“We are in a moment where work and our sense of self are increasingly intertwined. What does it mean to separate your identity from your work? What happens when you’re forced to do that, and can we even survive it?” Director Ben Stiller, talking about HBO's Severance.
Ahh, the chaos of the modern workplace. And while Severance is technically a dystopia, it feels uncomfortably close to reality for many creative companies, managers, and employees (minus the brain chip, so yes, the stress still follows everyone home, eye roll).
If you've missed the Black Mirror-esque drama, Severance is set inside Lumon Industries, a company where employees undergo a procedure that surgically separates their work memories from their personal lives. Their “innie” selves exist only at the office, stripped of identity, history, and context, while their “outie” selves have no idea how they spend their days. The result is a sterile, opaque workplace ruled by bureaucracy, vague incentives, and total control — an exaggerated mirror of the compartmentalization, burnout, and alienation many workers already feel in modern corporate culture.
Sound familiar?
Buckle in. As we enter a new year, it’s a powerful time to take a hard look at how AI has transformed creative hiring, management, and scale. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes at a cost. While technology has made systems faster, leaner, and more efficient, it has also stripped away something essential: humanity.
Creative workplaces aren’t failing because of a lack of tools; they’re struggling because connection, trust, and meaning have been deprioritized. But if creative leaders can intentionally re-center people (not platforms, prompts, or productivity metrics), we have a real opportunity to build healthier teams, more engaged employees, and sustainable work habits.
Consumers see polished graphics and carefully chosen words.
But the busy professional on a creative team likely sees the late-night Slack messages, the fiery email sitting unread in their inbox, or even the side-eye from a manager when picking up a kid from school.
Creative burnout isn’t hypothetical; it’s systemic.
According to a Superside report in Business Wire, creative teams are overcommitted, understaffed, and running on fumes. A staggering 76% of creative leaders report feeling burned out, while 78% say their teams are equally overburdened. These numbers don’t just point to stress; they signal a structural failure in how creative work is resourced, managed, and valued.
All of this points to several recurring realities across creative teams:
And yet, there is a silver lining.
As Fredrik Thomassen, CEO and Founder of Superside, puts it in Business Wire:
“It’s clear that creative leaders are operating in a pressure cooker, but there is a way out. By reshaping team structures, rethinking agency relationships, and embracing AI as a strategic partner, creative teams can function without sacrificing their well-being or creative potential. It’s time for stakeholders across businesses to recognize the impact of high-quality creative and ensure that teams are supported so they can deliver inspiring work.”
Graphic designers, writers, marketers — creative professions across the board — generally love what they do. The problem isn’t the work itself. It’s how the workplace makes them feel while doing it.
That disconnect is where burnout takes root. And the encouraging part? It’s fixable.
Research from Float and Marq points to a consistent truth: the healthiest creative teams are built on clarity, trust, realistic workloads, and regular feedback.
When expectations are transparent, and conversations go both ways, creatives don’t just survive, they re-engage.
Burnout thrives in ambiguity. Alignment kills it.
In practice, alignment looks like:
And to be honest, wouldn’t it be nice to be aligned with work? No one truly escapes their work, so if work is coming home with us — mentally, emotionally, and digitally — it matters that it’s work we believe in. Ideally, it’s work we enjoy doing, feel proud of, and see ourselves reflected in. Without that alignment, even meaningful creative work starts to feel transactional.
When burnout and misalignment make headlines, it’s rarely an isolated issue. We’ve all seen the scandals. A CEO makes an offhand comment, a leader dismisses work-life balance, or a brand’s values crumble under public scrutiny.
But the damage never stays at the top. No one in an organization is immune to leadership’s failures. Misalignment rots the tree from the roots up.
For example, consider a designer who joins a “people-first” agency with genuine optimism, only to discover that burnout and hustle remain the unspoken expectations of the creative director.
When values are performative rather than practiced, even great clients and exciting projects can’t bridge the gap. The work may look good, but it starts to feel hollow.
And this is exactly where technology gets pulled into the mess.
When leadership lacks clarity, alignment, or trust, tools don’t fix the problem — they amplify it. AI becomes a proxy for decision-making. Dashboards replace conversations. Efficiency metrics stand in for actual judgment. What started as a cultural issue quietly gets blamed on the tech.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth:
AI didn’t break creative work. Bad leadership did.
This idea is echoed by David Nordlund, a creative strategist with more than two decades of experience, who’s watched creative culture cycle through hype, disruption, and reinvention more than once.
Nordlund is a veteran creative powerhouse whose career spans everything from corporate identity work and annual reports to leading creative campaigns at Capitol Records, Universal Studios, Sony Pictures Television, and Variety. He worked on iconic film campaigns for A Beautiful Mind, Erin Brockovich, Ray, Seabiscuit, and The Cat in the Hat, helped build Variety’s Power of Women and Power of Youth franchises, and later founded his own agency, advising everyone from Disney and Relativity Media to early-stage startups and healthcare ventures.
Bottom line: Nordlund doesn’t just talk about creativity. He’s spent decades shaping, protecting, and fighting for it.
Despite being an early AI beta tester and working with emerging tools for nearly a decade, Nordlund is unequivocal:
“AI is a tool — like a computer was a tool, like Photoshop was a tool. If you can’t do it by hand, you’re not going to be able to do it with AI. It just makes things faster.”
Where companies get it wrong, he argues, is confusing speed with strategy and automation with leadership.
