For years, the creative toolkit has expanded in increments. Creative teams have always adapted to new tools. The printing press made design reproducible. Television opened a new stage for storytelling. Digital tools turned Photoshop into the 11th commandment. And the iPhone put a camera in everyone’s pocket. Each shift changed the way creative work was made. 

But nothing—and we mean nothing—has shifted the creative process as radically, as quickly, and as irreversibly as AI. 

This isn’t about replacing human creativity (spoiler: it can’t). It’s about how creativity itself is evolving when human intelligence and machine intelligence collide. And for growth marketers? That collision is where the magic (and ROI) happens.

Speed + Possibility: AI’s Double Benefit

Let’s start with the obvious: speed.

AI eats bottlenecks for breakfast. Drafts that used to take weeks now take minutes. Concepts that required three brainstorms and a rewrite can be iterated in an afternoon. Need 20 headline options before your 9 a.m. client call? Done.

And in growth marketing, where speed-to-market often means the difference between a campaign that crushes and a campaign that never even launches, speed is a game-changer.

But speed is only half the story.

The bigger benefit? Possibility.

AI is giving brands access to creative executions they never could have touched before—because of time, talent, or most often, budget.

• The indie brand with a shoestring ad spend can now visualize cinematic scenes that once required a Hollywood crew.
  
• The scrappy startup can test five campaign directions instead of one, because ideation cycles are measured in hours, not weeks.
  
• Even global brands with big budgets are reallocating spend—not on “making the thing,” but on “testing more things” until the winning creative emerges.
  

AI isn’t just a time-saver—it’s a door-opener.

What’s Working Today: AI + Video

Nowhere is the AI impact more visible (literally) than in video.

Video has always been king for engagement. But video has also been expensive—time, talent, production, editing, licensing, the whole circus. AI just handed marketers a golden ticket.

Here’s how teams are using it right now:

• Custom footage from prompts or stills
  Tools like Runway, Pika Labs, and Synthesia can generate realistic video sequences from nothing more than text input or a single static image. Suddenly, your product demo doesn’t need a studio shoot.
  
• Impossible locations made possible
  Want to set your campaign in a neon-lit Tokyo street, a 1920s jazz club, or a Martian landscape? Previously, that was a million-dollar ask. Now it’s a prompt away.
  
• Budget-friendly production
  Even “simple” video concepts—explainer animations, motion graphics, testimonial-style clips—are becoming accessible to brands that never had the dollars (or the editors) to make them.
  
• Faster concepting and iteration
  Need campaign storyboards or test imagery to pitch a big idea? AI generates visuals on the fly, accelerating approval cycles and freeing humans to focus on strategy instead of scrambling for stock shots.

And here’s the kicker: it’s not just the “big” campaigns. AI is helping with the unglamorous but necessary stuff too—snackable social clips, sales enablement videos, even internal comms. Things that used to be “nice to have if we had budget” are suddenly doable.

AI is democratizing video.

Beyond Video: How Catalyst Is Putting AI to Work

At Catalyst, we see AI as more than a one-off tool—it’s part of the creative bloodstream. Here’s how it shows up in our process today:

• Concepting: AI helps us generate early campaign ideas, audience insights, and fresh angles we might not have considered in a human-only brainstorm.
  
• Copywriting: We use AI to accelerate ideation—drafting headline options, tightening messaging, or testing different tones—before a strategist polishes it for brand nuance.
  
• Image generation: AI allows us to quickly create mockups, pitch visuals, and campaign imagery that would otherwise stall in production bottlenecks.
  
• Video: From storyboarding to fully generated clips, AI tools are shortening production timelines and letting us experiment with creative variations at scale.
  

But here’s the key: we don’t stop at “trying out cool tools.” We’ve built infrastructure to make AI a repeatable, scalable advantage.

Where Humans Still Rule

Now let’s address the panic button: “Is AI replacing creative teams?”

Short answer: no. Long answer: absolutely not.

Here’s what AI can’t do:

• Choose the right story for your audience
  
• Understand cultural nuance (at least, not well)
  
• Infuse humor, irony, or emotion that actually lands
  
• Know when “too much” is really… too much
  

AI is brilliant at pattern recognition. But culture-shaping, brand-defining, emotionally-resonant creative? That still requires taste, judgment, and an understanding of the messy, irrational thing we call being human.

In other words: AI may be the rocket fuel. But humans still set the course.

The Risk of “AI Sameness”

There’s also a danger in leaning too hard on machine outputs: everything starts to look the same.

We’ve all seen it—those too-smooth hands, that uncanny animation style, the copy that sounds fine but says nothing. If you let AI run the show unchecked, you risk producing content that blends into the noise instead of breaking through it.

This is where human oversight is critical. Creative teams don’t just generate—they curate. The real advantage is not “let AI make something” but “let AI make ten somethings, and then let a human choose the one that surprises, delights, or disrupts.”

The Catalyst POV

At Catalyst, we orchestrate this balance intentionally:

• AI accelerates: ideation, mockups, early drafts.
  
• Humans elevate: strategy, vision, storytelling, taste.
  
• Data validates: we test, refine, and double down on what works.

The growth marketing teams that thrive won’t be the ones who resist AI, or blindly outsource everything to it. They’ll be the ones who use it as a creative multiplier—expanding what’s possible while letting human intelligence steer toward impact.

Because the real creative revolution isn’t about AI doing our jobs. It’s about AI giving us back the time, space, and possibility to do our best work.

The Bottom Line

AI is transforming creative work. Not hypothetically. Not in the future. Right now.

• Speed is the obvious benefit—but possibility is the bigger prize.
  
• Video is the frontline where AI is making creativity more accessible, more scalable, and more experimental.
  
• Human creativity is not just relevant, but essential, to guide AI outputs toward resonance, not sameness.
  
• Catalyst is investing not just in tools, but in systems like our AI Innovation Lab to turn experimentation into repeatable client value.

Growth marketing just got an upgrade. And if you’re ready for what’s possible, the future’s wide open.

Ready to see what AI-powered creativity can unlock for your brand? Let’s start a conversation about how human imagination and artificial intelligence can create work that’s faster, smarter, and more impactful.