Before you let anyone near how your agency runs, you want to know three things: who they are, why they're doing this, and whether they actually use what they sell. Fair. All three are below.
In March 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players alive, in a match the machine was supposed to lose. But the moment everyone remembers came in Game 4. On move 78, Lee Sedol played a wedge so improbable that AlphaGo's evaluation collapsed — a one-in-ten-thousand move commentators called God's Touch. The machine had studied millions of games. The human found the move it couldn't see.
That's the founding idea of Create78. AI raises the floor of creative work — the drafts, the decks, the deadlines. It doesn't find the 78th move. The point of building serious AI operations isn't to automate the work that matters. It's to clear away everything else so your best people spend their time where only they can play.
Most AI consultants have never sat in your chair. I've spent twenty years in it. Editorial design at People, Field & Stream, and Victoria's Secret. Two agencies of my own in New York, where my teams did work for Audible, Levi's, Diesel, Godiva, and Deloitte. Creative director of a 22-person team. Chief strategy officer through an $8M acquisition of an AI research firm — piloting large language models for agency content systems in 2021, before most people had a working definition of one. I know what a blown review cycle costs an agency, and who ends up eating it. I've been the one eating it.
Today I work at the center of the AI transformation at Crowe, a global accounting and consulting firm — where I built the firm's AI Lab, designed multi-agent pipelines that cut prototype cycles from three months to a few hours, and have run AI workshops for over a hundred practitioners. I run it at personal scale too: my own AI usage got me flagged by IT — $1,200 in twelve days — before most companies had a policy to point to. What all of it taught me is that the gap between AI-assisted and AI-native isn't the tools. It's whether you're directing the work or still doing it.
Create78 is where that practice comes home to the industry I grew up in. It builds AI operations specifically for creative agencies of five to fifty people — the shops where the expertise that makes the work good lives in two or three people's heads, and everything routes through them. The first engagement of this kind gave a creative director 60% of their review time back. That number is why this company exists.
I work in the open. The thinking behind Create78 — the economics, the failures, the operating patterns — is documented in public, in detail, on my Substack. If you want to know how I think before you ever get on a call, it's all there.
If this sounds like how you want your agency to run, start the conversation.
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