For years I’ve worked to help people marry their creative talents with action and organisation. The prosaic side of the work is as important as the romantic side.
I believe it more now, and AI is a big part of why. Taste can’t be copied into software, but nearly everything around it can now be run by systems. When it is, creative people get their time back, and with it the room to think laterally and try again.
I’ve spent most of my working life running businesses in music and sport, and across the creative sector. Before today’s AI models could help, we built our own tools and an operations team to keep a very busy company running properly. Kieran, now one of my co-founders at Atlas, architected most of it. Hardly anyone outside saw that work, and it was what let the people inside spend their time on the work they’d joined for.
Creative companies run on taste, relationships and an instinct for what’s next. Too much of their people’s time goes on everything else.
If you’ve worked in one, you know what everything else looks like. An offer for a show arrives by email with twenty-odd deal points in it, and someone retypes them into a system. A campaign plan lives in a spreadsheet that one person understands. Royalty statements arrive in different formats from different places, and somebody reconciles them by hand. Monday morning goes on chasing the answers you chased last Monday.
In a growing creative business, operations becomes the constraint faster than anyone expects. Too much depends on a handful of senior people, and they’re usually the busiest in the building. The more of their week goes on the work around their judgement, the fewer decisions get their full attention.
That’s what I mean by the title. Of course you can hire more people with great taste, but no two of them see things the same way. You can’t hire more of the person who hears a record and knows. You can’t write their instinct down, and I wouldn’t want a model making those calls for them. We don’t do generative music or video.
What can grow with the business is the work around taste. Systems can run most of it all day, with clear human decision rights over anything that matters. That gives the people with taste more time and better information, so their judgement reaches further.
Better information is the half people tend to forget. A manager weighing an offer should see the real costs and what happened the last time the artist played that market. They shouldn’t have to ask around and wait a day. Taste still makes the call. It just gets to make it with everything in front of it.
That’s the business case. The part that excites me most is what it does for the way creative people think.
Most of the worry about AI in our industries is about machines making the work. It can also give people more room to make it themselves.
I’ve felt that in my own work. As a founder and an investor, I always have a lot going on at once. With a system connecting all of it, I can move through my projects, my responsibilities, my tasks and my ideas like water.
It works as a kind of connective tissue. Everything sits close together, so I can bounce freely from one thing to the next.
Working like this has made me more creative. I think more laterally than I used to, and there’s a fluidity to my thinking that wasn’t there before. It’s exciting.
AI also lets people move from idea to execution without the usual gaps. That makes a much more iterative way of working possible. Anyone who has made a record or built a campaign knows the good version often isn’t the first.
I’d like everyone in the creative industries to be able to work this way. Other parts of the economy are already getting real value from applied AI, and ours risks running a few years behind. Part of the reason is that generalist AI tools don’t fit creative businesses or the people in them. Putting a blank chat box in front of an artist manager or a talent agent is too much of a jump. Most of them aren’t technical, and why would they be? People get up in the morning in this industry to make great work and look after relationships.
Someone has to do this properly for the sector, and that’s the job we’ve taken on at Atlas. We build bespoke systems at the heart of creative businesses, co-developed with the people who run them. The technology should amplify what makes each business distinctive instead of flattening it. Then we stick around to run and improve what we build, because the models get better every month and the systems should too.
The measure I care about is simple. The people in a creative company should be doing way more of the work they love and way less of the work they don’t. When everything else is taken care of, they have time to try something, and then try it again.
Iteration and repetition are very often the riverbed of creativity.
