A.I. in the Creative Field: A Case Study for Art Directors In 2025

For better or worse, AI is here, and it offers some great opportunities.

Some react by seeing it as a great challenge to our society, but what if we flipped the coin and asked, 'What could go right?', or ‘What can I solve with today's tools?’.

Companies are already demonstrating the value of practical application of this new technology, showing that we don’t need to accelerate AI, but to learn how to use it effectively.

To truly appreciate AI’s impact in the industry, we should examine real-world applications. I’ve researched how businesses are leveraging AI, tested tools across graphic design, art, and marketing, and explored various use cases to see how AI is impacting and adding tangible value.

1. Image Generation

AI is in Fashion with Doji

Still in beta, Doji is an app that transforms selfies into personalized, lifelike AI avatars to let users test outfits before buying online. The platform is integrated with fashion retailers such as Net-a-Porter, creating a seamless shopping experience.

Early adoption has been remarkable. Within days of its App Store release, Doji secured $14 million in investment led by Thrive Capital, a clear signal of how powerful this mix of personalization, fashion, and technology can be.

Limited Edition Packaging for Nutella®

Nutella launched an advertising campaign using generative AI to create 7 million unique jar labels. Each limited-edition package was different, and every single one sold.

By turning packaging into a collector’s item, Nutella demonstrated how technology can elevate brand identity, drive consumer excitement, and ultimately deliver measurable business results.

The project became an example of how AI can scale personalization in ways that would be impossible through traditional design methods.

Combining Images with Bero

British actor Tom Holland’s first business venture, Bero, is a premium non-alcoholic beer. To support its launch, the team used Flora AI’s workflow to generate unique mockups and social media visuals in seconds. By combining images in innovative ways, AI enabled the rapid creation of brand assets. It shows the potential of significant productivity in design workflows, still delivering quality.

2. Video and Animation

AI Commercials with Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola has been experimenting with AI in advertising for years now. In 2023, the brand launched its “Masterpiece” campaign, a production that blended live-action footage, digital effects, and AI-generated imagery. A behind-the-scenes video shows how AI became part of the creative toolkit.

The campaign marked a turning point in AI-driven video production. Building on that success, Coca-Cola has continued to release new campaigns that push even further into AI-driven storytelling.

Also check “Create Real Magic" and "Holidays Are Coming”.

Prompt Engineering Justice with Dove

Dove’s approach was remarkably smart. They identified a real problem in the way today’s AI models are developing: when prompted with terms like “beautiful woman,” the outputs often reflect narrow and stereotypical standards of beauty.

To challenge this, Dove introduced a simple but powerful solution: adding context such as “according to Dove Real Beauty” into the prompt. This small change encouraged AI to generate images that were more diverse and realistic.

The campaign not only highlighted the biases in AI but also demonstrated a creative way to counter them, serving as a blueprint for how brands can use AI responsibly in the future.

Your Own J.LO by Virgin Voyages

To personalize customer experience, Virgin Voyages used Jennifer Lopez's image to create Jen AI, a virtual version that sent personalized videos to each passenger.

The idea was to offer a unique welcome, signed J.Lo — an innovative way of mixing celebrity, AI, and customer relations to generate a strong impact right from the booking stage.

To reinforce the concept, Virgin Voyages also released a commercial that played with the very idea of Jen AI, extending the campaign’s reach and creativity. It was not only clever but also very funny, adding a lighthearted tone to the initiative. You can watch it here.

3. Trend Detection and Strategy

Real-Time Personalization with Netflix

Thumbnails play an important role in people’s decision to click on content, and Netflix knows it. The brand employs AI to keep an eye on what each user likes. Through various LLMs, they test several iterations of a poster, analyze performance in real time to identify what’s working or not, and the system automatically adjusts.

This level of personalization is estimated to bring Netflix more than $1 billion in value each year, showing how AI makes customization both scalable and valuable.

Forecasting Visual Trends with Canva

As creative professionals, we have to keep an eye on what comes next. Canva predicts that one of the emerging directions in graphic design will be the fusion of organic, natural elements with technological or artificial aesthetics.

