Headshot of John Thornhill, Sifted's cofounder and editorial director.

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May 12, 2025

The real promise of AI: creating new business models (not just rewiring old ones)

Reinventing Europe's creative industries in the age of AI promises an exciting — and lucrative — future.

John Thornhill

3 min read

Two years ago, Nestlé released a fun advertisement for KitKat mocking how bad AI was. “AI made this ad so we could have a break,” a robotic voice intoned over clunky images of misshapen tree surgeons eating chocolate bars. An Australian creative consultancy had prompted an AI model to write a KitKat ad the way Gen Z speaks and then used DALL-E 2 to generate the images.

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John Thornhill

John Thornhill is Sifted’s editorial director and cofounder. He is also innovation editor of the Financial Times, and tweets from @johnthornhillft

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