December air is thick with endings and beginnings, mostly coffee and panic.

Global networks gobbled each other. AI platforms became procurement’s favourite toy, hammering agency margins into decimals.

Fees were reduced to peanuts and then beaten down further, until even the monkeys gave up and went back to the trees.

Performance marketing turned every feed into dull carousels. Same font. One horrid lavender colour.

Clients flash Midjourney layouts and Claude scripts, asking why they should pay us when AI does it for free.

Then, in a few heartbreaking weeks, we lost Piyush Pandey and Neil French. Two amazing minds.

As 2026 approaches, we know it will get tougher. AI will not slow down. But human creativity will take a shot of Jim Morrison and ride out this storm.

This is not despite AI. It is because of what AI cannot be. Just like this piece, written with 2026 words for 2026.

Creativity is why advertising exists.

There is nothing else.

Everything can be automated, commoditised or outsourced to someone for half the price.

Working from Goa. Possibly drunk.

But the mad act of inventing something that surprises, moves and connects remains stubbornly human.

AI cannot surprise me with impossible leaps. As my copy intern can. She linked a new brand of orange juice to a transoceanic protest by thirsty sardines.

Audiences, too, are sidestepping plastic work. They scroll past it with the same unease they feel watching CGI faces.

Barring Kunjumon in Idukki, perhaps, after a bottle of local iron brew.

Trust is as human as breath.

It is relational, not transactional. A client does not trust an idea in isolation. They trust the person behind it.

The one who responds when a midnight thought haunts the CEO.

Trust is built over time through judgment, delivery and shared pressure. Through fights and campaigns that almost died.

When a client invests millions in an idea, they are investing in people who bear the consequences if the work fails.

AI cannot play that role. The poor fellow does not even have legs.

When the CMO wants to get a drink after a brutal launch, they certainly will not call ChatGPT.

Accountability shapes everything.

When work fails, someone has to defend it in rooms full of angry people.

Clients can’t shout at Gemini. Meaningless.

But they can, and will shout at me. I become their warm-blooded target.

They need someone to fix things, or at least offer a very sincere apology over a samosa.

AI can’t be responsible. How do you drag it into the conference room? When things go sideways, who is the scapegoat?

I am. That makes me invaluable.

Responsibility is a human privilege no machine can ever earn.

Reading faces and changing tracks.

I can walk into a room with one idea and leave with another because I read the energy in the room.

I can spot the CFO who’s only there for free biscuits, the Brand Manager who’s secretly terrified of her boss, and the person who actually matters.

All in under thirty seconds.

I can watch micro expressions and adjust my tone in real time.

AI can’t see the wince when the price slide appears, and won’t know how to use a joke about the air conditioning to save a dying deck.

I turn objections into opportunities, and a sceptic into an ally. This is an ancient human art, not available in a machine.

Convincing a human requires a human, not an algorithm.

Courage and conviction sell ideas.

I have watched average ideas get approved because someone believed in them. And I have also watched brilliant ideas die because no one had the gumption to defend them.

Bold thinking and big ideas require courage. To be able to stand in front of a client and say, “Trust me”.

AI can’t do that.

It will just sit inside a rectangular screen. Blinking. It can’t stake anything because it has nothing to stake. No reputation.

My conviction, however, becomes contagious. It allows others to be brave.

More ideas have been sold on the strength of gut than on the strength of a spreadsheet.

The best work comes from arguments. Over whether the line should be six words or seven. Whether a comma stays or gets killed.

I know when to time an idea. I know when to shut up. AI will never be tired enough to be truly honest.

One unrepeatable life.

Authenticity is the electric moment when my mind, shaped by one utterly unrepeatable life, collides with a brief.

And produces something the world has never seen.

AI works with patterns. Zero lived experience inside. No scraped knees. No lovers. No heartbreak. No poetry.

On the other hand, my head is a museum, a library and a forever cinema. Childhood spent listening to monsoon frogs. Grandma calling me “mone” in that sing-song way that meant love or disappointment.

The smell of keema paav in an Irani café when I was broke and happy. The way my father mispronounced a foreign brand name and affectionately made it his own.

These are not just memories. They are entire worlds.

When I draw from that reservoir, my work feels discovered rather than manufactured. Like archaeology, versus an assembly line.

A machine has no scars, so it has no stories to tell. Errors and flaws are human. And that’s where the best plots are born.

Originality will trounce AI.

The machine remixes. Recombines data into statistically probable outputs. Brilliant at what it does, but it cannot surprise itself.

Originality needs perspective. A point of view earned through life, not common data.

When I work on a brief, I am not retrieving the answer from a database. I am filtering it through my specific intelligence.

And when you say breakfast, I want puttu, kadala, pappadam, sugar and milk. All mashed together.

It is yuck to most, but it is my love.

No AI will ever suggest something as nutty as that. No sane coder would train AI to write that recipe.

My craziness ensures that my ink is the DNA of my experiences. The market will flood with AI-generated work. Competent, yet mediocre.

