Here's a question. What are you fed by? I'm Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I'm asked to help their leaders discover what they're capable of, and then to maximize their impact. Helping them to unlock their own creativity, as well as the creativity of the people around them.

Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity. This episode is the fifth in a series of conversations that I'm having in partnership with the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity. For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we're focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries, or should we adjust and iterate, slowly and carefully? Do we follow the puck, or skate to where it's going? There are opportunities, and risks, around every corner.

This episode is a conversation with Nils Leonard. He's the Co-founder of Uncommon, a global creative studio based in New York, London, and Stockholm. I invited Nils into the series because I suspected he would have a strong point of view about what AI is, and isn't, when it comes to creativity.

Nils has strong beliefs about many things, which is why I ask him back on the show regularly. One of those is the emotional leap of faith that every creative act demands. It's a deeply and uniquely human investment. So, when I asked him about the threat of AI to creativity, he said this.

“It's not fed by tragedy. It's not fed by loss or by a heart attack or by a lover that's left you. It's not fed by a night on red wine and weeping and music. And it's not fed by sudden and dramatic radical change in somebody's life to lead them to do something.

And so as a result, yeah, it can offer up great alternatives to average problems and average solutions and offer those mediums, but it will never give you that. It'll never write "Push the Sky Away". It'll never write "Grief Is the Thing With Feathers". Because it just simply won't be able to understand or comprehend or even play back the leap that was required to do that type of work.”

At the end of the series, I'll offer some thoughts on what we've heard and learned, and where we might go from here. In the meantime, thanks for joining us.

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