Air founders: Shane Hegde and Tyler Strand
While most AI tools are declaring war on creative jobs, one platform is taking the opposite approach. And on 24 March, it’s shifting things up a gear.
Spend any time following AI, and you’ll notice a pattern. Every few days, a new model launches with breathless claims about what it can replace. Which, in our sector, increasingly means replacing designers. Ugh.
Air, the New York-based creative operations platform, is taking a radically different view. So different, in fact, they recently took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to say so.
Its message was clear: any platform that wants to replace your creative team is selling something you don’t need.
“Every AI company approaches creatives the wrong way,” argues Shane Hegde, Air’s co-founder and chief executive. “They say, ‘This new model is going to replace 20 creative jobs’ or ‘Our product is the CMO killer.’ Obviously, creatives are going to hate AI if that’s how companies try to work with them.
“Our approach is different,” he counters. “We want you to get access to all the new ways you could work, and all the new technologies that are emerging. That way, you can decide where to get value from new tech, and where it’s better to keep doing things the way you already do.”
That philosophy sits at the heart of what Air is releasing tomorrow, on 24 March, in what Shane calls the largest update in Air’s history.
Before we get to that, though, just what is Air, and why should creative studios care about it?
A memory machine for your creative team
Air is a creative operations platform: a centralised workspace where teams store, organise, search, share, approve and distribute their creative assets. Think of it as the place where all your images, videos, campaigns and brand materials live, in a system designed around how creative work actually gets made.
Air uses AI to auto-tag everything (faces, products, scenes, objects), so anyone in your company can find what they need through natural language search. Version stacking keeps every iteration of an asset in order. Approval workflows and timestamped video commenting keep projects moving without the usual back-and-forth over email. This all, as you can imagine, saves a lot of hassle.
It’s not surprising, then, that more than 250,000 people across 3,000 businesses use Air on a daily basis. They include big firms like Google, CAA, Mars and JPMorgan, along with creative agencies ranging from small shops to giants like Saatchi & Saatchi.
Three features to scale your creative library
The new update introduces three interconnected new features: a context layer, a set of AI agents, and a canvas. Understanding how they connect is the key to understanding what Air is actually trying to build.
The context layer is where teams can train Air on their brand. Not just a logo and a hex code, but the full picture: photography style, typography, tone of voice, creative rules and constraints. Like a permanent creative brief that lives inside the platform and informs everything the AI does.
This is the bit most AI tools skip entirely, and why their output looks so generic. Context is what creates originality, and without it, AI simply finds the most average answer across the largest possible dataset.
The agents are where that context gets put to work. Through a chat-based interface, you can instruct Air to execute specific tasks: “Resize this ad unit into eight formats”; “Turn this still image into a video”; “Extract the text layer and let me swap the headline before burning it back.” Exactly the kinds of jobs, in other words, that eat up a designer’s afternoon without requiring any original thought.
Crucially, these agents draw on the context layer to keep everything on-brand. “The creative should choose which parts are automated,” Shane notes. “And they should choose when to be in the loop.”
That last sentence is worth thinking about for a moment. It’s a deliberate inversion of how most AI tools work, in which the system makes decisions, and the human either accepts or rejects them.
In contrast, Air’s model puts the creative in charge of the process, not as a reviewer at the end, but as the architect of what gets automated and what doesn’t.
The canvas is where the human gets the final word
The canvas is where the human steps back in. This is a workspace for reviewing what the agents have produced, making final adjustments with manual editing tools, and taking something from 90% of the way there to finished. The built-in assumption is not that AI will get it right; it’s that a creative will always want to get it over the line themselves.
Best of all, this game-changing update will be free to all users, at no extra cost. Air is also relaunching its free plan, so anyone can sign up without a credit card and start exploring the new features immediately.
When AI works for creatives, not against them
Underlying this update is a vision about what the next few years in creative work should look like and, crucially, who should be driving change.
Shane is clear about the problem with the current AI moment: the noise is exhausting, the pace of model releases is impossible to keep up with, and the framing is largely hostile to the creatives doing the work. His view is that a centralised platform (rather than a proliferating stack of individual tools) is the only sensible response.
“Creatives don’t want to keep signing up for new tools and rebuilding their workflows every time a new model drops,” he points out. “So whenever a new AI model is released, it’s on Air within seconds. We try to remove the noise so you can focus on doing great creative work.”
For agencies in particular, the timing of all feels significant. Right now, clients are asking hard questions about AI. Some are excited, some are anxious, and most are confused. An agency that can walk into a room and show a coherent, brand-consistent creative operations system—one that uses AI as infrastructure rather than spectacle—is in a different place from one that’s still explaining why the budget includes six separate subscriptions.
“We want creatives to feel empowered to play around with new technologies,” Shane says, “and to decide where and how to get value from them. That’s the beauty of having a centralised platform: you get the opportunity to have choice. Before, if you didn’t have a platform, you didn’t have a choice. You’re just struggling to stay afloat.”
Elsewhere, the breathless announcements will keep coming. But Air’s bet is that what creative teams actually want is the opposite. A place to do the work, with the tools that matter, and without the noise.
Air founders: Shane Hegde and Tyler Strand
