A Forbes study of 11.3 million employees found that more than 70% of companies surveyed consider creative thinking and analytical thinking to be the skills most expected to rise in importance over the next several years. That finding sits at the center of a question that every business owner is grappling with right now: in a world where AI can generate a rendering, write a brief, draft a contract, and produce a prototype overnight, what is the human creative contribution actually worth?
On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, host Tommy Ahlquist brought together two people who live at the intersection of creativity and commerce every day. John Drake is the president of Drake Cooper, a 30-year-old Idaho advertising agency, and Mae Myers is an interior designer with Pivot North Architecture who has been shaping commercial and healthcare spaces for over two decades. The conversation covered AI, design science, hand sketching, vision clarity, and the surprisingly durable value of an eight-foot foam core board.
The Space You Work In Is a Business Decision
Before the conversation turned to AI, Myers laid out something that gets undersold in most discussions about workplace strategy: the physical environment of a business is not a finishing touch. It is a business decision with measurable consequences for how people feel, how they perform, and whether they stay.
She cited research on natural light and healing: patients with access to exterior views and daylight recover measurably faster than those without. The same principle applies to workplaces. Lighting temperature, material selection, color, acoustic design, biophilic elements like natural wood and stone, these are not decorative preferences. They are variables that affect how people think and feel throughout the day.
Ahlquist connected this to a project both he and Myers worked on, the Idaho Outdoor Field House’s hyperbaric wellness center, where the design brief was unusually high-stakes. Veterans coming in for hyperbaric oxygen therapy to treat PTSD and traumatic brain injuries are vulnerable. They are arriving with hope that a specific treatment will change their lives. The environment they walk into matters in a way that goes beyond aesthetics.
“Creating a place that feels good is so important,” Ahlquist said. “You walk in there, it feels fantastic. Everything from the locker rooms to where you stage, to where you go after, to where you go have your evaluations, it just feels so good.”
The design lesson for any business: if you cannot articulate what you want people to feel when they walk into your space, and if your environment does not reinforce your brand and culture, you are leaving something meaningful on the table. And in a labor market where recruiting and retaining talented people has become one of the hardest operational challenges a company faces, that gap is more expensive than it used to be.
What AI Actually Changes for Designers
Both Drake and Myers use AI tools regularly and were candid about what has changed and what hasn’t.
The clearest change is speed of iteration. Myers described a moment where she caught herself manually composing an interior elevation image from parts and pieces, then stopped and realized she could upload a black and white version, describe the finishes she wanted, and have a polished image in minutes. Ahlquist noted that a full rendering of a room, something that would have cost thousands of dollars and days of work just a few years ago, can now be produced quickly enough to show a client multiple options in a single meeting.
That speed has real value. It means mistakes get caught earlier, when they’re cheap to fix. It means clients can visualize what they’re approving rather than approving something abstract and being surprised by the result. It means the conversation between designer and client becomes more collaborative and iterative rather than sequential.
But Drake, who runs a large creative organization across multiple disciplines, offered the important counterweight: using AI to shortcut the process of actually understanding your subject is a trap. You can produce a beautiful presentation using AI assistance and then fail the moment a client asks a follow-up question, because you went through the output without going through the thinking. “If you don’t go through the activity of actually figuring it out,” he said, “you’re gonna fail at step two.”
The principle Myers added is equally useful: AI accelerates the creative process, but it does not replace the starting point of that process, which is the designer’s trained judgment about what a space needs to do and feel like. You still have to know what question to ask. The prompt is not a substitute for the vision.
The Hand Sketch Question
Myers mentioned something that stuck with Ahlquist: the practice of hand sketching is becoming a lost art in design education and professional practice. Schools that once required hand drafting have largely phased it out. Younger staff members who are technically proficient in modeling software have often never been required to draw by hand.
Ahlquist described an architect he works with on significant projects, Darren Bell, who still hand-sketches his initial concepts after walking a site in person. On a downtown Meridian project currently in development, Bell walked the site twice, went home, and called Ahlquist the next day with a hand-sketched vision of how people would move through the space, where the streetscapes would go, how the public plazas would connect to the buildings, how old and new elements would relate to each other. The drawing came from a mind that had absorbed the site firsthand, not from a prompt.
“Is this going away?” Ahlquist asked. “I don’t see the next generation doing anything like that.”
Myers’ answer was measured and worth sitting with: it might flip. The ability to hand sketch was once a requirement for working in architecture, a basic professional competency without which you couldn’t translate your ideas. Now it’s becoming a differentiating skill, something that marks a practitioner as having a particular depth of craft. The tools that used to be the only way to express a vision are becoming, in the right hands, a mark of distinction.
What Great Creative Leadership Actually Looks Like
The most applicable section of the conversation for anyone running a team came when Drake talked about clarity of vision and how it functions as a management tool.
He described work on the “18 Summers” campaign for Visit Idaho, which became one of the agency’s most recognized and awarded projects. The entire creative effort traced back to a single articulated idea: you only have a limited number of summers with your kids while they’re still kids at home. That line, not a tagline but an internal strategic clarity, was the lens through which every creative decision was made. When the media team, the client, and the creative team all carry the same mental model into the work, the output holds together in a way it doesn’t when everyone is working from a different understanding of what success looks like.
Drake’s principle for creative teams: spend disproportionate time at the beginning getting to the succinct, clearly articulated line that captures what you’re trying to do. The more specific and clean that statement is, the better the work that follows. Everything else is in service of that.
Ahlquist’s version of the same idea showed up in a story about his company’s internal meetings, where he started a talk by generating an AI image of himself holding the output of the motto “turning chicken you-know-what into chicken salad,” a phrase that captures the company’s appetite for difficult, transformative projects. Drake’s reaction was affectionate but honest: internal cultural phrases like that work when everyone is already in on what they mean, but they require additional definition to function as external communication. The point is not the words themselves but the shared clarity they represent.
The Durable Value of Range
Drake ended with a framing that applies as much to architecture and design as it does to advertising and to any other creative field: whatever you are naturally great at, lean into it. Don’t let AI automate away the thing that makes you distinctive. Use it to remove the work you don’t want to do anyway, and then bring your actual craft to bear on the part that matters.
Myers added the parallel: staying curious across disciplines is what keeps design thinking alive. She mentioned reading a book about hospitality and thinking about how those principles apply to the spaces she designs. Drake described studying music producers and film directors as a way of understanding how great collaborative creative work gets made and how to lead it.
In a world where the tools are changing faster than anyone can fully track, the people who will do the best work are the ones who remain genuinely interested in how things are made, who keep some version of the pad and pencil in the process, and who understand that the prompt you give an AI tool is only as good as the thinking behind it.
The machine can generate the rendering. The vision still has to come from somewhere.
Learn more about Drake Cooper at drakecooper.com and Pivot North Architecture at pivotnorthdesign.com.
