Digiday reported this month that agencies and marketers are now using AI tools to write media and creative briefs on a regular basis, and that the practice may be an early warning sign of broader AI overuse in advertising.
A brief sounds like a small, administrative document. It's the opposite of glamorous work: a page or two that tells a creative team what the problem is, who the audience is, and what success looks like. But it's also the moment where strategy gets translated into direction. If the brief is vague, the work that follows tends to be vague too. If the brief is sharp, it gives a team something to push against.
That's what makes the Digiday finding hard to brush off. Writing a brief with AI isn't inherently a problem. It can save time on formatting, on pulling together background research, on tidying up language before a meeting. The concern raised is different: when AI starts generating the thinking that a brief is supposed to capture, the document can grow longer and busier without getting any clearer. Digiday's phrase for it is brief bloat, and it describes something many people in agencies will recognize even without a report telling them so.
The deeper issue isn't the tool. It's what the tool quietly replaces. A good brief comes from conversations with a client, from understanding what a business actually needs versus what it says it wants, and from a strategist making judgment calls about what to leave out. That judgment is hard to teach and harder to automate well. An AI system can summarize a lot of information quickly, but it can't sit in a room and sense that the client's actual concern is something nobody has said aloud yet.
There's a useful contrast here with Dior's recent holiday film, which Fast Company described as a hand-illustrated, animator-directed short built around a historical friendship. Nothing about that project looks fast. It looks like the result of people making deliberate choices about story, tone, and craft, choices that take time precisely because they can't be shortcut. The piece isn't an argument against AI in advertising. It's a reminder of what sustained creative effort still looks like when a brand decides that's the point.
None of this means briefs, or the broader content pipeline, should go back to being slower just for the sake of it. Speed has genuine value. Campaigns move faster, markets shift faster, and a brief that takes two weeks to produce isn't automatically better than one that takes two days. The question isn't speed versus slowness. It's whether speed is being used to free up time for judgment, or whether it's quietly replacing the judgment altogether.
I don't believe AI is destroying strategic thinking in agencies. I do think it's making it easier to skip the uncomfortable part of the job, the part where someone has to sit with an unclear brief and work out what the client actually means. That discomfort is often where the sharpest thinking happens. Remove it too often and the briefs get smoother on the surface while the thinking underneath gets thinner.
This goes beyond the advertising industry's own workflow because clients eventually feel the difference. A campaign built on a brief that was assembled rather than thought through tends to look competent and forgettable at the same time. It hits the right notes. It just doesn't say anything a competitor couldn't have said. Over a year of that kind of output, a brand's voice can blur into everyone else's, not because any single piece of work was bad, but because the thinking that should sharpen it got outsourced one brief at a time.
A practical way to guard against this is simple to describe even if it takes discipline to maintain: use AI to handle the parts of a brief that are mechanical, and keep a human accountable for the parts that require a decision. If a team can't say who made the key judgment calls in a brief, from the audience insight to the single most important message, that's worth a second look before the brief goes any further, whatever wrote the first draft.
Sources
- Agencies find AI overuse is leading to brief bloat — Digiday, 5 Nov 2026
- Dior’s holiday ad triggers new AI debate — Fast Company, 6 Nov 2026
- Real journeys with Bayut: people tell the story, ads take a back seat — Campaign Middle East, 6 Nov 2026
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