# Edelman、Le Truc 与 WHY Brands 谈 AI 为何奖励有观点的创作者

- 来源：Runway：News（网页）
- 作者：Runway Team
- 发布时间：2026-08-04 00:00
- AIHOT 分数：45
- AIHOT 链接：https://aihot.virxact.com/items/cmsezb7821bsuro2ehgqf3hoa
- 原文链接：https://runwayml.com/news/customers/edelman-le-truc-why-brands-nyc-summit-2026

## AI 摘要

三家广告与品牌公司的创意负责人一致认为，AI 技术已成熟，真正挑战在于重塑习惯、团队与预算。Le Truc 的 Williander 强调快速原型、展示 60-70% 完成度即可；Edelman 引入 Runway 后设计师效率提升五倍；WHY Brands 的 Harrelson 用 AI 实现当天响应文化热点。

## 正文

Filip Williander runs creative technology at Le Truc, Publicis' creative engine, helping transform an organization of 120,000 people. Gabe Michael built Edelman's AI production capability from scratch. Chris Harrelson leads creative content and operations at WHY Brands, marketing to parents in a category where trust is everything. Moderated by Monks Chief Innovation Officer Henry Cowling, their conversation kept landing on the same conclusion: the technology is ready, and the real work is rewiring habits, teams and budgets around it.

Most companies are still somewhere between the promise of AI and actually putting it to work — a gap, as Cowling put it, that the three leaders sitting beside him work inside every day. In a conversation about how brands tell stories in the generative era, each shared what decades of creative experience has taught them about this moment: the habits they've dropped, the skills they're betting on and the results they're starting to measure.

Letting Go of the Perfect Reveal

The first casualty of generative tools, for Williander, was the creative's oldest instinct: guarding an idea until it's flawless. “As a creative, you always want to protect your idea. You only want to show the client when [you think] they're 100% going to get it,” he says. Now, he can get a concept “60, 70% of the way there honestly in minutes” and show it immediately because working two weeks on something a client will hate costs two weeks. The deeper shift is dropping the permission-seeking mindset entirely: “If you just build it and give them a prototype, they can actually react to something... and now you're co-creating, which makes everything easier.”

Speed creates its own discipline problem: when a new version is seconds away, knowing when to stop, Williander says, is “the skill that I think every creative person needs to work on going forward.” Harrelson, sitting on the client side, feels the same pull: “I finished the project and I [think] oh, but I can keep doing this.” That’s why he treats the endpoint as a decision: “I have to set the deadline. The work is done here... the hardest part of it is putting the pens down.”

Michael's long-held instinct was procedural. “I don't think I've given anything up, but I've changed the how to the why,” he says. The production process used to be the fixed thing; now the models change daily, so the questions that survive are why a thing is being made and what skills the team brings to it. “The skills that we bring to the table are there and they've been there. We just have to find new ways to retool them.”

New Tools Demand New Ways of Working

Williander's day job is a standardization puzzle: 100+ markets with each agency doing things slightly differently. It's taught him where the real risk of AI at scale sits. Not in the tools, but in using them without a reason. “If you're just using AI to use AI, it becomes a race to the middle because it's always going to give you the safest option,” he says. “You need to have that point of view that makes it interesting.”

Cowling, who advises some of the world's largest marketers on AI transformation, sees the same danger from the consulting side: companies where everyone is already using AI, but in scattered, personal instances. He says it accelerates old ways of working rather than rethinking them. His warning to the room: the risk is “amplifying chaos, or ingraining ways of working, but just doing it more so with AI.”

Moving at the Speed of Culture

For Harrelson, the payoff is responsiveness. “The rapid response is one of the benefits of AI. We can react to cultural moments much faster,” he says. For example, his boss, the Chief Brand Officer, can flag something in the morning, and the team is able to react the same day. “With a tool like Runway, you can iterate so quickly. You can put in a prompt that gives you these variables, and then you can pick and choose the best one and send 3 or 4 to the top immediately to get approval.”

Michael's version of the trust problem runs through clients rather than culture. He acknowledges moments where he’s had work turned down because it was being made with AI, but the objection has also dissolved with transparency about process: the owned assets, the research, the photographer they brought out. “When you go in and you actually tell them the process... they become much more comfortable with it.” He believes the window for AI as a punchline is closing because the output has gotten so good, so calling out the aesthetic no longer works. “You really have to lean into the storytelling aspect of it.”

For Cowling, the stakes reach beyond any single piece of work. AI “is not just a technology choice for a brand to make... it says something about the brand if they're prepared to use that technology or not, and how they use it reflects on the brand.”

Craft and Specialization Compound with AI

Asked whether AI is turning everyone into generalists, Williander argued the opposite. “We're entering a world where specialists are actually going to be more valuable and powerful than ever,” he says. A Photoshop-only specialist is in trouble; a genuine photographer is not because prompting rewards exactly what they know. Lighting, focal length, f-stop: “When everyone can prompt for anything, it is the specificity and the creative vision that you can put into your prompt that becomes the selling point.”

Michael frames the future as “2 to 3 core skills” per person and is actively upskilling Edelman's teams across a market-wide skill gap. He’s watching illustrators who'd been pigeonholed into one career path discover they can make films. And since Edelman brought on Runway as its lead creative partner, its designers are “five times more efficient” — five times the output, he says, without working any longer and happier for the room it creates to experiment.

Harrelson sees the same dynamic play out in-house, where a lean team never had the luxury of dedicated retouchers or compositors. Now, what was a three-day turnaround for a retouch only takes three minutes, and a designer “can actually level themselves up and have a skill set that they never thought they could have.” The creative, he's careful to add, hasn't left the loop. “Ultimately you have to know where you want to go and the result you want,” he argues.

Budgets, Briefs and the New Creative Math

Client understanding of AI is still all over the map, Michael says. Some arrive with briefs that require redirection: “AI is not the right tool for that. Go and actually hire an animation team.” The most educated clients understand the potential. They arrive with the same budget as before and a bigger ask: “We want you to do this, and we want you to do more.” At WHY Brands, Harrelson splits the cost of Runway across the whole company — brand design, photo, video, industrial design, even marketing decks — and everyone in the organization is encouraged to use it.

Williander believes the structural change that matters most for global brands is the death of the fixed deliverable. A global team spends $4 million on a beautiful ad; a local market team in Sweden gets the file and $2,000 to “make it work,” and the seams show. “It's not a fixed file anymore. It is a template,” he says. The brand truth stays locked, while the background, characters, setting and cultural insight can all change to fit a local market. “And it's not going to break the bank.”

The gap between AI's promise and its practice hasn't closed yet. But all three are pointing the same way through it: toward more and better creative work, made in more places, by more people.

Based on a panel conversation in New York City during Runway’s 2026 AI Summit.