Hi there,

It's nice to throw a ball into someone's court and have them catch it. Literally or otherwise, it feels good to hand the duty to someone else knowing they've definitely "got this".

This logic does not apply to working with AI. It's not a ball you can hand off; it's an 800-page instruction manual. It needs to be read in shifts by different team members, probably over many months.

To get the results creative and marketing leaders are hoping for out of AI, they need to do more than leave the ball in their team's court. They need change management.

1. 5 expert steps to manage AI's changes: Empathize with your fellow humans, set a picturesque destination, motivate change, do science
2. This week in AI: Free time with these free creative workflow hacks
3. Meme of the week: Coffee contains water, anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
4. From our community: Holiday marketing with Reddit; video news with Kirsten
5. On our socials: Zoomers and boomers have something in common; damned by the damn brief (again)

5 expert steps to manage AI's changes 🔃

You won't get your race of cybernetically-enhanced, creative-marketing supergeniuses without a firm understanding of human feelings. Ironic, huh?

To help us appeal to our team members' psyches, we've curated an expert-led framework for AI change management, courtesy of Captivate's Darren Chiu and Ben Wise.

1. Understand the human element. 🙋 People aren't resistant to change because they're "just stubborn"—that's lazy thinking. Open the floor up to consequence-free conversation. Listen and internalize the objections.

2. Set a destination. ⛰️ What's your concrete goal for AI on the team? "Efficiency" isn't an answer. What does efficiency look like to you?

3. Motivate change. 💪 Show your team where these bold new tools could take them: Less time spent on mundane task X, more time spent on exciting task Y, less time doing work altogether... find their angle.

4. Set the environment. 🌎 Your team needs education, proper tooling, and most of all, TIME. What can you do to give them all of the above? If the answer's "not much", that's about what you can expect in terms of results.

5. Experiment and iterate. 👩‍🔬 When the game is set, start playing. Make it the goal to find out what you can use any AI tool for, even if it seems insignificant at first—significance comes little by little through experimentation.

>> Read the blog

This Week in AI

Creative workflow hacks (try 'em out) ⛏️

Why spend painstaking hours building and nailing your own AI creative workflows? We've got advice from Zapier's DesignOps brain Aletheia Delivre and Mozilla's creative whiz Francis Mekhail right here.

>> See the workflows

And if you'd like to dive deep into things, watch their webinar below!

>> Watch the session

People have their reasons for not wanting to board the AI train just yet, and we can't blame them. It's hard to know what to make of tech praised and mocked in equal parts. Disillusionment is a normal response.

But it's not going anywhere, which means it's on leaders to gently nudge their teams in the direction of progress. Merciless, beautiful progress.

✨ Stay super,