Make it Pop #10 - Enterprise creative AI: what tools are big brands using?

For most enterprise creative teams, the question is no longer whether to use generative AI. That decision has already been made. The harder question now is how to operationalize it without creating fragmentation, brand risk, or runaway cost.

What has fundamentally changed is scale. Modern marketing platforms reward continuous iteration and personalization rather than a small number of "hero" assets. Large organizations increasingly need thousands of creative variations across audiences, formats, and channels.

Human-only workflows simply can’t keep up.

From generation to systems

This is why creative AI has moved from cool experimentation into how do we build a system that’s scalable, safe, and governable.

Teams discovered that while tools could produce images or copy in seconds, the surrounding infrastructure was missing. Generated assets often lived outside existing DAMs, legal review was difficult to enforce, and content wasn't connected to product data.

The bottleneck was no longer creativity; it was coordination. This is where creative AI stopped being a tooling conversation and started becoming a systems conversation.

Three strategic paths are emerging

In practice, enterprises are converging around three approaches to solve this, often blending them rather than choosing just one.

1. Partner: Agency platforms & service

Some brands are partnering closely with agencies that have invested in proprietary platforms.

WPP’s Open is a prominent example, a system designed to combine creative, production, and media capabilities to deliver personalized advertising at scale.

In recent iterations, WPP has expanded client-facing access, allowing brands to participate directly in campaign planning and generation. This path suits organizations that want outcomes and scale without owning the underlying technology stack.

2. Buy: Enterprise software

Many companies prefer to license software from established vendors to ensure security and standardization, often because they lack the internal engineering resources to build and maintain custom tools.

Adobe remains the common standard, expanding GenStudio and Firefly deeper into enterprise workflows. Beyond just its own "safe" models, Adobe is now opening up to offer legal indemnification and 3rd party models, broadening its utility.

Tools like Typeface focus on brand-safe generation integrated directly into daily apps like Salesforce to reduce friction. Similarly, platforms like Pencil are carving out a niche with specialized integrations focused on ad performance and prediction.

Platforms like Freepik, Higgsfield, and Weavy are moving upmarket, offering fast innovations, flexible workflows, diverse model choices, and specialized capabilities. While they offer a fast route to adoption and innovation. Off-the-shelf tools like these are powerful, but they may not always align perfectly with complex, legacy enterprise internal data structures.

3. Build: Internal tooling

A smaller number of tech-forward organizations are choosing to build their own creative AI tooling.

Kraft Heinz built TasteMaker, an internal tool for their creative production, creating custom workflows that suit their business.

In these cases, companies collaborate directly with cloud and model providers to assemble custom workflows. This offers tighter control over data and unit economics but requires significant engineering investment. It is best suited for organizations with strong technical maturity and clear scale requirements.

Real constraint: integration

Across all three paths, the limiting factor is rarely the quality of the model. It is integration.

Creative AI performs best when it is connected to customer data, accurate product information, and approved brand assets. Without this context, outputs are difficult to reuse or scale responsibly. This is why many enterprise platforms increasingly resemble "middleware," sitting between data systems and generation models to ensure the AI knows who it is talking to and what it is selling.

Looking ahead: Fewer tools, more orchestration

An emerging direction for 2026 is a move away from tool-hopping toward coordinated workflows. Rather than manually moving between multiple applications, teams are beginning to define objectives while systems handle the generation, review, and deployment across channels.

This shift is still early, but it reflects a broader trend: creative production is being treated less as a sequence of isolated tasks and more as an integrated, agentic system.

Conclusion

For enterprises, the challenge in 2026 is not whether AI can generate content. It is how creative work is structured, governed, and scaled.

Whether you choose to partner with agencies like WPP, buy license to a platform like Adobe or Weavy, or build internal systems like Kraft Heinz, the differentiator will be infrastructure. Creative advantage is no longer just about ideas. It’s about the systems that allow those ideas to scale.

📰 AI creative news updates 12-19th January 2026

• Higgsfield dropped Mixed Media, a new tool that turns any video clip into stylized mixed-art visuals in one click. It has 40+ curated presets that can be customized.

• Google’s Veo 3.1 “Ingredients to Video” upgrade lets you turn up to three reference images into expressive AI videos with better character, object and scene consistency, vertical (9:16) output for mobile, and upscaling up to 1080p/4K.

• California’s Attorney General sent xAI a cease-and-desist order, demanding the company immediately stop its Grok AI from creating and distributing deepfake, non-consensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material.

• Z.ai just released GLM-Image, an open-source, industrial-grade image generation model using a hybrid auto-regressive + diffusion architecture that excels at detailed, text-rich visuals.

• LTX Studio’s Storyboard generator uses AI to turn your descriptions or scripts into detailed visual storyboards, automatically creating scenes, characters, and frames you can refine and export.

• Tencent Hunyuan just announced Hunyuan3D Studio 1.2, a major upgrade to its AI-powered 3D creation pipeline with sculpt-level detail and fine-grained interactive control for 3D assets

🏆 AI creative competitions worth joining

If you’ve got a video or concept brewing, these competitions are open right now, and they’re giving real prizes + visibility to your creative AI work

Thank you for reading my newsletter! 🙂 This week’s edition is less of a "how-to," as I wanted to answer some questions I've been getting from folks at companies who are deciding which tools to use for their teams.

On a personal note, I’ve been getting back on track with weightlifting and working with a PT. I feel so much better already. Remember to eat your protein and lift to live longer!

Khulan