By Jonathan Santerre, Head of Marketing, Communications and AI Innovation at Happening
A personal note on what AI changes (and doesn’t change) in my work.
First, a clarification: I’m not a computer-science or AI expert. I’m passionate, and curious by nature. What drew me into this wave isn’t the technology itself. It’s the breadth of possibility it opens up for anyone whose work is to design, imagine, give shape. For a creative person, it is a buffet of possibilities. And it motivates me like nothing before.
For the past two years, I have been exploring what these tools can (and cannot) bring to our craft of event design at Happening. Through this practice, this expression describing what I do has surfaced: creative intelligence.
Why “creative” rather than “artificial”
The term “artificial intelligence” troubles me for three reasons.
First, it puts the focus on the machine, as if the subject were the tool rather than the usage. But what interests me isn’t AI as such. It’s what we do with it, and above all, what we choose not to do with it.
Second, the word “artificial” implies an intelligence that would replace our own. In my practice, that’s not what happens at all. AI doesn’t create. It assembles, it recombines, it proposes. Creativity, judgment, meaning: they remain human. Always.
Third, and perhaps the deepest reason, AI is in fact nothing artificial. Its impacts are very real: they shift our rhythms, our relationships, the way we think about a project. And the exchange isn’t one-way. Through repeated interaction with these tools, we begin to think differently: in systems, by iterations, rereading ourselves out loud, challenging ourselves the way we’d challenge a model. Whether I want it or not, my intellectual DNA shifts. The craft itself shifts. The organisation shifts. Calling this “artificial” is to minimise what’s actually happening.
Union, not substitution
Creative intelligence is the union of human intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Not a competition. Not a substitution. A meeting, where each side brings what it does best: the machine, its speed, its capacity to combine and assemble, its inexhaustible patience; the human, their judgment, their sensitivity, their craft, their discernment.
The human at the center, the tool at their service. Not by hierarchy, but because it’s in this configuration that the union works.
It’s more than a change of vocabulary. It’s a positioning.
Concretely, creative intelligence, as I practice it, is the ability to recognise where a tool amplifies a human gesture, and where it replaces it. To sense, in a creative process, the exact moment when a technical intervention saves precious time, and the moment when it would sabotage the very thing we’re trying to bring forth.
It’s a discipline of listening, more than of production.
A philosophy of integration, not a toolbox
I won’t describe in detail how I integrate AI into our processes. That would betray the very spirit of creative intelligence, which is less a recipe than a posture. But I can describe the grid that guides each of my decisions.
Before integrating a tool, I ask myself three questions.
- Does it free up time for what truly matters (listening, the gesture, the encounter), or does it consume time by demanding my attention?
- Does it enrich the quality of our perception, or does it flatten it into a predictable standard?
- Does the human remain at the center of the process, or do they quietly slip to the side without anyone noticing?
If the answer to any of these three questions is troubling, the tool doesn’t come in. Even if it’s impressive. Even if it saves time.
Creative intelligence consists, in large part, of knowing how to say no to seductive propositions.
For people in the field
If you work in events, design, or communications, you probably see the same thing I do: an influx of tools, plenty of noise, few serious practices yet documented.
After two years of experimentation, these are my three observations:
- The most useful tools are not the ones making the most noise. The real progress often comes from visually unimpressive tools that solve a specific point of friction in a workflow.
- AI doesn’t replace craft knowledge. It reveals it. The more you know your craft, the more you benefit from a tool. Conversely, without craft, a tool only produces sophisticated mediocrity.
- The risk isn’t that AI replaces creatives. The risk is that they stop cultivating their judgment, seduced by the fluidity of automatic suggestions. That judgment is precisely what will remain our value.
To conclude
I don’t know where all this is heading. No one does. But I can tell you what I try to practice, day after day: use the tools to do my craft better, not to dispense with doing it.
Creative intelligence is that. The rest is marketing.