Situation
Creative teams spend a lot of exploratory time at the beginning of a project that never makes it into a final deliverable: building first-round concepts that get discarded, going through rounds of back and forth to align stakeholders and manually searching hundreds of raw assets to figure out what already exists.
None of that setup shows up in the final product, but it has to be done and done right.
Approach
Franco’s creative team built AI into the front end of the process intentionally, using it to cut early-stage setup and concept rework so more time could go toward strategy, design and refinement.
Across two active projects, the approach reduced unproductive back and forth and produced earlier stakeholder alignment, leading to quicker final delivery and fewer edits.
Where AI Did The Work
Faster Concept Development
For a brand identity and brochure project, the client needed to see multiple creative directions before selecting one. AI generated visual directions from the designers’ ideas; prompts were refined until concepts matched the vision, then polished mockups gave stakeholders something tangible to react to. The design team rebuilt the approved direction from scratch to production standard.
6-8 HOURS OF CONCEPT SETUP AND REWORK
Video Library Analysis
For a video refresh project, 291 raw clips from a previous production had to be reviewed before a new filming plan could be built. AI categorized the footage — interviews, drone, retail
stores, donation bins, riverfront, B-roll — and flagged gaps, producing a searchable library that showed what could be reused and what needed to be shot new.
6-8 HOURS OF MANUAL REVIEW AND CATALOGING
Results
One Day of Setup Removed
Time reinvested into creative strategy, design refinement and execution.
- Client alignment earlier, with fewer rounds of back and forth
- Fewer discarded concepts and revision cycles
- Faster identification of reusable footage and content gaps
- Time that used to go to setup and rework now spent on refinement
AI did not replace creative thinking or shorten the work itself on either project. It removed the manual setup that used to happen before that work could begin.
