When I stepped back into my CMO role at Securonix, it felt like stepping out of a time machine.
Three years might not sound like much, but in marketing years, that is a lifetime. The fundamentals were still there: campaigns, brand storytelling, pipeline generation. But the entire creative landscape had been rewired. It was like walking back onto a familiar movie set only to realize the cameras now run on quantum power.
Generative AI had changed everything. It was no longer an experiment living in the corner of the martech stack. It had become the creative partner sitting across the table, ready to brainstorm, build, and sometimes out-draft you before your second cup of coffee.
It reminded me of that iconic line from Back to the Future:
“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
Except in marketing, we still need roads. They just look a little different now. Picture the endless space highways of Coruscant from the Star Wars prequels, streams of speeders weaving through levels of light and gravity. That is what marketing feels like today: creative ideas moving at hyperspeed on intersecting layers of AI acceleration and human direction.
And yes … Star Wars nerd alert! Owning it.
Discovering the GenAI Frontier
Across demand generation, campaign automation, and creative production, GenAI was reshaping everything.
In demand gen, I watched AI generate and personalize nurture flows in minutes that used to take weeks.
In campaign automation, it started predicting which messages would resonate with which audiences before the first email even went out.
In creative, it was producing concepts, visuals, and taglines that rivaled the agencies I had paid handsomely in the past.
And in sales enablement, it was writing competitive battlecards faster than any product marketer could type “next revision.”
It was exhilarating, chaotic, and slightly terrifying.
I realized the challenge was no longer whether AI could create. The challenge was whether we could learn to direct it.
Founding My Own Creative Agency
That is the story I want to tell today.
Curiosity turned into experimentation. Experimentation turned into a full-blown creative collaboration. I trained ChatGPT the way I would onboard a new agency partner.
I started with context. I shared everything about our market, our competitors, our customers, and our company. I uploaded the storylines and creative frameworks that had inspired me through my career: the great, the good, and the occasionally ugly. I even shared the creative campaigns that had made me laugh, cry, or scratch my head wondering how they ever made it past approval.
I taught it my tone, my quirks, and my rules of engagement. (Yes, even the “no em dash” rule.)
Somewhere in that process, my experiment evolved into something unexpected. I had built my own creative agency.
Always on. Always honest, although hint: run embrace cynic prompts to keep it real. Never billing by the hour.
Becoming the Director
I love movies. Always have. Somewhere between my fifth campaign concept and my fiftieth iteration, I realized I had stepped into a new role: Director.
Like Spielberg sketching storyboards for E.T., I began shaping the creative sequences. Each version told the same story through a different lens.
- Human-centric: This version focused on the emotional heartbeat of cybersecurity. The analysts, the long nights, the constant pressure to defend. We explored visuals that humanized the SOC, showing faces behind the dashboards and the quiet heroism of those who prevent what never makes the news. It was empathy-driven storytelling that reminded CISOs and boards that security is first and foremost a people business.
- Innovation-centric: This concept leaned into the power of technology. AI, automation, data pipelines, and the velocity of insight. It was sleek, futuristic, and kinetic. It showed how an organization can accelerate from manual detection to autonomous defense, all guided by human oversight. It captured the energy of transformation but risked feeling a bit too clinical without the human spark.
- Business outcome-centric: This became the anchor. It spoke to the measurable results our customers needed to show their boards. Faster detection, better visibility, reduced risk, and the credibility to say, “We are breach ready.” It balanced the emotional pull of the human story with the credibility of the innovation story.
What made the process powerful was not that AI came up with these ideas. It was how quickly it allowed us to explore, test, and evolve them. What might have taken weeks of creative back-and-forth now unfolded in hours.
I still played the role of director, shaping tone and message, but my AI agency gave me velocity. It was like editing a film with a crew that could instantly render any cut you could imagine.
The winning version, business-outcome-centric, became our rallying cry:
Breach Ready. Board Ready. AI Powered.
All in the Edit
One of my favorite pieces of movie lore is that Star Wars: A New Hope was a creative disaster until Marcia Lucas and her editing team saved it. They reshaped the story in the edit room. They found the emotional thread and turned chaos into clarity.
That was exactly what my process felt like with my creative agency.
The magic did not come from the first draft or the cleverest prompt. It came from the edit.
The back-and-forth. The refinement. The “what if we tried this instead” moments. Each cut made the message sharper and the emotional connection stronger.
The difference was speed. What used to take a full creative cycle could now be shaped in days. I was still leading with human intuition, the understanding of what makes a message resonate, but I had a creative partner that could instantly visualize every iteration.
We were not just creating assets. We were editing a story into existence.
The Pitch and the Premiere
Eventually “we,” me and my AI creative agency, pitched the campaign. We lined up the three creative directions: the human story, the innovation story, and the business story.
The business-outcome version won because it blended the emotional truth of the human story with the credibility of innovation. It showed the CISO as both protector and strategist. It spoke to board confidence, operational excellence, and resilience in the face of complexity.
We then partnered with our brilliant in-house creatives to visualize it, bring it to life, and launch it.
The response was incredible. Colleagues, customers, and partners all recognized something different. A shift in how cybersecurity could sound, feel, and connect.
It was not just another campaign. It was a creative collaboration between human experience and AI acceleration.
The Future of Creativity
The experience reminded me why I love this job. Great marketing has always been part art, part science, and part soul. The arrival of AI does not change that. It just changes the canvas.
The best creative work will always require human emotion, instinct, and judgment. But when paired with AI, those instincts gain speed and scale. You can explore more ideas, test more stories, and sharpen your message faster than ever before.
AI did not replace my creativity. It multiplied it.
It is all in the edit. The human in the loop. The conversation between intuition and iteration.
Because the real magic of AI is not in what it creates. It is in how we shape it, refine it, and turn it into something that moves people.
So maybe Doc Brown was right. The roads of the past are gone. What we have now are the glowing space lanes of Coruscant, endless, fast, and alive with creative possibility, if you know how to fly them.
That is where the future of marketing will live: in the edit room, mid-flight, where human creativity and AI imagination meet to tell the next great story … from one proud nerd to another.
Behind the Scenes: Building My AI Creative Agency
Every good movie needs a “making of” moment, so here is mine.
When I decided to create my own creative agency inside ChatGPT, I treated it like a living partner. I gave it a brief that covered everything a real agency would need to know: market context, competitive positioning, audience personas, tone of voice, company values, and my own creative non-negotiables.
Then I started training it through conversation. I fed it examples of great campaigns I had led, from tech launches to rebrands, along with a few that completely missed the mark. We talked about why they worked or did not. I shared favorite cultural moments, from Apple’s “Think Different” to Nike’s “Find Your Greatness.” It learned my storytelling rhythms and the emotional undercurrents I look for in brand work.
Over time, I expanded its scope: campaign strategy, narrative framing, sales enablement content, even presentation pacing. It began to understand why certain creative choices resonated in B2B marketing and when to push boundaries.
What surprised me most was how fast it learned. Within weeks, it was co-creating at the level of a seasoned creative director. I still made the final calls, but the process became less about briefing and more about collaborating.
That is the beauty of an AI creative agency. It does not replace the spark of human creativity. It amplifies it. It is your idea accelerator, your edit room assistant, your 24-hour brainstorm partner.
And like any great creative relationship, the work only gets better the more you invest in it.