AI makes space for risk — if creatives dare take it

When filmmaker Brady Corbet took the stage at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, his remarks on the shifting realities of creative production resonated strongly with Teemu Suviala, global chief creative officer at Landor. Corbet noted that while AI is driving down production costs, it is simultaneously opening the door to greater creative risk. For Suviala, the connection was clear: if technology enables efficiency, then it also demands a willingness to push boundaries.

“This means that when more can be done with AI, we should take more creative risks,” he told Campaign. “We know we can be more profitable by lesser resources. But it is more important to push risk taking and do crazier, weirder and more unpredictable things, because AI can now support us to get there.”

The statement reflects a tension that runs through the advertising and branding industry today: how to balance efficiency and experimentation at a time when data, automation and AI dominate decision-making. In an industry long accustomed to polished output and risk-averse messaging, Suviala is advocating for a return to resilience, imperfection and human intuition.

His perspective is shaped by more than three decades in design, branding and innovation. Before joining Landor, he was global head of brand design at Meta’s Reality Labs, where he defined brand expression for products such as Meta, Quest, Ray-Ban Stories, Portal and Horizon. His remit spanned brand identity, campaigns, in-product experiences and experiential design—territory where emerging technologies meet consumer adoption.

Earlier, he held senior creative roles at Collins and Wolff Olins and co-founded two studios, Kokoro & Moi and Syrup, which worked with Spotify, Google, Chobani, Nokia, Coca-Cola and the City of Helsinki. Alongside his agency work, he is a partner in Finnish footwear brand Tarvas and advises Helsinki’s New Museum of Architecture and Design.

That breadth has kept him close to the debate around the role of creativity as a business driver. For him, risk-taking is inseparable from resilience. The concept first captured his attention in the 2000s after reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan. “Resilience is being open minded that anything can happen, and this open mindedness gives you the flexibility and optimism to deal with any negative things that might come your way,” he said.

Building a culture of safe risk

At Landor, Suviala describes his role less as dictating ideas and more as creating conditions for experimentation. “My biggest job as a creative leader is to create a safe space for people to take risks,” he said. “Because when there's safety, people are willing to go extra miles and do unseen things.”

That safety, he explained, rests on transparency—ensuring everyone knows what is happening—and trust, so that teams feel able to bring forward ideas without fear of failure. “You have to create a culture that makes people feel safe enough to fail, so they can try different things. Because mistakes are part of the creative exploration process and one can make 10,000 mistakes before getting the right answer,” he added.

To operationalise this, Landor has embedded frameworks into its creative process. One is a stage dubbed ‘Live it, write it, sketch it’, designed to encourage professionals to challenge assumptions and explore unorthodox routes.

In a recent project for an insurance client, the team was sent to a trampoline park, where jumping with safety nets became a metaphor for risk-taking under protection. “By building these types of processes and frameworks, people start taking more risks without worrying about their career in that exact moment and as a leader, it’s your job to build these little programs and frameworks,” Suviala explained.

Another framework involves deliberately coming up with wrong answers to a client brief. He argues that through play and inversion, “they often find a nugget of brilliance that can be built upon.”

A related exercise encourages creatives to parody the product, imagining it through the lens of a stand-up comedian or a cartoonist. Humour, he said, has the potential to unlock lateral solutions.

The role of play and humour

“Creativity is built from three elements—curiosity or being open-minded, empathy where one can see things from different perspectives and the third is play, which we need to encourage in our industry’s creative teams. I'd like to push anyone having challenging problems to look at it through these elements,” Suviala suggested.

He draws parallels to children’s collaborative play with Lego blocks or hopscotch, where ideas evolve collectively rather than being shut down. “We bounce back ideas, letting everyone build upon what other people said, rather than killing ideas from the get-go,” he noted.

Humour, in particular, has re-emerged in advertising. Cannes Lions added ‘Humour’ as a subcategory in 2024, and by 2025, entries had spiked. McCann’s APAC chief creative officer, Valerie Madon, observed that almost 80% of winning Film entries had some style of humour. Yet for brands, using humour in an age of scrutiny remains fraught.

Suviala acknowledged the challenge of brands being understandably worried about being funny without being tone-deaf. His advice is to build humour around vulnerability and self-awareness.

He points to Liquid Death, the US canned water brand, as an example of how humour can drive distinctiveness. But, he warned, empathy is crucial in judging the right moments to be funny.

The risk of misjudgement is evident in Burger King’s ‘Mouldy Whopper’ campaign of 2020, which split opinion despite its attempt to highlight preservative-free food. For Suviala, the lesson lies in openness.

“If you get into a crisis like that, then it is best to be open and transparent and then build from there. You gain trust by showing your vulnerability and if you do a mistake, then stand by it rather than shying away from it. It might actually be a good thing and could result in a stronger affiliation between the consumer and the brand,” he noted.

From Duolingo to data obsession

Suviala cites Duolingo as a brand that has built an emotional relationship with its users through humour and play, including its notifications involving the wellbeing of its mascot, Duo. As a user himself, he sees the reversal of roles—where consumers care for the brand—as an example of how emotional resonance can be engineered.

But translating creativity into business language remains a challenge in a results-obsessed environment. “The industry has become data-obsessed to the point that many find it hard to make decisions if they don't do AB testing, or have some data research available,” Suviala argued.

With data accessible to all, he added, the effect has been homogenisation. “Most brand marketers [are] chasing the same set of consumers with these tools and now with AI on top of it and literally in every corner of the design process—whether it's ideation or iteration.”

The issue is compounded by the fact that many AI tools draw from the same internet data sets, resulting in similar outputs. Suviala’s prescription is to embrace imperfection.

“I would push brands and agencies to really trust on the impact imperfections and under-predictability of humanity and general life, because things often come as surprises. It’s important to build resilience, so brands and agencies can surf the incoming waves and trust their gut and intuition,” he proclaimed.

Shifting pendulums

Despite the current fixation on automation, Suviala sees evidence of a shift. “We saw this at Cannes this year where there was a lot of discussion around human touch than data and AI. So, it's always a pendulum shift where things move to the extreme in one end, and then start to come back,” he said.

That pendulum, he suggested, underscores the cyclical nature of the industry’s embrace of technology and rediscovery of humanity. “In the end, even intuition and gut feeling of a creative or for a brand is built on some sort of data and lived experiences of the number of years that the brand has been in the business.”

Suviala’s framing of resilience, risk and humour is not presented as a silver bullet. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of uncertainty in a market defined by rapid technological change, evolving audience expectations and economic pressure. While frameworks such as “wrong answers” or parody exercises may sound light-hearted, they are part of a broader argument for brands to maintain distinctiveness in the face of sameness.

It is also a reminder that resilience requires both optimism and realism. In his view, the creative industry’s challenge is not only to adapt to new tools but to use them to expand, rather than contract, the scope of what brands can say and how they can say it.

The question that remains, however, is whether marketers—under constant pressure to deliver measurable returns—are willing to embrace unpredictability. As Corbet’s observation at Cannes suggested, efficiency may be AI’s promise, but for those directing brand narratives, it is also an invitation to risk.