Fern Potter, the chief strategy and growth officer at Multilocal, explained that the rise of curation in the last 18 months is driven by deal management, automation, and algorithmic influence. She noted that AI is helping to 'tidy up our house' with data, significantly impacting discoverability.
TikTok's 2026 algorithm scans each frame, favours clips that keep viewers watching, and pushes down posts that feel low effort. When an AI editor trims silence, snaps cuts to the beat, and adds captions in seconds, you gain that retention-boosting polish without spending hours in Premiere.
Edsger Dijkstra argued that the inherent ambiguities and slow evolution of natural languages were conclusive reasons to abandon any real idea of programming in human languages. He was right.
Design is a strategic lens—a way of seeing systems, solving problems, anticipating consequences, gleaning insights, and making decisions to ensure better outcomes for all stakeholders. As a function truly custom-built to navigate complexity, design trains its practitioners to synthesize competing inputs. It translates abstract goals into tangible outcomes and considers the needs of diverse user groups.
Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.
The advertising industry has always been in the business of making things, such as the OOH billboard, the 30-second spot, the snappy social post, the standard website: final, finite assets polished and pushed into the world. Agencies were paid, often by the hour, for producing final versions of these things and then moved on to the next project. Even with generative AI entering the picture, much of the conversation remains focused on making those same things faster or cheaper.
