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.
The ad highlights two things about AI. First, viewers today would disbelieve the low quality of the AI-generated content creation given how much the industry has advanced in the meantime. Second, technology can enhance human creativity — even when it involves taking the piss out of the technology used to produce the ad itself.
A senior technologist at an advertising agency told me recently that AI could nowadays pretty much solve all of the processes involved in end-to-end marketing. “But the differentiator in a world where end-to-end marketing is solved is human creativity. How do I come up with creative ideas that differentiate my brand from another brand?” he said. “We’re going all in on using AI to enhance and accelerate human creativity.”
Most of the debate about the benefits of AI revolves around how the technology can be used to simplify business processes and boost productivity. That’s a good and worthy endeavour that keeps finance directors and investors happy and can have a measurable impact on profitability.
“The value of AI comes from rewiring how companies run,” a recent McKinsey report argued. Many of the companies the consultancy surveyed reported that the biggest financial impact of using generative AI came from cutting costs in areas such as supply chain management, service operations, HR and software engineering. McKinsey found that three-quarters of respondents were using AI for at least one business function with bigger companies adopting the technology more quickly than smaller organisations.
Many AI companies are explicitly targeting that business market. This week, for example, France’s Mistral launched Le Chat Enterprise to help customers automate routine processes and create AI-powered agents. That will put Mistral in direct competition with the likes of Microsoft and OpenAI that have been investing heavily in this enterprise field.
But it will be tough for any competitor to rival the giant US companies in the commanding heights of the AI economy. According to Stanford university’s 2025 AI Index Report, US-based institutions produced 40 notable AI models last year compared with 15 in China and 3 in Europe. Private investment in AI rose to $109bn in the US last year, compared with $9.3bn in China and $4.5bn in the UK.
More intriguing business opportunities, though, may lie in how AI can be used to boost a company’s top line, rather than just massage its bottom line. Finance directors in established companies are understandably cautious about spending money on speculative projects with uncertain revenue projections. But that’s home turf for many startups, who can build their entire business models around an inspired hunch and fast experimentation.
AI tools can enable startups to innovate fast, become more creative, expand existing knowledge and invent new ways of doing business. That is already evident in industries as diverse as drug discovery, insurance, defence and law.
But Europe also rightly prides itself on the strengths of its creative industries, including entertainment, advertising, luxury, fashion, music and gaming. Reimagining how all of these activities can be reinvented in the age of AI can open an exciting — and lucrative — future for Europe. The real promise of AI is to stimulate imagination, not just slash costs.
