Dolsten & Co. On Putting Taste Back at the Centre of AI

The thing about a prompt bar is that it can look deceptively ordinary – little more than a blank line waiting for instructions. But, as Simon Dolsten puts it, “the same prompt bar can generate a plain wooden chair or the entire feeling of a room. It can create the light, the air, the mood, even the sense of a memory that never actually happened.”

It's this attention to mood sits at the centre of Dolsten & Co., an AI-first creative studio based in New York. Simon launched the company in early 2025, positioning it as a studio for brands and artists that treats AI less like a bolt-on and more like a baseline – integrated into how ideas are developed, shaped, and delivered.

It’s been a quick flurry of success over the past year. In April 2025, Viome and Accelerator Active Energy appointed the studio as agency of record, with both brands tapping it to explore AI-focused creative campaigns. For Accelerator, that remit has included work featuring Travis Kelce – part celebrity casting, part product argument. In one write-up, Simon framed the aim as positioning the drink as “a true upgrade from the rest of the market”. And the wins have kept on coming. The agency also won AI Ad of the Year by ElevenLabs, the Chroma Awards and Google Cloud for their Arthur The Alien VIOME campaign. There’s a pull Dolsten & Co. has that creative folk seem to understand and want to be a part of.

Maybe that’s because Simon spent a lot of his career on the other side of the table too. The worldview behind Dolsten & Co. has been shaped by a career that has moved between traditional advertising craft and emerging formats – and one that has been publicly validated in the awards economy that still sets reputations. In The One Show’s 2024 creative director rankings, Simon Dolsten appears as the world’s most awarded creative director.

The tools matter, and throughout 2025 we’ve been seeing a lot of hype surrounding them, but for Simon, they do not carry intent. “AI does not create meaning on its own. It only reveals the meaning, taste, and intention of the person guiding it,” he says. “The tool is accessible to everyone, but what you do with it is entirely human.”

This belief shapes how Dolsten & Co. thinks about talent. Instead of building a fixed roster and defending it, the company focuses on assembling teams around the work – curating specialists from wherever the most interesting craft is emerging. “AI creators are not concentrated in any one city. They are everywhere. Lagos, Mexico City, Seoul, São Paulo, and in online communities where new aesthetics emerge every day,” says Simon. The point is less about novelty for its own sake than it is about keeping the creative vocabulary porous.

It has consequences for leadership, too. “Creative leadership has become curatorial rather than hierarchical. The organisation has shifted from being title-driven to being craft-driven,” he says. In practical terms, it is an attempt to protect authorship in a moment when output is cheap and imitation is easy. If anyone can generate a competent image, the value shifts to the judgement that makes the work feel specific, intentional, and emotionally credible.

The business question, of course, is whether cinematic ambition survives contact with performance demands. Simon doesn’t pretend the tension isn’t there. “We do not try to eliminate the tension between art and performance because the tension is where the best work happens. We design around it,” he says. His argument is that craft is not a soft metric; it is the fastest route to attention. Then come the systems: “modular content, real-time personalisation, and AI-driven iteration that extends a single creative idea into an entire ecosystem.”

For an AI-first studio, the sharper test is when the machine should step back. And Simon is direct when it comes to the process. The studio isn’t “AI only” so much as “AI deliberate”. And when it comes to the work, “We always start with the idea. Not the tool.” If a performer brings “emotional nuance or physical presence”, he says, “there is no reason to place them inside a generative world.” When the concept needs “impossible scale” or “visual languages that do not exist yet”, then AI earns its place. Often, he adds, “the best answer is a blend of both worlds.”

The emphasis on judgement also shows up in what Simon thinks will remain essential in creative leadership. His answer is not speed, novelty, or technical fluency. It is “Imperfection. The best creative work contains irregularities, friction, and choices that might not be logical but feel emotionally right. AI tends to smooth out the edges. Humans are defined by them. Creative leadership is knowing when to leave something rough, when to add tension, and when to keep the detail that breaks the perfection. Imperfection is where originality lives.”

Simon’s plans for the studio suggest he sees that kind of taste as portable beyond advertising. He points to collaborations “with an international gallery to bring paintings to life”, partnerships “with a venture firm to launch AI-first products”, and experiments helping personalities build digital clones that can move across formats. He calls the frontier “fluid storytelling” – work that is “real time, adaptive, and alive”, and that moves naturally between “art, entertainment, technology, and brand experiences.”

Underneath  sits a claim about the economics of it all: that the cost of making has dropped, and the distance between idea and film has shortened. “We are living in a rare moment where one brilliant AI filmmaker working with one strong creative director can produce a two-minute brand film that used to require two hundred people,” says Simon.

The industry will argue about what that means for jobs and craft. Dolsten & Co. is betting, at least, that it makes the human part of the process harder to outsource. We are capable of bringing intention, and there must be a willingness to choose an imperfect detail over a perfect one. “For Dolsten & Co. it marks the beginning of a new era where creative ambition can finally scale at the speed of imagination.”

In that future, technology will be the baseline, and taste, the differentiator.