Rory Sutherland on why AI could turn the advertising industry upside down

I mean, if you take the advertising industry, where I've worked for 35 years, I keep surmising, no one listens to me. I keep saying, look, we've always worked on the basis of a client requests an advertisement or or briefs us with a problem, and then we go through a whole strategic process, and then eventually we produce some form of communication.

I said, that makes absolute sense if the production of those communications is massively expensive. So, Fabergé eggs, I've always said, look, the reason you had to commission a Fabergé egg was the gold was very expensive, the craftsmanship was very time-consuming. You couldn't just have a load of people just grabbing hold of gold and making random eggs.

Actually, with AI, does it work backwards? Will production companies simply produce advertisements unasked for and then go and find a buyer? Now, that sounds really weird to everybody in the advertising industry until I said, "No one went to the Beatles and said, 'We want to commission a song about a submarine.'"