October, 2026.- The old operating model of creative production is increasingly incompatible with dynamic content environments. Sarah DiLeo, Global Chief Production Officer at Studio X, believes production needs to make a paradigm shift from acting as an execution layer to becoming an orchestration layer. In the best expressions of modern marketing, production as a discipline is fundamentally about system design: enabling the build-out of creation architecture for content that is driven by data and intelligence, serves clients’ complex omnichannel needs, and can bend across the spectrum of audience personalization without breaking.
In this interview, DiLeo discusses why the industry risks using AI to simply accelerate the production of average work. Generative AI pipelines make it exponentially easier and faster to produce a high volume of permutations, but that leap doesn’t mean the content will be memorable or culturally resonant. The caliber of craft has to remain paramount.
DiLeo also addresses the personalization paradox. Highly curated and algorithmically driven platforms have trained consumers to expect responsive, hyper-personalized content experiences, but marketing content as a whole isn’t yet delivering a commensurate experience. What we’re contending with is a storytelling gap. The future of content should not simply consist of unremitting hyper-personalization to narrowly defined audiences. Shared experience becomes even more meaningful and valuable as media consumption fragments into ever-proliferating niches.
1. The AI Production Reset: You said AI isn’t fixing production—it’s forcing the industry to reinvent its operating system. What’s the most fundamental part of the current production operating system that needs to change, and where should agencies start?
The old operating model of creative production is increasingly incompatible with dynamic content environments; we need production to make a paradigm shift from acting as an execution layer to becoming an orchestration layer. In the best expressions of modern marketing, production as a discipline is fundamentally about system design: enabling build-out of creation architecture for content that is driven by data/intelligence, serves clients’ complex omnichannel needs, and can bend across the spectrum of audience personalization without breaking. In high-level terms, this means radically transforming creative production from an output-based model to a systems-based model.
So Production’s role is being recast in exciting ways: from standalone storytelling to story systems, from fixed executions to the realization of flexible, adaptive expressions of a core idea, and from a discrete, time-boxed and historically siloed stage of the creative process, to production as a continuous, connected content ecosystem. This is powered by broad innovation and expanded upon through generative AI firepower, but the change is bigger than any tech or tool; this transformation is rooted in holistic change across the entire life cycle of content, from earliest ideation through the delivery waterfall. Creative, strategy, production, media, data and tech can’t remain sequential or separate disciplines; they all need to act as interdependent layers of the same system.
2. Don’t Scale Mediocrity: You’ve warned that the industry risks using AI to “simply accelerate the production of average work.” How do you build systems that protect creative quality while still delivering at scale, and who needs to be involved in that decision?
Brands aren’t just in need of assets to fulfill media; they’re in need of systems capable of continuously creating, adapting, optimizing and governing content across global, omnichannel environments. We need to build and sustain multidisciplinary systems that support our ability to rapidly ideate, create and deliver great creative work at that scale; while synthesizing intelligence inputs to help determine what we should make – and for whom, when, why, and based on which signals?
Generative AI pipelines make it exponentially easier and faster to produce a high volume of permutations tailored to individuals or audience segments, but that leap doesn’t mean the content will be memorable or culturally resonant. The caliber of our craft has to remain paramount as we engage a systematized approach to deliver excellence at scale, underpinned by hybrid and virtual production-powered pipelines, strategic, generatively driven solutions, and strong connective tissue across creative, production and media, with a spine of tech & data powering the entire endeavor.
3. The Personalization Paradox: As marketing becomes more individualized, brands risk losing the shared experiences that create cultural relevance. How do you balance the push for hyper-personalization with the need for big ideas that bring people together?
Highly curated and algorithmically driven entertainment and social platforms have trained media consumers to expect responsive, hyper-personalized content experiences, but marketing content as a whole isn’t yet delivering a commensurate experience to audiences. This isn’t a data gap — there’s never been more information available about consumers. What we’re contending with is a storytelling gap, and to close it we’ll need to reimagine our system.
At a global scale that means not only high volume, fast-turn assets, but processes that incorporate localization, personalization, real-time responsiveness to culture, and critically, the ability to use audience insights to drive impact. To achieve this, we need content expressions that can stretch across markets, platforms, formats, and audiences.
