What AI can't design is the bit that makes people care
This article was first published on Campaign Asia-Pacific on 1 November 2025
Susie Hunt
Chair of Asia, Elmwood & MSQ
I often think about what the future of work will look like for my three children. Like many, I imagine the thought is both exciting and unclear.
When I began my career, brand design and the creative journey were chatty and tactile—boards, markers, tear sheets and endless late nights crafting kerning, typography and debating the placement and practicalities of supermarket shelf standout.
Now we are designing for the digital shelf, hiring designers fluent in art directional prompts, chasing algorithms, and making friends with agents who don’t need to sleep. The creative origination and creative production process continues to change at the speed of AI, as fast as we humans can imagine, prompt, and iterate.
The question today isn’t whether AI will reshape our industry. It already has. The real question is how we ensure creative origination, empowered by AI, stays deeply authentic and human, and how brand design continues to give brands their soul.
Stephen Hawking once said AI could either be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity. He was right on both counts. Which means it’s up to us to decide what side of that line we stand on.
Where humans still lead
AI is astonishing at pattern, logic and speed. But what gives design its power has never been logic. It’s emotion—that almost invisible layer of meaning that sits beneath the rational.
Robert Heath’s research on low-attention processing (how the brain responds to high speed messaging—exactly how we engage with social commerce) shows that emotion, not logic, drives recognition. We don’t remember ads because they explain; we remember them because they move us. That’s why a small curve under a logo, Amazon’s famous smile, can make a billion-dollar difference. It’s a fraction of a second of recognition, but a lifetime of emotional coding.
That emotional intelligence is what designers bring, and it’s what no machine can replicate.
From assets to ecosystems
Today, a brand isn’t just a logo or a pack. They stretch across screens, shelves, feeds and storefronts. Each touchpoint adds another layer to how people experience them. The challenge now is to keep all of that connected, consistent, and emotionally true.
When we worked on Whiskas, we weren’t just refreshing a logo. We were trying to capture the spirit of ‘cattitude’ – that peculiar blend of grace and defiance that every cat owner knows instinctively. The refreshed design didn’t just look right; it felt right. The emotion was immediate, and that’s why it worked everywhere from e-commerce thumbnails to supermarket aisles
From luxury lifestyles to multi-channel luxury ecosystems
Our new normal of connected commerce also empowers design to create more powerful multi-channel impact than ever before. Louis Vuitton catapulted the familiar ‘pop-up store’ into a new dimension with the ‘Louis’ cruise ship museum (see below) and lifestyle temporary store in Shanghai—attracting huge numbers of customers.
In the same way, brands like The Beast & Butterful and Cremourous in China have shown how physical space and digital storytelling can be fused together through design to create sensory, culturally grounded premium experiences. The Beast launched the next chapter of its Chinese Designer lifestyle platform in Shanghai earlier this year: The ‘China Atelier’. Design becomes a bridge between people and place, between meaning and commerce. Butterful and Cremourous have taken the Chinese and Korean bakery experience to new levels. When was the last time you queued for an hour for a croissant?
The new hard skills
LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman recently said we’re moving from a knowledge economy to an innovation economy, one that values creativity, curiosity, courage, compassion and communication. I’d add another: the curiosity of culture.
In Asia, culture isn’t a backdrop; it’s context. There are many Asias, each with its own codes, contradictions, nuances, and sensitivities. When Heineken’s Bia Viet beer in Vietnam was re-energised with the Đông Sơn Drum and the Lac Bird, it became more than a redesign. It was a story of national pride, renewal and belonging. The result was a 27% growth in sales and 55% rise in brand power. As Sir John Hegarty reminds us ‘You can judge the quality of ideas by the obscurity of the sources’.
That’s what good design does: it translates culture into commercial resonance.
Design at the speed of Asia
Speed defines this region. ‘China speed’ isn’t a phrase; it’s a way of working. It can feel relentless, but it’s also thrilling.
AI has a role to play here, not as a replacement but as an accelerator. It can take care of the repetitive so that people can focus on the remarkable. The next creative frontier isn’t prompt writing. It’s art direction for AI: teaching technology to understand tone, nuance and emotion the way a human team would.
The most exciting work I see today at Elmwood and across MSQ happens where design craft meets intelligent automation, not where one replaces the other. As Steve Gatfield, vice chairman of MSQ, puts it: “AI will most definitely impact production—including edits and adaptation — but creative origination still demands deep human imagination. Today AI can’t imagine. What it gives us is a bigger, more dynamic palette to explore possibilities. The best and most imaginative minds will always seize that potential to find new ideas and forms of expression.”
That distinction is crucial. AI expands the canvas for creativity but it doesn’t paint the picture. It enables personalisation and responsiveness in ways we’re only beginning to explore, yet the spark that makes ideas meaningful remains deeply human.
And sometimes, the best ideas remain disarmingly simple. When VanMoof discovered that their bicycles were getting damaged in transit, they printed the image of a television on every shipping box. Damage dropped by 80 percent. That’s pure human lateral thinking: empathetic, witty, effective.
The magic of mistakes vs the perfected prompt
The actor Tom Holland was recently interviewed on the future of entertainment and film when everything is possible with AI. His view was that live theatre was the future because of its imperfections and mistakes. The same is true for the future of the design process in the era of AI. As Andy Lawrence the global creative director of Elmwood always teaches ‘we still need to create time to fail as part of the creative origination process—this is how the great ideas are developed’.
Ethical imagination
As AI becomes woven into creative practice, ethics become non-negotiable. How we use these tools will shape how people trust both brands and the industry itself.
As Air India’s Deva Joseph put it, ‘The future belongs to those who can leverage AI to explore the bounties of creativity.’ The word leverage is important. AI should amplify the authenticity of our imagination, not outsource it. The best design leaders I know treat technology as a partner, not a substitute.
From intent to impact
Design has always been more than decoration. It’s a way of thinking, connecting purpose with emotion and emotion with action.
In the AI era, that loop tightens. When brand ecosystems are designed with intent, they become self-sustaining; flowing from strategy to storytelling to commerce, all powered by empathy and guided by data.
We’ve seen this in our work for Glanbia’s Optimum Nutrition, cost-effectively scaling content creation for all markets by creating a product playground. The result is a suite of assets that build consistency and memory structures while delivering content and imagery that drive aspiration, reinforce RTBs and product superiority. It’s proof that design systems, when built with intent, can balance efficiency with emotion, enabling brands to scale impact without losing humanity.
Design is the golden thread that ties it all together. It keeps technology centred on human needs and helps achieve the kind of innovation AI alone never could.
To the next generation
If you’re entering this industry, stay curious about people. Notice how they scroll, shop and share. Study behaviour. Learn to draw. Be obsessed with subconscious human behaviour, rituals and moments of unprompted emotion.
The tools will keep changing; the reasons people care won’t.
This is why human-led creativity and design aren’t just important in the AI economy. It needs to thrive. Because authentic, original and human-crafted design, at its core, is what keeps technology human and what our audiences seek.