Fast Five with James Hurman

Name

Reuben Halper, Head of YouTube, Google New Zealand

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How do you define creativity?

I'm a bit of a cynic in this space and think the idea of creativity as something truly original is actually overrated, given "humans abhor the new" . With that in mind my definition of creativity tends to be around combinatorial creativity where you combine existing ideas, insights, tech, etc. to develop something novel yet familiar. Or to quote Kirby Ferguson "Everything Is A Remix"

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither, it's a tool. In the same hands a hammer can be both a tool and a weapon. I feel the same way about AI.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

I bet half the respondents will say Cadbury Gorilla and frankly I want to punch them in the face. I honestly don't think there's any idea that an AI could never have come up with as the space is evolving so rapidly and so much of the output comes down to the input and the prompting. I also want to include a non-advertising piece of creativity that an AI expressed in the form of the move that AlphaGo made in the second game vs Lee Sedol.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

A bar in deep Alabama where a hardcore NASCAR fan asked why we couldn't visualise the effects of drafting. That became a massive project involving wind tunnels and patents.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

NotebookLM is the shit for so many things both personal and professional. Probably my favourite general use case for GenAI is using it as a sparring partner and adversary to challenge my thinking.

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Insights From Women Driving AI Startups

Cannes had a ton of AI talk this year. Most were a mix of hype, fear, and lots of buzzwords. Our GM of the Americas, Carolyn Murphy, joined a conversation worth listening to at Salon Culture Conversations: Women Entrepreneurs Driving AI Startups.

It brought together four founders/AI leaders who are doing the thing everyone’s talking about,  but doing it with intention, creativity, and a whole lot of focus on people over product.

And the themes that came through couldn’t align more with how we build: AI isn’t here to replace humans, it’s here to make creative humans even more powerful.

AI isn’t the star. People are.

Everyone on the panel came to AI not because it was trendy, but because it solved a real, human problem, like faster staffing in entertainment, clearer emotional insight from voice, better discovery in ecommerce. For us at Springboards, it’s about helping strategists and creatives get to smarter ideas faster without losing the joy, weirdness, and originality of the work.

As Carolyn put it on stage: “We’re not building to automate execution. We’re building to unlock new creative ways in.”

Being AI-native doesn’t mean flashy. It means useful.

The best products on that stage were showing results. Purva Gupta from Lily AI framed it perfectly: AI isn’t electricity, it’s electricity that proves its value. At Springboards, our value is time saved, thinking unblocked, and pitches won. That’s what being AI-native means to us: delivering something real.

Execution is cheap. Insight isn’t.

This theme ran through the whole session. Everyone agreed that AI should streamline production, not strategy. Carolyn framed it well: “We’re here to support the thinkers, not replace them. The best creative still comes from people who feel, who talk to others, who know what’s happening in culture.”

That’s why we don’t do content automation. We’re not here to make ads faster. We’re here to help you get to better starting points, so you can make something worth watching.

Listen harder. Move faster. Stay weird. 

Every speaker on stage made one thing clear: the best AI products are shaped by their customers, not their founders.

Same goes for us. Some of Springboards’ best features have come directly from strategists telling us where they’re stuck, what’s not working, or what would help them get to a bigger idea, quicker.

The TL;DR:

AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a tool. What matters is what you do with it — and why you’re doing it. The founders on this panel aren’t just using AI. They’re building companies that respect creativity, center human insight, and move fast without losing the plot.

That’s exactly how we build Springboards. Because the future of creative work isn’t automated. It’s amplified.

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Who are you?

Gabrielle Tenaglia, Head of Marketing, Lettuce

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How do you define creativity?

When solving problems, its common for people and businesses to ask the same questions and use similar processes...which leads them to similar answers. In marketing its a key reason why so much of the communications in each category look and sound the same. Creativity is about asking different questions and using a different process to open up new options--not just ones that are different from what your competitors are saying, but ones that your competitors could not say. In marketing, creativity is taking your strategy, your messaging and your communications assets to a place where your competitors can't follow you.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

It can be either. Like any other technology tool, It depends 100% how you use it.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with? 

This was produced with AI, but developed and written by humans. AI is so much about pattern recognition and doing things that are similar to what you've done before. This is so different than what exists out there in the tax and accounting space that no AI could have come up with it.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

All my great ideas happen when I'm not working. Lately some of my ideas have come from thinking about my grandmother. When she died and we cleaned out her house, we found all of these bundles of money hidden away in different places tied up with ribbons. I'm working on a financial services product. We think about money as a very rational thing but there is SO much emotion wrapped up in it. Like the little bundles my grandmother left us.

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

I'm not sure that I have a brilliant answer here--I use it as a partner in lots of thinking and work. It helps you get the obvious ideas out of the way quickly. I am able to be SO fast in doing background research, developing target insights, and understanding the competitive landscape that I can spend my HUMAN time working on the creative pieces that push the thinking to new and more interesting places.

My mother has been sick with a complex medical condition and I've been using it a ton to understand what to expect and figure out questions to ask the doctors. But I haven't been telling the doctors that I'm doing that because I think they'll be annoyed. I had someone tell me recently that they had AI write recommendations or questions in a format that looks like a referral letter from another doctor. They then hand that to their new doctor and it gets more attention. I thought that was super interesting...how AI is giving such good information but we need to "fake" the source so people will accept it.

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