However, the future of content should not simply consist of unremitting hyper-personalization to narrowly defined audiences or individuals. Knowing who someone is and what they care about is hugely important, but marketers still need clarity on which stories and messages will resonate enough to have a real impact on brand affinity and purchase decisions. That kind of resonance is driven significantly by shared experience. With pop culture and media consumption fragmenting into ever-proliferating niches thanks to social, influencer and streaming, shared experience becomes even more meaningful and valuable. A truly great marketing campaign transcends a collection of targeted executions to become an experience people recognize, talk about, share and feel part of, ideally even amplifying it themselves. The challenge and the opportunity for marketers is to create storytelling that is both individually relevant AND culturally resonant — making it strong enough to break through the noise and engender an experience people can’t help but share.
4. Building Systems, Not Just Adding Tools: You said the real transformation is about “rethinking production infrastructure, workflows and decision-making” rather than simply layering AI tools on outdated systems. What’s the most common mistake you see brands make when they try to integrate AI into existing production workflows?
Much of my perspective on this was actually shaped before AI tools came into the picture. My past work in long-form film and immersive experiences taught me to focus intensely on audiences, as distinct individuals whose cultures, fandoms, and lived experiences mediate how they experience stories. Producing virtual reality experiences showed me firsthand how emerging tech could be used in service of novel forms of storytelling. Today as I leverage gen AI models, I look at AI-powered production not as a way to churn up more content, rather as a path to imbue great ideas with the flexibility to resonate with more people and have greater impact. And while I am admittedly a nerd for emerging tech, the magic as always is in how technology can enable new stories, new formats, and new creators reshaping the paradigms of storytelling.
To that end – I think treating AI itself as the strategic insight is a common and fundamental misdirect. Everyone knows AI can make content creation faster, cheaper and more scalable, and in that sense it may be helping to expose or overcome some inherent limitations in a more traditional content creation model. But the trap that’s easy to fall into is scaling outputs without redesigning the system that creates them. Scale is not a solution on its own; it requires a system of creative production that gives your content a reason to exist. If a brand just leans into AI as a conduit to making more content more quickly, while leaving the briefing process, operating models, and governance unchanged, it’s pretty unlikely to result in anything great.
I believe we get to true creative excellence not through one lightning strike of genius but through a thousand seemingly small decisions – and in our business there are often cumulatively hundreds of people involved in those decisions. So to reach the fullest potential of a piece of creative work, we need to maintain the equanimity and patience to let all of those decisions be important and let the people involved actually think critically and reflect. We also have to move faster than ever before, automate more process points, and produce a higher volume and degree of iteration of content than is precedented in our industry. I don’t think there’s a panacea for this, but I think it starts with the power of ideas that are designed to stretch without breaking, and aligning on frameworks for how we approach the iteration of those ideas that still leaves room for cultural fluency and specificity. That’s the alchemy made possible through real integration between creative, production, media and data experts.
5. Human Creative Judgment in an AI World: You believe human creative judgment will become more important as content generation becomes automated. What specific skills or capabilities will agencies need to invest in to ensure human judgment remains central?
Every great and memorable piece of work in advertising – whether it’s won a bunch of Lions or that esoteric spot with the jingle you can still sing from your childhood memory – would not exist in that form without stellar creative thinkers. I don’t see that changing. If anything, as gen AI models continue to rapidly accelerate and enable a vast spectrum of high-end content creation, that ineffable quality of human taste, injecting humor or pathos or just coherence into the work, should become even more discernible. The ability to immediately identify what good looks like gets even more valuable as the field overcrowds with average work. Agencies will need to double down on their best creative minds.
Paired with that taste and creative judgment, we need systems thinkers, orchestrators, people who are fundamentally interdisciplinary in their thinking and practice. Modern agencies need people who can design and run a system, people who can enable the broader agency population to strategically evolve their ways of working and galvanize what have historically been disparate disciplines into an integrated community where everyone has a new passport. I believe the best production leaders are excellent at this particular form of integration, and also have a crucial role to play in systemic governance and brand stewardship. I think we should all be ready to radically reimagine the role of producers and the discipline of production for the next era of marketing.
6. What’s one thing you’ve learned from building production systems at scale that applies to brands and agencies of any size?
I think a robust system needs to enable content modularity and production agility along three axes: linear chronology as the X axis, where we reach further upstream and downstream than ever; regional and local market specificity as the Y axis, where we apply some unified visibility and governance while allowing for local fluency; and brand stewardship as the Z axis, where we drive best practices and efficiencies across brands and categories while carving space for each brand to shine. Within that framework, we can design any of a number of subsystems for content creation, depending on the brand’s needs for volume, pace, platforms, and audiences. A system like this is complex to build, but at peak effectiveness becomes simple to operate, and any brand can benefit from this at any scale.
