From hardcore developer at Poke in London, then Director of Creative Technology at Wieden + Kennedy. Now, Nilesh Ashra makes his living scanning the horizon for emerging technologies and their implications for creative opportunities.

In a world now grappling with AI’s impact, the OK Tomorrow founder and creative technologist has a simple suggestion for pretty much anybody.

That is, take a weekly walk and spend half an hour telling everything that is on your mind to ChatGPT – and then let generative AI do some of your thinking for you, or at least help with organising those thoughts, fears and curveballs.

You’d be surprised at the outcomes. Ashra says brands, agencies and media companies can apply a version of that approach to customer service conversations – as well as their internal resource planning and staff development.

Generative AI, he emphasises, is far more than a means to find efficiencies – it’s a tool to unlock creativity at scale, and make such tasks as customer service, marketing and HR more fun, inventive, wide-ranging and better informed.

Ashra cites fintech automation firm Ramp as a standout.

Turn complaints into podcasts

“Ramp gets a few thousand customer service calls a day and gets those transcribed into text and put it into a large language model. But they didn’t just say ‘summarise this’. Although that would be useful, they said, ‘summarise this, and then turn it into an entertaining five-minute podcast script’,” Ashra explains.

“Then they fed that into OpenAI’s Whisper model that turns text into audio. And so they created a pipeline in the company where they can go from customer feedback to a five-minute podcast episode,” he continues.

“The audience for that podcast [are] the marketing team and the product team. But what they now have is a way to constantly tune into the voice of the customer in a way that is entertaining, truthful and insightful,” says Ashra.

“I just think there are hundreds of opportunities like that for marketing organisations to create little mini-utilities in the pursuit of better thinking.”

AI talent planning

Ashra thinks companies could take the same approach and apply it internally to better understand employee thinking – and where their otherwise untapped talents may lie.

“Have everyone in your organisation take a 30-minute walk. The brief is ‘just talk about everything you feel that you are creative and knowledgeable about that has nothing to do with your job’,” says Ashra.

“If you took 100 of those transcripts, you could create a phenomenal view of all of the potential in your team … We don’t know what we’re leaving on the table … So I think the ability for [generative AI] to extract what is true from us, and give us a view on that, should be pretty exciting to most bold leaders.”

De-siloing creativity

Adopting such approaches could also help democratise creativity, says Ashra. He thinks making innovation more accessible and attainable to all will help businesses and individuals get much more rewarding outcomes and growth – personally, collectively and financially.

For too long, he says, creativity has been falsely perceived as the preserve of a select few with “art and copy” backgrounds and the official creative department.

“Those constructs really don't make that much sense today. We should just feel fine deleting the stuff that doesn't matter any more, encouraging participation in the ideas from people with extremely weird backgrounds.”

Synthetic cohort exploration

For marketing and media, there is potential to push beyond outdated cohort demographic studies. Says Ashra: “You know, ‘Everything Gen Z Doesn’t Want To Do’, or ‘All The Ways Millennials Are…’ those documents just haven’t changed.

“[Now] you can use Claude or ChatGTP or any of those large language models to create really interactive personas … and take these really elaborate deep dives into people … You can run mini ethnography simulations … You can invent people … There is no question it can’t answer.”

Creativity > efficiency

Thinking about generative AI as purely an efficiency tool is wasting its potential, Ashra declares – it’s about exploring new avenues, and letting curiosity take the lead. But that opportunity “is completely being missed, mostly by the industry”. Which is likely why the prevailing narrative is negative – largely around AI replacing jobs.

His advice: “Choose to think about it as more than just something that can make you more efficient.

“[Currently] the [AI] conversation around marketing and media starts at the middle and then only goes to the end. There's very little conversation about the first part of creativity, which really is where the table is set for creative excellence. The middle and back half is like, ‘well, what if we could take these assets … and then make a thousand more assets and automate that’.”

But that kind of efficiency is neither creative, nor anything really new. “The things to use [AI] for are to enrich your own learning,’ says Ashra.

“We've got a million libraries of Alexandria now just waiting for you to ask the right unique question, to go on your own walk through an encounter with your own intellect. And if that isn't an exciting prerequisite to great ideas, I don't know what is.”

Just remember, he reiterates, “book 30 minutes in your calendar for a walk with ChatGPT. It is so good at helping you organise your own thoughts … Think about it as a concept or imagination engine.”