AI doesn’t come up with my ads. It just makes them sharper.

Making ads has always been one of my favorite parts of the job. I love finding a way to make a problem visible, something you look at and instantly think “yep, that’s me.” And I love making people laugh. A good ad does both at once.

AI hasn’t changed why I love it. It’s changed what I can do. I can now do things I didn’t have the skills for before, and I can do the things I already knew much faster.

The process itself hasn’t changed. It just moves quicker.

So here’s what that process looks like, step by step.

It starts with real conversations. I use Airspeed to go through our sales calls and pull out the pain points prospects and customers actually talk about, not the ones we assume they have. A persona doc tells you what someone should struggle with. A call tells you how they describe it, slightly frustrated, in their own words. That second version is where the good stuff lives.

While I’m going through those calls, I’m looking for one thing in particular:

A visual metaphor. It might be a phrase someone uses or an image they reach for to explain what’s going wrong.

When a prospect describes their problem in pictures, half my job’s already done. I just need to draw it.

Then I move into design and start sketching. I mostly do this without AI, and that’s on purpose. Sometimes I’ll use it to quickly draft an image I already have in my head, but the ideas come from me, not the machine. The rule here is quantity over quality: lots of rough ideas, plenty of bad ones, and a few that make me smile. You can’t find the good idea if you only let yourself have one, right?

Next, I sit down with the copywriter and we brainstorm.

Everything goes on the table, and we get ruthless about which ideas actually work. Which ones are clear, which ones are funny, and which ones only make sense in my head. Most of my sketches quietly disappear at this stage. That’s fine, because that’s what they’re for.

Only now does AI get a real seat at the table. Once we know which ideas we’re running with, I use it to nail the content and the angle: sharpening the message, trying different ways in, and finding the line that lands. And I never start from a blank prompt. I’ve built a very specific prompt that keeps our ads on brand and holds on to the kind of humor we’re after. Without it, AI copy drifts toward the same polite, beige sentences everyone else is publishing. With it, the ads still sound like us.

AI comes back in at the very end too, when I analyze how the ads perform. But that’s a whole other story... and probably a whole other article.

So no, AI doesn’t make my ads. People do: the ones on the calls, the copywriter, and me with a pile of rough sketches.

AI just makes sure the good ideas don’t get diluted on the way out.