05/11/2026
Last week our team took the afternoon to get together in person and talk seriously about AI.
We worked through together what we believe, what kinds of challenges we’re navigating, and where we want to draw lines in a landscape and future that keeps shifting. This was both necessary and well overdue, so a big thanks to everyone on the team who made it happen.
Some of what we worked through was quite straightforward: We’re human-first, with human ideas, human strategy, and human creative. That part was easy to label, as we’ve always been a studio where people and the planet are at the heart of everything we do. Passing off those elements to AI would feel like a betrayal to our core values.
But a lot of the questions we’re sitting with are really tricky. How do we remain accessible to underresourced clients if holding the line on AI makes us less competitive? How do we acknowledge the benefits AI offers some organizations while staying honest about the damage this technology is doing and has the potential to do to the environment, to jobs, to health, to the people it’s leaving behind and the billionaires it’s lifting up? How do we protect our process, our creative judgment, our humanness, as clients arrive with their own relationships to these tools and their own expectations? How do we hold our boundaries gently, and stay in the driver’s seat of how we operate?
While there are a lot of questions remaining unanswered, we left our retreat with some clarity and a shared sense of next steps, including how we integrate our position into our internal-use policy, our contracts, and how we navigate client requests around AI in our process and project outputs.
We topped the afternoon off with good food, ice cream, a walk along the Meewasin in the sun, and a couple of plays from 25th Street Theatre’s Behind Closed Doors series. It was a really wonderful afternoon all around.
Grateful for this team and the dedication that exists to do these big things well! 💕