This case shows how AI is increasingly being used not only to enhance creative output in the present, but also to forecast the visual languages that may define the industry in the months ahead.

Predicting Costumer Preference with CXG

By analyzing huge amounts of data from social media, search trends, and sales, AI agents can spot new styles and micro-trends before they even go mainstream. This helps companies like Zara, Levi’s, and H&M react quickly and design collections that match what people will want.

A recent report from CXG reveals how these predictive tools give brands a clearer view of demand and consumer behavior, making it easier to adapt strategies and stay ahead of the market.

4. Exploration

Create New Fonts with Blaze Type

Blaze Type experimented with AI to create six new fonts. By giving a Monotype beta tool a few key characters, they let the agent imagine the rest of the alphabet. Some results were unconventional, unexpected, but they showed how AI can expand creative possibilities. Click here to see the results.

Product Design Ideation with Toyota

Toyota partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to develop a tool called Inkspire, designed to help with early design ideas. It turns abstract concepts into sketches by reshaping AI-generated images into more practical visuals. While the tool is only a prototype, it demonstrates how AI could support the brainstorming stage of design. The researchers have published their findings online. Read further.

UI Variations with Figma

Tools such as Uizard, Galileo, UX Pilot, and Figma’s Wireframe Designer make it possible now to generate and visualize a bunch of UI solutions from simple prompts within seconds. These platforms use AI to speed up ideation, and suggest design variations that might otherwise take hours to explore manually, so that the designer can focus more on creativity and problem-solving instead of repetitive tasks.

5. Local AI Uses

Writing Contracts

For freelance designers, drafting a contract is an essential part of the service, and it can often be difficult to know where to start, after all, this is not our specialty, nor does it seem like a particularly enjoyable task.

In this case, you can rely on the help of artificial intelligence. All you need to do is provide some information about yourself, your service, and your client, along with a good prompt to generate a ready-to-download PDF file. Using this procedure can have a considerable impact, reducing both stress and the time spent creating legal documents.

Of course, human supervision and review in this process are indispensable. It’s also worth remembering that there are still many reasons to be cautious when entering personal information into a LLM. Recently, OpenAI has been involved in controversies regarding data leaks. To avoid sharing sensitive details, you can ask AI for contract templates and then customize them offline.

Selling Prompts

With the emergence of a new technology, new challenges—and opportunities—have also appeared, paving the way for entirely new professions. One of them is the role of a prompt engineer.

At one end of the spectrum are beginners experimenting with these tools; at the other are experts who have mastered them. This gap has opened the door to a new business model: selling prompts to those who need them.

For instance, if you’ve created a stunning piece of art with Stable Diffusion or DALL·E, why not share the prompt that made it possible? For that, you can use platforms like PromptBase.

Importing code from LLM to design softwares

Many design applications, such as Photoshop and Figma, allow you to expand their capabilities through extensions. You can either find pre-built plugins and add-ons in community marketplaces and install them with just a few clicks, or, for a more customized solution, use an AI tool like ChatGPT to generate code.

You can create a ready-to-import file, giving you a direct way to develop a tool tailored to your exact need. For example, let’s say you want to apply a color filter to your image. In this case, you could prompt ChatGPT your specifications, and ask it to generate a file that you can import as a script into Photoshop. Voilà!

Writing prompts with ChatGPT

We haven’t yet entered the era of AGI—when artificial intelligence systems evolve autonomously—but we’ve already taught them to work in self-referential ways.

Today, we can ask AI not just to execute tasks, but to design the very prompts that guide those tasks. For example, instead of manually drafting every instruction for a marketing plan, you can let the model generate the most effective prompts to structure campaigns, define target audiences, and propose creative strategies. After all, who understands the language of large language models better than the models themselves?

There is significant power in new AI tools. As the initial buzz fades, the focus shifts towards the real, practical applications.

Staying up to date with the latest AI trends became an intrinsic part of creators that value competitive advantages today.

The scene evolves rapidly, and early adoption can be the key to outpacing the competition.

Are you tuned into AI innovations? How do you expect AI will help us in the future?

Tell me in the comments section below, and don’t forget to share with your friends!