Have you “adopted AI”? What if that’s not enough? Find out what worked, what failed, and what changed when an agency was redesigned and rebuilt around AI. Are you using AI as a toolkit in production? What if that’s not enough either? Find out what changes when AI moves from experimentation into production infrastructure. What new kinds of stories and visual languages will become possible? Finding out all this is easy. Bookmark these two Saturday sessions to attend at ADFEST.

SATURDAY 21 MARCH | 10.05-10.40

The Comfortable Lie of AI Adoption:

 A support group for leaders who’ve been pretending

Varun Khiatani, Co-Founder & AI Specialist, mktgstack, Bengaluru

Namrata Chawla, Co-Founder & Content Creator, mktgstack, Mumbai

Over the past three years, the advertising industry has proudly declared that it is “adopting AI.” Innovation teams have been formed. Tools have been tested. Internal decks have been circulated. Pilot programs have been launched. And yet, very little has fundamentally changed. AI is treated like another tool in the creative stack. AI is not a tool, It is a new operating system. And operating systems do not sit alongside existing structures - they reorganise everything around them. In many creative organisations today, AI exists in pockets. It is delegated, isolated, or positioned as a productivity upgrade. Meanwhile, individuals who are AI-fluent are accelerating faster than their organisations can adapt. The gap between teams that reorganise around AI and those that simply “adopt” it is widening - not yearly, but daily.

The opportunity for leaders is not to defend hierarchy, but to redesign it. Organisations that intentionally create space for AI-native talent, encourage reverse mentorship, and reward fluency over tenure are discovering faster learning cycles, stronger creative velocity, and greater organisational resilience. This session shares how AI-native agency, mktgstack has approached this reorganisation - from redefining roles and redistributing decision making authority, to building AI-first workflows, cultural norms, and hiring frameworks inside a modern marketing agency. Rather than treating AI as an add-on capability, the agency rebuilt around it. The session offers a candid look at what worked, what failed, and what changed once ego was removed from the equation and growth became the priority.

A Cannes-winning creative, Varun Khiatani is the Co-Founder of mktgstack, a marketing agency built as a living example of what a reorganised operating system for creativity can look like in the AI era. mktgstack was designed from the ground up to function as an AI-native service business, rethinking how talent, workflows, authority, and creative output are structured inside an agency model. In parallel, Khiatani serves as the AI Practice Lead at The Talented Grid of Companies, where he helps build workflows, AI systems, and upskills teams across disciplines for what modern marketing in the AI era needs to look like. In 2023, he worked on India’s first end-to-end AI-generated advertisement, marking an early shift toward fully AI-native creative production.

Namrata Chawla is the Co-Founder of mktgstack, leading business strategy, content systems, and distribution, ensuring that creative output translates into measurable growth. Her path into the industry has been unconventional. Instead of growing inside legacy agency structures, she built her experience working directly with founders on revenue, performance marketing, and distribution. This grounding allows her to approach creativity not just as storytelling, but as a business lever. Alongside her professional work, she built a business-focused content platform from zero to over 43,000 followers, runs founder-led communities and events across Mumbai and India, and is a recurring panellist at WTF, one of India’s leading entrepreneurship platforms.

SATURDAY 21 MARCH | 15.05-15.40

AI Unlocking Human Creativity:

Redesigning Culture, Production, and Creative Reality

Julie Jihyun Kang, CEO, Flux AI Asia, Seoul

Ian Tae Woong Jeon, Founder & Director, Compound Collective & Director, Applebox Asia, SEA

Joel Lim, Founder & CEO, Gengis AI, Singapore

AI is no longer a collection of tools. It is rapidly becoming the production-grade infrastructure through which culture itself is produced. At the same time, AI has emerged as a genre of its own, shaping the content, aesthetics, and formats that define contemporary pop culture. This session is not a technology showcase. It examines how AI is redesigning the speed, structure, and creative reality of production across platforms, direction, and physical shooting environments.

It does all this through three interconnected perspectives. Number one is the Creative AI Platform Perspective: As thousands of generative models fragment the ecosystem, how can creators retain intention, authorship, and taste? Is AI merely a toolset or is it evolving into a new creative operating system centered around human creative flow? Number 2 is AI-Driven Direction & Cultural Production: How are AI-native visual styles reshaping cultural influence from cinematic commercial work and fashion aesthetics to meme culture, short-form, and UGC trends? Number three is AI-Enabled Production Infrastructure: What changes when AI moves from experimentation into production infrastructure? The session will explore AI enabled workflows across pre-production, VP stages, and post that make scale and iteration viable under real schedules. What new kinds of stories and visual languages will become possible?

Ultimately, AI Unlocking Human Creativity will ask, if AI becomes cultural infrastructure, what becomes of the human role?

Julie Jihyun Kang is the Founder & CEO of Flux AI Asia, where she explores how emerging creative technologies can support storytelling, expression, and creative flow -supporting creators and brands to bring ideas to life more fluidly across platforms and formats. Based in Seoul, she focuses on how AI is reshaping creative authorship, aesthetics, and contemporary pop culture. She is also the CEO & Managing Partner of Serviceplan Korea, leading the agency’s strategic and creative transformation across creativity, technology, and culture. Her perspective is deeply informed by Asia’s highly diverse, constantly evolving creative ecosystems, and their growing influence on both regional and global creativity.

Ian Jeon is a Seoul-based director known for blending cinematic storytelling with cutting-edge technology. Influenced by his time living in Los Angeles, he developed a unique visual language that bridges Eastern and Western sensibilities, balancing emotional subtlety with bold aesthetics. His work is characterised by engaging narratives, striking visuals, and a continuous drive for creative experimentation. In recent years, Jeon has led a number of AI-powered commercial projects in collaboration with major Korean corporations, exploring new intersections between technology and storytelling.

Joel Lim is the Founder and CEO of GENGIS AI, an AI-enabled production studio delivering real world AI workflows for virtual production, VFX, and generative post. He leads a team that turns AI from fragmented tools into production systems, creating AI assisted environments, stage ready extensions, and fully generated clips designed to integrate into live action edits and broadcast delivery. As a director and production lead, Lim focuses on how AI is reshaping creative decision making, aesthetics, and authorship when the work must survive real schedules, crews, and quality standards. He previously spent over a decade directing narrative, commercial, and fashion projects, after an early career in software, finance, and systems design.

ADFEST 2026, Human+, will be held Thursday 19 – Saturday 21 March 2026 at the Royal Cliff Hotels Group in Pattaya, Thailand.

A must for the ambitions of all industry professionals., ADFEST’s 3-day event brings together the industry’s top minds, rising stars and most innovative ideas. With star-studded speaker sessions, workshops, screenings and networking events, register now to join us at the region’s most celebrated creative festival.

ADFEST is open fo delegate registration. For more information on delegate packages and fees, click here.

ADFEST is a not-for profit entity that believes passionately in its role to nurture and support the creative industry in the Asia Pacific and MENA region. It is 1 of only 7 regional creative festivals included in the WARC Creative 100 Rankings, 1 of 12 awards included in the Campaign Brief Asia Rankings, and 1 of 22 awards included in The Drum World Creative Rankings.