In a world of prompts, your perspective is the only portfolio that matters

There’s pulsating panic in the room. You can feel it. Senior creatives quietly learning how to prompt. Young professionals quietly wondering if their job description will still exist next year. Interns pretending they didn’t just copy paste the entire ChatGPT answer into their campaign brainstorm doc. But this isn't an obituary for your career. It's your survival strategy.

Because history has repeatedly proven, those who know how to work with the machines will always outlast those who fear them.

Build a Brain That Speaks Binary and Branding

Hybrid skills are your career insurance. If your sentences can seduce but your dashboards can’t diagnose, you’re not the hybrid the world is hiring right now. The marketer of tomorrow isn’t the loudest in the boardroom. It’s the one who can turn insights into income. Think Don Draper meets Google Sheets.

Please pair your refreshing creative muscle with a dozen AI designs, research and analysis tools. Think of it as being the bridge between code and campaign. Understand what these tools can do, how to feed them the right inputs, and how to translate their output into business impact. Even for research you will then soon know that for macro, use ChatGPT. For micro, Gemini. For depth, Notebook LM. For a larger net, Grok or DeepSeek. For internal data mining, an aggregator of sorts like Perplexity who will mix and match the best of Gemini, GPT and Grok. Teach yourself when to use a sniper versus a revolver. Yes both are guns in the same way all the above names are LLMs. This regular practice alone puts you ahead of 80% of professionals blindly copying prompts from LinkedIn threads. And knowing how to speak to machines is just the start. The real edge comes when you pair it with knowing when and why to speak.

Creativity Is Still King. But Now It Needs a Strategy Council

“By 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) application programming interfaces… up from less than 5% in 2023”, according to Gartner.

Yes, AI can write 20 creative copy in 3 seconds. But only you know which one works in a frightening recession, during an IPL final where a star is retiring, or which wedding joke to not pitch as a headline when your client’s CEO is going through a public divorce.

What AI lacks is judgment. That taste, timing and tactical restraint that turns good into unforgettable. Start focusing on high order thinking: campaign architecture, brand storytelling, narrative strategy. Basically, the things AI can mimic but not originate. Your edge isn’t just being creative, it’s knowing when creativity works and where to apply it.

Campaigns that move culture have always been rooted in terrifyingly intuitive human judgment. That’s still your power move. That last pitch you won because it reminded the Chairman of his grandfather’s vintage song. Not just because it was sweet, but because it felt closer to the family business. These stories don’t live in prompts. They live in people.

And I believe this even more now, that creativity without strategy is just art. Strategy without creativity is just math. And branding lives where they fall in love.

Master the Machines (Don’t Just Use Them)

Prompt engineering will be the new art direction for the Alpha generation. Your ability to have deeper and more engaging conversations with AI will become your core ability to lead it. So stop treating AI softwares like a vending machine. Treat it like a symphony and conduct it like Mozart with intent not luck.

If you’re in branding, communications, or content strategy, your AI stack can save you weeks of production time. Do know, calling ChatGPT 'AI' is like calling Yahoo ‘the internet’. You have brilliant cross category options now. CreativeX tracks creative consistency across global campaigns using AI. Delve AI can generate dynamic audience personas with whom you can talk. Perplexity is certified for deep research with verified citations. Notion AI has a lovely enterprise search feature with which you can converse with all your case studies and corporate data. Notebook LM for summarising dense decks and PDFs. Midjourney for visual moodboards. Descript for video editing and content slicing. CapCut for social ready short form video content. There are literally hundreds now in the market specializing in everything that can make your job easier to be able to focus on the big picture and not be drowned in the small battles.

You don’t need to master all of them. But you do need to experiment till you build a stack that works like your second brain exclusively for you. For if you don't, then you become the tool and the machine becomes the driver.

Speak Data Like It’s Your Second Language

Data is no longer just for analysts and bankers. It’s now both the prologue and epilogue part of the creative process. Take Spotify Wrapped. It’s data dopamine wrapped in narrative.

Netflix thumbnails may be tested by exceptional data, but someone still decides which emotion and final option converts in which market and audience. So as a future creative in any field from marketing to events, don’t present charts. Present consequences. In 2025, when you’re the person in the room who can connect impressions to business goals, and sentiment analysis to strategy, you’re not just valuable, you’re indispensable (almost).

My advice would be to start a weekly ritual. ‘What fresh insights of my field and work did I get from data this week?’ And finally all of this still leads to one deeper, rarer advantage, the kind even the sharpest algorithm can’t simulate.

The Human Edge AI Still Can’t Fake

Want to future proof yourself? Okay sorry, that no one can promise but want to stay at the top of the pyramid. Go where nuance lives. If AI can already do 80% of your role, double down on the 20% where it chokes. There is a reason major parts of crisis communication, public policy, political sensitivity to cultural intuition aren’t automated yet. Humans are still better at connecting dots that don’t look like dots yet. They can sense sarcasm in a meeting. Calm down a panicked client. Mediate between two passive aggressive teammates. Emotional intelligence with unmatched urgency now isn’t fluff. Its firepower turned into pattern recognition. Experience after all is the greatest operating system we have. Or as Samantha whispers in Her, “The past is just a story we tell ourselves.” But in creative industries, it’s the only story that makes us irreplaceable. For all the hyper real 4k pictures of Greece AI can generate with you and your friends, it can't generate the moment or predict how it will transform you as a person and a thinker. Think about it this way, if you would have outsourced your childhood, would you have had your personality? Then why are you outsourcing your thinking, risking your originality.

So yes, absorb more around you and show up dedicatedly. To the Zoom calls with cameras always on to the chirping and mildly chaotic offices. Everywhere your team is, BE. Sorry introverts. But the people who thrived in silos will quickly get replaced by trained machines that will be impossibly better at working alone.

One final tip: Your edge is not speed. Your flex is your originality, nostalgia, irrational obsessions and cultural rebellion. Human work that can stand out today is either hyper personal or deliciously unpredictable. Win by being unpredictable in a world trained on patterns. In the end, it’s not about beating the algorithm. It’s about surprising it.

The author is chief strategist and founder of Salt and Paper Consulting. He is also a visiting professor of market research and campaign planning at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi. Views are personal.