Shiny New Toys & Structural Shifts

Opening for the proposition, Oliver Yonchev, founder of cocreated and former co-founder of Flight Story, began with a confession: he has what his mother calls “shiny new toy syndrome”. He admitted openly that he has backed the wrong technologies before, saying “I was a metaverse enthusiast; NFTs… not my proudest moment”, but explained that those mistakes taught him something more important: how to recognise when a shift is genuinely structural rather than fashionable.

That realisation came not from his first playful interactions with ChatGPT but from Sam Altman’s framing that the entire economic order rests on two inputs, energy and intelligence, and that generative AI is the first meaningful attempt in history to drive the marginal cost of intelligence towards zero. At that point, Oliver argued, AI could no longer be treated as a tool. It represents a fundamental shift in what computers are, moving from passive applications to active agents that can read, write, see, hear, code and act.

“A junior designer who masters prompting can out-compete several senior colleagues. That’s the experience paradox of this era.”

From there, Oliver turned to what he sees happening inside creative teams. Barriers to creation have collapsed, he said, pointing to a junior designer in his business who immersed herself in prompting and image generation and, within six months, could outperform several more senior colleagues. Meanwhile, a seasoned creative can now use AI to strip away bureaucracy and focus on judgement, taste and direction. He described this tension as the experience paradox of the AI era: the gap between junior and senior capability narrows, yet the value of experience becomes even more powerful.

Prompting, he argued, should be treated as a core professional skill, with clear rules, codes and structures that everyone in the industry needs to understand. Productivity, he suggested, should be defined as “more fulfilling and frankly better work”, not just squeezing more output into each hour. When it came to creativity, he drew on Ethan Mollick’s idea that humans are often “stuck in our own heads”, suggesting that AI gives access to “infinite perspectives” and a powerful way to break out of our own limits. His closing line set the tone for the rest of the evening: “AI is a disruptor. The real question is how we ensure it becomes the right kind of partner.”

Eviction Notices & Accountability

Leading the case for the opposition, Dr Amr Al Khateeb, a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Liverpool John Moores University specialising in AI, ethics and consumer behaviour, framed his argument around a single idea: the issue is not whether AI is powerful or useful, but whether the word “partner” accurately describes what is happening in practice. Drawing on examples from failed AI call-centre deployments to widely criticised AI-generated Christmas ads, he described systems that introduce what he called an accountability vacuum, where vendors blame the data, agencies blame the model, and no one carries responsibility. In promotional marketing, he argued, fairness, accountability and trust are non-negotiable, and black-box optimisation feels less like collaboration and more like risk being quietly transferred onto consumers, clients and junior staff who cannot meaningfully interrogate the outputs.

“AI fundamentally decouples revenue from human effort. It devalues the creative product to zero marginal cost. Once you’ve paid for the AI subscription, you can generate unlimited outputs at essentially no additional cost. That’s not a partnership. That’s an eviction notice.”

Amr moved from principles to people, focusing on the labour market, market structure and public trust. He cited 2025 figures showing job postings for computer graphic artists down 33 per cent and for photographers and writers down 28 per cent, stressing that it is the disappearance of junior and entry-level roles that should trouble the industry most, because no one becomes a creative director, strategist or senior planner without first spending years as a junior designer, copywriter or art worker.

By automating the foundational work that once served as the training ground, he argued, “we are not building the future of our industry, we are dismantling it”, concentrating opportunity and power in a small number of large platforms while small agencies and freelancers see incomes squeezed. His closing challenge was not to reject AI outright, but to stop using the language of partnership until there are meaningful standards for transparency, accountability, worker protection and control; until then, he argued, it is more honest to treat AI as a disruptor than to pretend it is already a trusted partner.

“AI is not the end of creativity. It is the next evolution…” 

Seconding the proposition, Dan Hirons, Co-founder and Director at Activation, brought the argument to everyday agency work. He set the scene with a reminder that people now see more than 6,000 adverts a day and that prize promotions only work when they cut through with relevance and genuine value. Against that backdrop, he described AI as “like a team member who never sleeps,” automating data analysis, entry verification and scheduling so humans can “think, create and connect.” For Dan, AI is less a cost-cutting gadget and more a productivity engine that gives teams back time to uncover insights, explore more routes and craft better ideas, not just more output.

