Exploring the Integration of Generative AI in Advertising Agencies: A Co-Creative Process Model for Human–AI Collaboration

Advertising agencies are investing in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance creative ideation and streamline production workflows. However, AI has the potential to disrupt creative professionals’ work methods, causing them to resist change and thus threatening the effective integration and sustained usage of AI technology. By using a qualitative approach combining stakeholder interviews and supplementary archival data, this article examines how creative processes change when agencies adopt text-to-image AI. A generative AI-integrated co-creative process is introduced, involving stages of readiness, co-creativity, validation, and effective execution. This empirically derived process model challenges notions of AI augmenting creativity by taking on repetitive workloads, provides a novel perspective for successful generative AI integration in advertising, and offers avenues for future research.