back the internet’s average. 

When approached this way, the payoff is real: 2025 surveys from Adobe and Canva found that around 85% of marketers and creatives save approximately four hours a week using generative AI tools.

The real opportunity afforded by AI is in how you make the most of those four reclaimed hours.

Beware the quiet cost of ‘easy’

There is a subtle risk hiding in all this speed.

When producing something becomes effortless, it is tempting to produce more of it, whether or not it is worth making.

Design that looks fine but says nothing is not a bargain, no matter how fast it was made.

The businesses getting real value from AI are not the ones making the most content; they are the ones using the time AI frees up to think harder about what is worth making at all, and the message behind it.

Curiosity is the real advantage

If one trait separates the businesses thriving with AI from those falling behind, it is not technical skill – it is curiosity.

The leaders getting the most from these tools are willing to experiment – to learn what the tools do well and to be honest about what they do poorly.

That willingness to adapt, paired with the discipline to keep people in charge where their judgment is most valuable, is what turns AI from a threat into an advantage.

What stays true

The creative process is evolving, and that opens up some exciting possibilities.

The change that comes with AI does not have to diminish the value of human creativity; rather, it clarifies where that value is most powerful.

When a machine can produce almost anything instantly, the rare skill becomes knowing what is worth producing in the first place.

That knowledge still lives within people.

In Central Wisconsin, where trust is earned face to face, it always will.

Work alongside AI; let it carry the load it is built for and keep your judgment exactly where it belongs: at the center of the brand and voice your business communicates to the world.