“Behind the tool, you need a hand. And behind that hand is a person. If you don’t have that, you’re never going to maximize what AI can actually do for your business.”
AI can remove friction by automating repetitive tasks, accelerating iteration, and supporting smarter planning. But when tools become substitutes for judgment, taste, or empathy, teams disengage fast.
And the data suggests leaders may be starting to understand that.
Orgvue’s Fortune 100 report shows that, despite the hype, AI is still positioned as a leadership and decision-making amplifier, not a replacement for human capability:
The implication is clear: the future of successful creative work doesn’t belong to leaders who chase every new tool. It belongs to those who know when to use technology and when to get out of its way.
So if your AI stack is creating more confusion, heavier oversight, or greater distance between people, it isn’t working. It’s just expensive vibes.
When work feels empty, it’s rarely a tooling problem. It’s a leadership one. Joy is either designed in … or designed out.
AI just shows us which choice was made.
Nordlund also points out that many creative leaders didn’t lose control because of technology; they lost it because they abandoned clarity.
In organizations where values are vague, trust is thin, and leadership is disconnected from the work, AI doesn’t solve problems. It magnifies them. Dashboards replace dialogue. Metrics replace judgment. And “efficiency” becomes a convenient excuse to avoid hard conversations about culture, workload, and purpose.
“What’s happening right now is that companies are trying to replace people instead of supporting them,” Nordlund says. “They think AI is the answer, when really it just exposes that they don’t understand their own strategy, narrative, or voice.”
This disconnect doesn’t just affect internal teams. In fact, audiences feel it immediately.
Overproduced, AI-heavy creative often reads as sterile or performative, especially at a moment when people are craving real connection. Nordlund notes that platforms like TikTok didn’t explode because they were polished, but because they were human.
“People want connection. They want to see real people doing real things,” says Nordlund. “When brands use AI to smooth everything out, it feels cold — and people reject it.”
This mirrors exactly what creative teams experience internally when leadership prioritizes cost-cutting over alignment. The work stops feeling meaningful, even if it looks “successful” from the outside.
And when clarity disappears, joy is the first casualty. … Not because people stop caring, but because the conditions that allow creativity to thrive quietly erode.
Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip, points to one word she still finds real hope in for the creative industry: community.
Not the buzzword version. The lived-in, show-up-for-each-other kind.
“Building our own support systems, reaching out to peers, talking these issues through — whether that’s with us at CCC or within your own network — we’re stronger and better together,” states in It’s Nice That. “As AI pushes us into siloed working, ignoring the temptation to ask a bot and discussing things with friends instead is an act of rebellion.”
And for creative leaders who were once neck-deep in glitter, paint, layouts, and late nights making things for the sheer joy of it, this might be your cue. Close the inbox for half an hour. (An hour if you’re brave.) Step away from the dashboards and remember why you started doing this in the first place.
“Get the crayons out, rip up magazines, get charcoal all over your hands,” Cadwell suggests. “Remember the satisfaction of creating something beyond pixels.”
That same thread of hope shows up in the thinking of Kat Wong, founder of career-change platform Oh Yeah. She’s betting that 2026 will be the year more people — creative or not — start reclaiming the time, energy, and space needed to bring real value and purpose back into their lives and communities.
Because no one thrives in isolation. And while many of us are still unwinding our post-COVID, inner-recluse habits, the way forward isn’t more distance but deeper connection, both at work and at home.
“I’m really looking forward to this growing movement of people turning their backs on performative culture and putting healthier boundaries in,” Wong shares in It’s Nice That. “We’re shifting toward real meaning, honesty, and IRL connection. I’m inviting everyone to experiment with a more conscious — and more playful — approach to how we want to live our working lives.”
For Nordlund, joy at work isn’t optional but strategic.
“Creative used to be everything,” he reflects. “Then marketing took over, and creatives got pushed into execution mode — just another cog. What we’re seeing now is a resurgence of creators reclaiming ownership, voice, and authenticity.”
And AI, when used correctly, can support that resurgence … but only if leaders stop treating it like a replacement for people.
“If you understand brand strategy, if you understand narrative, you can guide AI,” Nordlund notes, “But it still requires a human to decide what matters.”
Joy, in this context, isn’t about fun offices or flexible perks. It’s about agency. It’s about being trusted to think, to feel, and to contribute meaningfully.
Mission-aligned teams don’t happen by accident. They require creative managers to move beyond task assignment and into intentional leadership.
And yes, we know, this is the part that can feel a little like that required philosophy class you took just so you could graduate. The one you didn’t think would matter, until you realized it was quietly asking the biggest questions of all: purpose, humanity, responsibility, meaning. Heavy stuff. But also very real.
So let’s keep this snackable and deep.
If you’re a creative leader, manager, or team lead, take some time to reflect on what you can do in the coming year to make work a more positive, sustainable place.
This could mean:
When creative leaders fail to prioritize alignment, teams are bound to disconnect. But when they get it right, something powerful happens: creatives stop working around the system and start working within it — fully engaged, invested, and proud of what they’re building.
Curious where creative leadership, hiring, and the future of work are headed in 2026? Part two of this series lands in January.
And if you’re a creative leader looking for help building thoughtful, mission-aligned teams, or a creative exploring your next move, this is exactly the work we do at Artisan Talent: connecting people with roles, teams, and environments where creativity can thrive.