I worked in the creative industry for about twenty years, a world where thinking differently is supposed to be the whole point, where imagination gets celebrated on stages and out-of-the-box thinking is literally the business model. And still, I have never seen a sector that thinks more in silos.

I remember writing a headline as an art director and being told, kindly but firmly, to leave that to the copywriter. I remember finding an insight in the research that nobody had spotted and being told to leave that to the strategists. And I remember a digital concept I developed being approved by the client and then rebuilt from scratch by another team, not because it was bad, but because it wasn't theirs.

For years I told myself these were quality controls. They are not. They are territory markers, paid for by the client.

To be fair, those walls were never just politics. They were necessary, because one person simply could not shoot the film and build the prototype and design the store and write the business case all at once. An idea that wanted to become real needed a building full of people, so we divided the work, and around every division a territory grew. If you have ever looked at the credits of an award-winning campaign and wondered how anything coherent comes out of that many roles, that is your answer: usually it doesn't. Every handover cost the idea something, but there was no alternative, so we accepted it as the price of making things.

Then the constraint disappeared.

Today I can spend a morning studying a market, an afternoon designing the product, and an evening watching a film of a store that doesn't exist yet. Not a mood board or a sketch of the intention, but the thing itself, real enough to judge, to reject, to improve, to believe in. Everything on this site was made that way: a hearing device in gold, a sneaker with a sole you design yourself, a store that thinks. Each of them carried from a first hunch to something you can react to, by one person.

People sometimes ask me if this is AI-generated work, and I understand why they ask, so let me answer it properly. The ideas are mine, the taste is mine, and so is every decision along the way, every rejection, every detail that stayed and every darling that didn't. AI did not have a single idea. What it did was take away every excuse I had for not finishing one.

What I find remarkable is that the sector searching hardest for its own relevance right now is mine. Everywhere the same debates, whether AI will replace the copywriter, the designer, the strategist, while I think those are the wrong questions entirely. If one person can now carry an idea all the way, the real question is what all that overhead was protecting.

The relevance the industry is looking for is not hiding in a new tool or a new title. It sits on the other side of its own walls, in ideas that survive intact, in work where the thinking and the making never have to change hands, in creativity that finally goes as far as it was always meant to go.

The sector that taught the world to think outside the box now has to leave its own.

Jo Van Grinderbeek