At ADFEST 2026, Yasuharu Sasaki, Global Chief Creative Officer at Dentsu and this year's Grand Jury President, opened his session by playing a short video of himself speaking Thai. The voice was AI-generated. The background was Pattaya Walking Street rendered fifty years into the future. He pointed out that anyone could make something like it in ten minutes. The point wasn't to celebrate the tool. It was to acknowledge that the tool is fully here.

The question now isn't really whether creatives should use AI. Most of us already do. What's harder to answer is how to use it without losing the part of the work that mattered in the first place.

What worried Sasaki more was what comes next. He showed survey data from Dentsu's annual CMO study. 79% of CMOs around the world believe generative AI is making brands look more and more alike. The fear isn't AI itself. It's sameness. In an algorithm era, being average is the easiest way to disappear.

But the most striking moment of the session came from a different number. Sasaki shared an internal study from Dentsu Tokyo. Copywriters scored 69.3 on a creative evaluation when working without AI. When the same copywriters used ChatGPT, the score dropped. When they worked with AICO 2, Dentsu's own AI copywriter trained on the craft and knowledge of their own writers, the score went up. Same people. Same brief. Different outcomes depending on which AI they used.

Just using AI can lower the work. Teaching AI can lift it. The difference isn't in the tool. It's in what the creative brings to the tool first.

With the rise of machines, humanity is more valuable than ever. To overcome the AI-driven sameness, Sasaki asserted creatives need to be both AI-native and human-native. Being AI-native isn't about prompting better. It's about bringing craft, and creative instinct, into the tool to powerfully move people. It is not mastery of engineering, but mastery of how it makes people feel.

Advance Humanity: technology that makes people's lives better. 

Augment Humanity: AI as a co-creator that expands what people can do. 

Human Experience: AI that makes digital experiences feel more human, not less. 

Human Aesthetics: lean into the things only humans bring — humour, taste, imperfection. 

Humanise with Craft: keep human craft alive in the work, even when AI is in the room.

So maybe the heart of it is this. The work in the very near future that comes from purely using AI as a shortcut tends to feel the same. While work that comes from collaborating with it tends to feel like there's still a human soul in it.

While we must be both AI-Native and Human-Native in the age of AI, it is more crucial than ever to maintain a humanly inspiring presence and take emotion over function.