AI would struggle to predict Elle McCarthy’s career journey. The vice president of brand and creative at McAfee has built her marketing muscle at some of the world’s most recognisable brands and agencies, from Ford, PayPal and Electronic Arts to Karmarama, BBH and BBDO.

The red thread through this exceptional career has been a relentless focus on talent and creativity. As a leader who has consistently championed culture, inclusion and creating environments in which people can do their best work, Elle is clear-eyed about both the opportunity and challenge presented by AI. Her vision is rooted not just in the promise of AI, but in the nuts and bolts of its practical applications.

Far from being uncomfortable with the friction that comes with AI transformation, Elle believes the onus has always been on leaders to ask better questions. “If it doesn’t feel challenging, you’re doing something wrong,” she explains.

Elle is bringing her unique leadership lens to the intersection of AI and creativity as part of The Blueprint’s 'Truth About Talent: AI' interview series, designed to cut through the negative hype cycle surrounding artificial intelligence.

“We cannot train creative brains by removing the pathways of struggle.”

Prompting change

A deep understanding of AI as a tool, rather than an abstract concept, is key to Elle's sharp view of its impact.

“AI can help us move past obvious answers faster and be a great thought partner to get to more interesting places. But only if leaders ask AI to challenge them, rather than going along with a first thought, which AI is programmed to validate,” she explained.

The search for validation can turn AI from thought partner into mirror, endlessly proclaiming you ‘the fairest of them all’. As Elle quips, “I don’t want to hear; ‘Great thinking, Elle. This is definitely an original thought.’

Instead, she recommends asking AI to critique your thinking through different lenses: a consumer psychographic segmentation, a behavioural scientist’s viewpoint or the perspective of a competitor’s CEO.

The aim is not reassurance, but the creative friction that comes hand in hand with actively setting AI up to rattle the cage.

The innovator’s dilemma

In a wider industry ecosystem which rarely recognises the tension between corporate endeavour and parental responsibility, Elle cracks open the challenge facing parents.

Elle shares her support for New York City’s decision, announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, to impose a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for children from pre-school through the equivalent of Year 9. She explains: “As a mum raising two young kids I don’t want them to have too much exposure too soon.”

She continued, “This is at odds with my own behaviour, which has been to adopt early and try things out. And sometimes I worry that this is hypocritical or ideological, and that a bit of exposure to everything might be a healthier path. But until we see how this unfolds, I am erring on the side of caution.”

That caution reflects an ability to reconcile two truths: understanding the gains of AI does not negate the need to consider what we may collectively lose, both as an industry and a society.

“We have to guard against cognitive atrophy for our teams, for young people, and for ourselves,” Elle explained. She continued, “The organisational benefits are slow, but the individual damage is fast, especially for people who haven’t developed critical thinking skills and spent years writing to think as much as to express their thoughts.”

There is an innate creative tension in AI’s ability to remove friction and streamline workflows. Elle recalls how seamlessly Copilot can make a presentation flow, while removing the process of formatting slides. A process, which while time consuming, can become the mechanism through which new ideas or insights might once have bubbled up.

The absence of the endeavour and growth that comes alongside that creative struggle cannot be ignored by leaders seeking to nurture the next generation of talent.

“Being an artist, creating, is hard. It’s a practice built on the slow work of failing often. Of pushing for something, anything resembling human thought. We cannot train creative brains by removing the pathways of struggle,” Elle explained, adding, “If we’re already creative, we have to be hypervigilant about not accepting ‘good enough’.”

“AI is a driver of culture today, so to totally disengage is to disengage from culture.”

The practitioner advantage

Individual creative endeavour still matters. When interviewing prospective candidates, Elle asks how they use AI in their personal lives, using the answer as a lens into their creative curiosity.

This approach isn’t just marketing theory. Alongside her husband, Elle has been working on an AI sous chef, which they post about on Instagram at @sais_chef. The process has given her a practical and expansive view of how AI can augment creativity, including through prompts such as a flavour thesaurus.

“What you end up making and how you end up thinking about food fundamentally change as you use it over time. That felt like a different kind of creativity to me,” she explains.

Elle's analogy for how AI can complement human insight also comes from the language of cooking. Think of it as a sandwich. “AI is great at creating that first layer of fact-finding and gathering. However, in the middle of the strategic or creative process (the filling), your brain is what can get to the crispiest insight,” she shares.

The efficiency effect

While the freedom to embrace and learn from friction is crucial to individual creative development, organisational reality often puts efficiency first.

“We are also all operating in a world where we are being asked to do more for less. No matter what brand or creative organization you’re running, there will be dollar pressures and efficiency questions. AI is good at helping to relieve these pressures,” Elle explained.

She believes that there are a lot of misconceptions that AI creativity is just as good as human creativity. “Sometimes it feels like we’ve opened Pandora’s box and can’t go back. Every time we make more AI-generated creative outputs, the opening gets a little wide,” she warned. “I don’t have a solution,” she shares honestly, adding: “I personally feel like I have to use it, bring it into my team, scale with it, move with the regulation, which I think is very positive and would like to see more of and have a strong point of view on how, why, and when.”

But the option to bypass AI entirely simply cannot sit alongside being a successful modern marketing leader. As Elle explained, “AI is a driver of culture today, so to totally disengage is to disengage from culture. And that doesn’t fit with being the voice of the customer and the driver of a brand’s alignment with culture. So there’s that.”

“AI is not your doctor, your lawyer, your therapist, or your children’s teacher.”

Swimming against the sea of sameness

This curated, human approach also helps marketing leaders avoid brand messaging that gets lost in a sea of sameness.

Elle warns that AI is compounding this trend: making the same recommendations to people, validating their first thoughts and producing things that look like things. Strategies that look like strategies, but without distinctive insights. Advertising that looks like advertising, but lacks humanity.

It is telling that the inputs Elle recommends during the course of this interview include two books: Laura Bates’ illuminating The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny and Julia Cameron’s iconic The Artist’s Way. Arguably there has never been a more vital time to look up and see the bigger picture.

Equally, ask Elle what myth about AI she would most like to bust and she goes straight for a big, yet too often ignored, threat: the idea that all personal uses of AI are safe.

“There are new threats coming, and they’re arriving faster than ever. AI is not a safe place to put your personal information,” she explained.

She points out that there are settings you can use to ensure that AI forgets your children’s names and likenesses, if you have ever uploaded their image. “AI is not your doctor, your lawyer, your therapist, or your children’s teacher. Once you start to use it to help problem-solve in these areas, it’s hard to contain the exposure further down the line,” she shares.

In a world where leaders need a Swiss army knife of skills to thrive in the AI era, Elle's approach underlines the value of engaging with difficult questions rather than avoiding them. For all the efficiency AI promises, the friction is still where the magic happens.