I bristle with my originality, and it’s advertising’s rarest resource.

Biological instincts remain our secret weapon.

That involuntary laugh that escapes before the brain approves. The tear that arrives unbidden.

The hairs on my neck that stand up when my idea lands perfectly in a room full of sceptics.

Even the proud lump in the throat.

These pre-verbal signs are the ultimate test of creative work, triggered only by something genuine.

Machines can never understand if tears are cold or warm. You cannot A/B test for goosebumps or smiles.

These responses come from deep in the limbic system, where one mammal recognises the emotional truth transmitted by another.

Humans can reveal themselves. We can say the quiet part out loud. Even break down and cry.

AI cannot. It has nothing to confess. Nothing to risk. It will stay lifeless.

Developing taste and signature.

Neil French’s long copy swagger and Piyush Pandey’s warmth wrapped in wit made you smile before you realised you were being sold something.

Taste is built through living, failure and refinement.

AI can imitate taste, but it cannot own a coherent or evolving point of view. It lives through its prompter.

My own voice, honed over years of trial and spectacular failure, carries a texture no prompt can reproduce.

It took me 37 years writing copy and apologies, but I now know I have a signature.

A visual language sprinkled with Mallu words because it sounds like my soul and carries meanings English cannot deliver.

That is my distinction. I guard it like the last parippuvada stall in the universe.

Culture is negotiated between humans.

AI absorbs culture like a sponge absorbs water. Passively. Without understanding.

Real culture isn’t absorbed. It’s lived. Disagreed on. Changed by every person who touches it.

I negotiate my culture every single day. AI cannot negotiate anything.

I understand Trivandrum. As I understand Kerala, South India, India, South Asia, Asia, Global South and Earth.

I am an Earthling. Fire burns me. Ice tickles me. I have the same fear of aliens as an Inuit would.

AI has none of this. No lived presence in any world. Just can’t speak for me. Or you.

It can scrape the surface of every culture. It will never understand what it means to belong to one.

AI creates from the outside, looking in. Forever a tourist.

My weirdness is my superpower.

Maybe you know, maybe you do not, but you have madness in you. Many people call it keeda.

The bug inside you that keeps chirping.

It is in the strategist who grew up in a joint family in Patna and understands group dynamics in ways no MBA ever taught.

And in the art director who restores vintage motorcycles and understands craft in ways that show up in pixel-level decisions.

My own obsessions are not quirks to be ironed out. They make me unique.

I see a grandmother buying tomatoes, and I smell pepper rasam. I see a langur, and I think it’d jump me and stab me with my own Swiss Knife.

My brain does not travel in straight lines. It never will.

They are the secret weapons that I deploy at will. AI can never do that in a thousand moons.

If you can feel, observe and argue well, you are not replaceable — you are just under-priced.

Lateral thinking is a human reflex.

I leap from detergent to dignity. Mobile data to immortality. Instant noodles to nostalgia.

I travel sideways because a random conversation on a local train sparked something deep.

I saw a woman laughing, and that became a campaign for sarees. I make connections that seem absurd until they suddenly feel inevitable.

I see metaphors, stories, visuals and epics, where machines see only categories. The edge that you and I have cannot be programmed. It’s totally irrational.

Come to think of it, I don’t even go sideways.

I zigzag, pirouette, do the kuthu dance on the head of a slightly drunk honeybee. The machine cannot.

A messy life is a gold mine.

Body odour, fragile relationships, lottery tickets, juicy lardburgers, jealous bosses, dirty diapers, scammers, AQI, loud neighbours and cats that crap on your door.

This is offline life. This is where messy happens. It remains my richest creative capital.

Theatre performances that show me how to build unbearable tension. Family arguments that reveal the insanity of love.

Watching children invent entire worlds with nothing but sticks and imagination.

My offline life is not a distraction from work. It is the source code of everything interesting I will ever make.

I invest in it deliberately. Across India and some parts of the world.

I am yet to see AI sitting in a second AC compartment and having a bread omelette on the Venad Express.

The workhorse and the heart.

History says we expand, not disappear.

Every major shift, from the printing press to photography to digital media, expanded what we could do.

These shifts gave us new tools, new ways to reach people. Those who mastered the tools did not disappear. They shaped the next era.

They defined what technology could become in human hands. AI is no different. The new ghoda — the workhorse. The rider decides where it goes.

Let it handle volume, variants, translation and optimisation. All the mechanical work. The stuff that drains energy minus insight.

Or explore 259 seven-word headlines instead of five.

I will employ it and reserve my time for the wild leaps that create disproportionate value. AI can never have my blood in it. I can always whip it to work for me.

Indeed, 2026 will not be like 2025. But none of us needs to surrender.

I see faster days and freer evenings.

When I was asked to write this piece, I had a choice. To do the typical 500-word piece I always write.

Instead, my heart got yanked by an idea.

One of those time-consuming, beautiful knots that we willingly get ourselves into.

I chose to write this article with 2026 words.

(Prathap Suthan is Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Bang in the Middle)

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Published on December 29, 2025