‘Creativity is the only job left’: Why creative thinking deserves a seat at the adults’ table
In a provocative talk at SXSW London, David Lee, chief brand and creative officer at Squarespace, argued that in the age of artificial inteligence, the future belongs not to the smartest people in the room, but to the most creative. Dan Martin reports.
“It used to be the being the smartest in the room was like the currency of the future,” he said. “Everyone wanted to be the smartest in the room.”
But in the era of AI and access to limitless information, Lee argued that model is becoming obsolete.
“I don’t think any individual human is going to be smarter than the combined knowledge based that is sitting in server farms being built all around the world”, he argued. “Intelligence now has actually been democratised.”
Lee said with intelligence becoming “almost as ubiquitous as oxygen and energy”, individuals and businesses need to decide the skills that will allow people to survive and thrive. His answer? “Creativity is actually the only job left in any knowledge-based job.”
Lee argued that creativity needs to be elevated from a support function to a strategic discipline.
He said that creatives have traditionally been treated as if they on the children’s table of business, working on the lower floors of organisations while decisions are made elsewhere. This “irritating” approach, Lee added, isolates creativity from the core business.
“Every once in a while, we’ll go up to the penthouse floor, stick our head into the boardroom, and we’ll go ‘hey, what’s going on in here?’. And we’re always told ‘it’s ok. Next time we need something pretty or something that sounds better, we’ll call on you. Go back to your sandbox.'”.
Lee said that model is broken and creativity needs to move upstream because it is a core strategic function and the lens on how decisions are made. He highlighted a report from the World Economic Forum which showed the core skills set to be most in demand by 2030. At the top of the list, creative thinking.
Lee said the traditional notion of layers of management passing data up and down the chain is over because intelligence has been democratised and data is now ubiquitous.
“The notion of a player coach is happening right now, and what that means is that people have to get back to making work and not just talking about it,” he said. “Everyone now has to roll up their sleeves, no matter where you are in the food chain of an organisation.”
Lee also argued that higher education is facing disruption and the traditional business school model is losing its monopoly on preparing leaders for the real world. A creative art and design education, he said, is the new model.
“Art school is the new MBA. Original thought, creative thinking, taste, judgment and point of view, I believe, will be the currency of the future. All things you get in a creative education.”
For an example of creativity in business, Lee discussed Squarespace’s 2026 Super Bowl ad. Its challenge was to tell the world that the company had become one of the biggest website domain registrars following an aquisition.
They looked for “a unique idea” that would “cut through the sea of sameness” of Super Bowl ads and lean into pure creative craft.
Squarespace took the anxiety, fear, and anger of finding out that someone has taken the domain for your name and turned it into high art. They paired Academy Award-winner Emma Stone with acclaimed director Yorgos Lanthimos for a cinematic-style campaign shot on black-and-white film.
The ad received critical acclaim and broke records for domain registrations pre, during, and after the Super Bowl game. It also showed how creative risk taking can drive business results.
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As AI continues to democratise access to knowledge, Lee said businesses need to rethink where creative thinkers sit within their organisations.
The future, he argued, will belong less to those who possess information and more to those who can transform it into meaning, connection, and new possibilities.
Bristol Creative Industries is the membership network that supports the region's creative sector to learn, grow and connect, driven by the common belief that we can achieve more collectively than alone.
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