How Adland’s AI Natives Are Building a Bridge to the Future

How will AI shape the future of the advertising industry? It’s the question we’re all asking but with answers ranging from utopian to dystopian, there’s not a great deal to clarity to be found. Perhaps the best place to look for insight is to speak to the people who are going to be most impacted by it: those at the beginning of their careers, for whom AI and advertising have always been inextricably linked.

Yongjin Li and Olly Evans represent the industry’s new generation of AI natives. They both joined WPP through the holding company’s nine month paid creative technology apprenticeship scheme, and AI has been part of their work from the jump. Their journeys across the holding company, bringing all sorts of unusual projects to life have opened their eyes to what a fluid, fragmented career might look like in the AI age.

What’s striking about the pair is that while they’re fully conversant in hard skills like coding and confident with cutting edge AI tech, they both come from a visual arts background. Olly has a BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins and Yongjin studied Design for Art Direction at the University of the Arts London.

By the time Olly graduated in 2022, he was already experimenting with AI and teaching himself to code, and he found himself crossing the pond to Berkeley in California for an AI research fellowship and a stint in San Francisco as a senior arts and technology researcher.

Yongjin graduated in 2023, just at the point where the buzz around ChatGPT and Midjourney was gathering momentum. She’d already worked as a freelance art director and had short experiences working as an assistant creative director with a Chinese apparel brand. The idea of bringing both together was tremendously exciting. “I think that's also a reason why when I saw this apprenticeship I got really interested in it because at that time everybody was talking about prompting, generating images and the fashion industry changing, things like that. I think it was a time for us to think about what AI can do for designers and visual people like us and how it opens up the possibilities.”

The WPP Creative Technology apprenticeship gave the pair the chance to solidify their hard tech skills in everything from coding to game design as well as getting hands-on experience working with innovation teams, collaborating on major WPP clients. Yongjin completed her apprenticeship in 2024, with Olly finishing his in 2025. The pair now work as creative technologists at Hex, the innovation studio that sits within WPP’s global production engine Hogarth.

“I think Hex within Hogarth is an exciting place to be for people who are interested in AI and creative technology because of the type of projects that come in and the type of software we have access to," says Olly. “The limits are.. well… there's no limit so it's pretty cool, it's pretty fun.”

AI has been an integral part of their creative technology careers and, the pair points out, that under-the-hood understanding of how AI works combined with the harder skills, means that they’re not just interacting with AI via the prompt box but via the API (application programming interface), which then allows them to build new workflows, apps or AI tools. Moreover, even with the rise of 'vibe coding' (using prompts to generate usable code), being able to code the 'old fashioned way' and understand what's going on allows them to interrogate, assess and tweak AI-generated code.

“I think the way that we view AI is rather than just as a tool that produces things, it's like a collaborator and part of our process,” explains Olly. “Having gone through the WPP Creative Technology apprenticeship, we are able to actually harness the true powers of AI using the API through coding rather than strictly through a user interface… I think part of our job is the problem solving around how we can use the API to bring AI into the workflow in a more innovative way basically.

“We're not just generating images or video, we're exploring how to build up the AI as part of the workflow,” agrees Yongjin. “Because the thing is, creativity is always different. AI only gives you one way to solve the problem, so you have to creatively think about how to use AI as a tool to approach all the different creative ideas.”

Those hard skills and a clear understanding of the ‘how’ of AI certainly give the pair a sense of confidence in how they’ll navigate a career that’s much more fragmented than adland pathways in past decades, as well as the ability to keep up with all of the new developments that come their way.

As powerful as AI can be, both also are keenly aware of its limitations. From a production perspective, for example, the AI output is never the finished product. Olly mentions that every project needs a degree of human retouching. “It's a very typical use case of AI: prompt, get a result, prompt get a result, change the prompt until you get closest to what the client is looking for. But even with all the advancements that we have it's still very, very hard to achieve like-for-like,” he says, explaining that inevitably a human hand and eye will be needed to fix lighting or lettering.

AI alone can’t create without human input or oversight, explains Yongjin. “I don't think AI can literally replace people,” she says.

As the pair cast their eyes ahead, there’s an excitement around the opportunity to commit more and more energy towards innovative thinking. That’s where the future of a career in advertising lies. “We see a lot of AI being used to automate processes and you know the boast about the speed and efficiency of things and the costs that that saves. And I think once everything is automated there'll be nothing left to do but innovate,” says Olly.

They’re both people who have jumped into the waters of creative technology early on in their careers and have embraced the opportunity to learn hard skills, so Yongjin and Olly have an interesting perspective to share for anyone who is perhaps still intimidated by the task of getting their head round it all or fear that it’s a threat to their own creativity.

For Yongjin, the wealth of free resources and people who are willing – excited, even – to share knowledge on platforms like GitHub and Discord is incredibly powerful. “When I came into Creative Tech, one thing I found really interesting is people are sharing everything online, they share everything,” she says. “I feel that's the power of the internet; literally just ask and get started!”

Olly adds that confidence in the strength of your own creative ideas goes a long way in quelling the feeling that AI is a threat. AI can take care of parts of the journey but it can’t do everything, so there’s no need to feel insecurity. Moreover, he says, the more you learn and understand about the digital nuts and bolts that make it work, the more clearly you can see what it can and can’t do. “I think just educate yourself on how these things actually work so it isn't just some magic machine that spits out whatever you want… maybe it’s not as magic as you think when you figure out how it truly works,” he says. Perhaps we’re further from that famous Arthur C Clarke quote than we think .

Right now, there’s a trend particularly among premium brands (and, notably big tech companies) for leveraging traditional production and creation techniques to communicate luxury. But that division between pre- and post- AI creativity and making is less clearly delineated for this new generation of AI natives.

One gets a really beguiling sense of the alchemy that lies ahead for creativity when the conversation veers from their day-to-day advertising work to their hobbies. Both Yongjin and Olly enjoy properly hands-on craft and love to spend their free time away from computer screens and in the art studio. But both have found surprising ways to integrate their personal arty passions and their AI knowhow. A keen ceramicist (she does pottery three times a week), Yongjin enjoys working with AI to find inspiration for new kinds of glazes. Meanwhile, Olly, who loves fashion has found a novel use for AI in his garment-making pursuits. He’ll draw sketches by hand, but will use AI to visualise these garments using different fabrics, which allows him to make informed decisions and avoid risking wasting time and money on a fabric that won’t work. These examples demonstrate that with enough ingenuity, you can find a place for AI in the most unexpected ‘workflows’ – and it’s that kind of thinking that will help the industry as a whole make a bridge to the future.