&Walsh is a New York-based creative agency that specialises in branding and advertising for clients like Lex, Google and Coconut Cult. The studio also runs its own type foundry, Type of Feeling. We spoke with creative director Jessica Walsh to find out how the studio uses AI, and how she feels about it.
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Broadly speaking, are you excited for how AI will change the design industry, or nervous?
Both truthfully. AI has incredible potential to democratise creativity and speed up parts of the process that used to take days. But it also brings big questions around ethics, authorship, and how we value creative labour.
I think the designers who’ll thrive are the ones who use these tools thoughtfully to enhance their work.
Do you have an agreed policy around AI as a business?
We’re in the process of shaping a more formal policy, but the guiding principle is this – we only use AI when it supports our original thinking, not as a substitute for it.
We’ve had internal discussions about transparency, copyright, and ethics, especially around client-facing work. It’s a learning process, and we’re trying to stay flexible while staying grounded in our values.
When did you realise AI was going to have an impact on design?
It really hit me when I saw early Midjourney and DALLE outputs that looked eerily polished. Suddenly, image-making at a high level was accessible with just a few prompts. And now of course these tools are even more powerful. They democratise design and open it up to so many more people.
Have you undergone any AI training, either as a studio or individuals?
We’ve done some sharing of knowledge and best practices among the team. People will bring in tools they’ve tried or prompt techniques they’ve figured out, and we experiment together.
It’s more of a collaborative playground than something more formal. The biggest impact is simply learning how to ask better questions, which applies to both AI and design.
How do you use AI in the studio’s creative process? What is it good for? Where are its shortcomings?
We use AI mostly to support the early stages of our projects in moodboarding, rapid ideation, and generating unexpected references. It’s great for pushing past creative blocks or exploring a weird visual territory fast.
But it’s not good at nuance or strategy. It can’t replace the emotional intelligence or cultural specificity that real human work requires, so we rely on our creative point of view in those situations.
Do you think clients care if/how you use AI in your work?
Some do, especially if it raises questions about originality or authorship. Others are more curious and open, especially when we’re transparent about where and how we use it.
Clients care most about the quality of the idea and execution. If AI helps us get to something better, and we’re upfront about its role, it tends to be a non-issue.
Do you use AI for any non-creative aspects of running your business?
We’ve started using AI to help with some admin tasks like organising research and summarising meeting notes, like a lot of other studios and businesses I suspect.
It frees up time so our team can focus more on the work that really needs a human brain. It’s not glamorous, but it’s incredibly useful.
Beyond the best-known tools, what is one AI tool that you would recommend to other design studios?
We’ve been exploring and testing a wide range of models lately. It feels like every week something new and exciting comes out, so we’re always keeping an eye on how these tools might fit into our workflow.
Lately, we’ve been especially interested in Google Flow and other video generation models. We’ve been using them to gather visual references and quickly build TVC animatics, which helps us explore creative directions faster and communicate ideas more clearly with clients, while still leaving plenty of space for human creativity and craft to shape the final work.