On creativity, he pushed back at the idea that automation and imagination are opposites, calling AI “a mirror, not a mind” and arguing that it should be seen as a catalyst that can generate options and variations while leaving emotional judgement and cultural nuance firmly with people: “the machine provides the clay, the human is the sculptor.” He also stressed AI’s role in protecting trust, positioning it as a frontline defence against fraud that can audit entries, filter out bad data and help ensure prize draws are provably fair. For Dan, that combination of speed, creative stimulus and safeguards is what partnership looks like in practice, and his conclusion distilled the heart of his case: “That’s what partnership looks like. This isn’t disruption. This is collaboration.”

Escaping the Sea of Sameness

Mays Elansari, Marketing Director at Stonegate Group, shifted the focus from tools to people, arguing that the industry is “not experiencing an AI revolution, we are experiencing AI fatigue.” She noted that estimates now suggest 30 to 40 per cent of online content is AI generated and described how this resulting “sea of sameness” is driving consumers back towards real human connection, trust and live experiences. She pointed to the IPA’s latest Bellwether Report, which shows event-led marketing at its strongest growth in more than a decade, as evidence that people are seeking out what algorithms cannot replicate. Using Dove as a positive reference, she highlighted the brand’s decision to ban AI-generated images of women in response to harmful beauty content, contrasting it with Coca-Cola’s fully AI Christmas ad, where even the iconic truck appeared in inconsistent designs with mismatched wheels. It was, she said, “a dream-like, soulless Christmas,” a reminder that when emotion, trust and originality disappear, it may still be content, but it stops being effective marketing. 

“We’re not experiencing an AI revolution. We’re experiencing AI fatigue…” 

She then brought the point closer to home with last week’s AI-generated Christmas mural in Kingston, where distorted faces, deformed animals and a disturbing scarecrow-like figure quickly went viral as a cautionary tale of what happens when brands treat AI as a partner before they understand the risks. She linked these examples to trust and mental wellbeing, referencing research that heavy AI use can weaken recall, learning effort and cognitive resilience, and drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s arguments about always-on algorithmic environments eroding attention and emotional regulation in younger audiences. Her dividing line was simple: marketing only works when it is memorable, emotionally resonant and trusted. In her words, “AI produces volume, people produce value,” and until AI is deployed in ways that clearly elevate human judgement rather than hollow it out, it is more accurate to see it as a disruptor of the conditions that make great marketing possible, not a partner.

Voices from the Floor

From the floor, the discussion kept circling back to one question: what do we mean by “disruption”? One contributor drew a line from the Industrial Revolution to today, arguing that technologies we now take for granted were once deeply destabilising. Others pushed back, noting that progress also came with displacement, environmental cost and consequences we still live with. “We’re still living with the fallout of that disruption,” one attendee said. “Let’s not repeat the mistake of pretending it was painless.”

When the conversation turned to promotions, several contributors argued that AI, used well, could make campaigns more timely, better targeted and more relevant, with smaller brands able to use generative tools to mock up mechanics, localise assets and test ideas that once needed a full agency, studio and insight team. The note of caution came from those who reminded the room that the law “still sees a promoter, not a platform, when something goes wrong”, and that if the industry is going to call AI a partner, it must also be clear “where the human liability sits.”

On one side, AI was cast as a co-pilot, a partner that can raise standards by freeing humans to focus on judgement, creativity and fairness. On the other, it was painted as something far less comfortable, a force hollowing out junior careers, flattening originality and eroding trust at scale. As Lord Black of Brentwood, President of the IPM, remarked in his introduction, “Five years ago, if we’d been looking at this motion, many of us would have asked what this was all about. But today, AI dominates our industry.”

In the weeks before the event, a LinkedIn poll suggested optimism, with 62 per cent of respondents seeing AI as a partner. Inside the room, sentiment swung dramatically, from an initial 31–2 majority in favour of AI as a partner to a 31–29 vote against the motion. The IPM would like to offer its thanks to The Debating Group for inviting us to bring this motion to Westminster and to all four speakers, Oliver Yonchev, Dan Hirons, Dr Amr Al Khateeb and Mays Elansari, for a thrilling and timely debate. The final count left little doubt: AI is here to stay, but its claim to “partner” status still has to be earned.

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