Internal communication project:
AI for Art Direction. Roadmap
Pace Creative is a full-service marketing communications agency delivering work across 16+ industries in Canada, the US, and the UK, where speed, quality, and trust are non-negotiable. This internal roadmap was built to help the team adopt AI responsibly in one high-impact area: art-direction presentations. The goal was to streamline research, concept development, and asset production, while protecting client confidentiality, IP, and the agency's reputation.
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THE CONCEPT
“AI for Art Direction” is an internal decision-making deck designed to align leadership and delivery teams around a practical, low-risk path to adoption. I structured the narrative like an internal communications brief: start with an executive summary, diagnose the current workflow, propose a future workflow, and make the risks + guardrails explicit.
Because this change affected processes, quality standards, and legal/privacy concerns, the work depended on relationship-first stakeholder management—especially translating priorities and risk tolerance across the CEO, Founder, and Design Lead into a single, complete shared plan the team could implement.
Challenges and Opportunities
Pace Creative was a late adopter: the organization generally resisted new technology, had recently limited employees' individual use of AI tools, and leadership’s main concerns were confidentiality and personal data leakage. 
Operationally, the existing art-direction workflow was highly manual and time-boxed (~22 hours total), with research capped at around 5 hours, followed by ideation, heavy asset prep (editing, sourcing stock, vectorizing/rebuilding low-res assets), and final deck writing/layout.
The opportunity was clear: introduce AI where it meaningfully improves speed and quality, but do it with strong governance (human-in-the-loop review, clear do/don’t rules, and documented SOPs) so the agency can move faster without creating new risk.
The Solution
I developed a clear, executive-ready roadmap that combines process design + internal communications:
1. Mapped the current workflow and pinpointed where time and quality were most at risk (research depth, asset prep, writing consistency).
2. Recommended a focused tool stack tied to specific outcomes: Notion AI (structured research + prompt library), Midjourney (concept imagery), Nano Banana (image edits), ChatGPT (copy refinement), Vectorizer AI + Lupa AI (vectorization + upscaling).
3. Designed the future workflow and framed implementation by capability type (descriptive intelligence, advisory intelligence, process automation) so stakeholders could evaluate it logically, not emotionally. 
4. Built operational guardrails: vendor-policy review, internal guidelines, privacy/legal requirements, SOPs, budgeting considerations, and an explicit human-in-the-loop requirement for all AI outputs. 
5. Documented risks and usage boundaries, including trademark/celebrity likeness risk, restrictions for industries requiring full copyright ownership, and cross-border processing considerations—so decision-makers could approve with confidence. 
6. Defined role clarity across teams (Designers managing key AI tools; Project Managers curating and updating the Notion AI knowledge base) to reduce ambiguity and support adoption. 
7. Recommended ethical adoption practices. An AI committee, training plan, prompt governance, and privacy flagging, positioning the rollout as an ongoing internal program, not a one-time experiment. 
Why this is an internal-communications project (not just “AI research”). The value came from building shared understanding, earning buy-in, and turning ambiguity into a usable operating model, so leadership (CEO/Founder) and delivery (Design Lead/team) could move forward together with clarity and trust. 
Title: AI for Art Direction: Roadmap (Pace Creative)
Role: Designer / Marketing Communications Specialist (Internal Strategy + Art Direction Workflow)
Year: 2025
Tags: Internal Communications, Stakeholder Management, Change Management, AI Strategy, Art Direction, Workflow Mapping, Governance & SOPs, Risk & Ethics, Notion AI, Midjourney, ChatGPT, Vectorizer AI, Lupa AI
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