Creative Tools On Demand

Building the creative tools you need, right when you need them #

As a creative, you are at the mercy of the software tools available to you. You buy apps for yourself or your team on a “just in case” basis. That is, you hope you have the right tools for the job, without knowing exactly what those jobs will be. You want to make sure to have tools to solve the right problems, speed up the right processes, and generate the right outputs at the exact right moment, without breaking your creative flow.

Sometimes you’re right. And sometimes you waste time and money being wrong. But what if you didn’t have to guess? Using AI, we can shift our mindset from hoping for the best, to building customized tools and applications that do exactly what you need them to, exactly when you need.

You can shift from “just in case” tools to “just in time” tools.

Just in Time Tools #

AI is no longer just outputting text, images, and videos. It’s building fully interactive apps, custom built to solve your needs. The latest AI models let you describe the tool you need, what you need it for, and how you want to use it. With that information, models can output custom applications, or interactive websites, that do exactly what is most useful for you.

Think of this as clearing the friction in your creative workflow. You’re no longer slowed down by researching and selecting the right tools. You don’t need to request features and hope they get built. You can create what you need when you need it. And you can empower your collaborators to use AI to automatically build what they need to keep them in the creative zone.

Here are three examples of custom tools inspired by real challenges that people have shared with me recently:

Example 1: Audience Simulator #

Imagine you want to test new creative ideas against different audience demographic groups or personas. How will your audience react to each different option? What are some of the things you can do to improve your campaign option with your target audience in mind? Instead of making assumptions about an audience’s behaviour, I’d build a simple app that allows you to input a creative idea and see how different audience profiles might respond.

To do this, I’d open up AI Studio, and write a short description to quickly create an on-demand creative tool.

Make me a simple web app where I can paste a new creative concept or campaign idea. Underneath, I want a ‘Test Audience’ button. When I click it I want the app to invent three completely different audience personas—give them ages, jobs and a quick personality summary. Then, show me a card for each person explaining how they would emotionally react to my idea, what they’d love about it, and one highly specific suggestion for how I could tweak the creative to get a better response from that audience.

Immediately, AI Studio starts to code my custom app. And it creates something that looks like this.

Now, I can interact with my app. I’m going to test it by describing my example campaign for the Hamburger Hot Dog. And it’s going to generate something that helps me understand how my creative would land with different audiences.

You can try my Audience Simulator made in AI Studio prototype for yourself. In fact, you can even remix it and make it your own. Start adding your own prompts, and customize it into the tool you need.

Example 2: Video Constellation Maker #

Here’s another. Maybe you need to create a series of space videos that fit into your vision for an out-of-this-world, space-themed short film. Rather than just using a generative AI tool to prompt each individual video, here’s how I would prompt for an app that lets you input some ideas, reference images, and a visual direction to create a playful interactive constellation of videos.

Please build a dark, cinematic web app called 'Constellation Maker.' I need a place to drop in some reference images, and text boxes to type in my 'Visual Direction and Cinematic Style.' When I hit generate, I want it to build an interactive constellation of stars. Each star should represent a different space-themed image based on my inputs, similar ones could be closer together maybe? If I click a star, it should pop open a cohesive prompt and a button to generate a video using the image as the first frame

Example 3: Brand Alignment Checker #

Or, what about this? Imagine being able to determine with some objective clarity if the creative you are making is on brand. Here’s a very simple prototype of how I might create a custom app that takes as input some brand guidelines and a creative campaign or tags, and allows you to determine if you nailed it, or suggests ways to improve it.

Please build me a clean, minimalist dashboard called the 'Brand Alignment Checker.' On the left side, I need to be able to upload a document of brand guidelines and upload a new creative asset. On the right side, I want it to give me an 'Alignment Score' out of 100. Break the feedback down simply: tell me 'What I Nailed,' tell me 'Where It Missed' the guidelines, and give me a list of 'Actionable Fixes' to get the creative back on brand.

Those are three simple ideas that I was able to quickly build customized apps for. In less time it takes you to write down your problem, these new AI systems can start building the solutions.

The Future of Creative Tools #

I realize it’s early days. The technology isn’t perfect yet, but it’s improving quickly. But the time to start is now. We’re in the early adoption phase of vibe coding, or AI-assisted engineering. Today, AI models are powerful enough that you can make useful things without writing any code at all. Now is the time to try things out, see what you can do and get excited about the possibilities.

AI-assisted engineering means that the right creative tools for you are more available than ever, because you can create them yourself. You don’t need to hope someone else has made the tool you need, or put the right functionality into their software. You can dream it up and make it happen.

So what’s in the way? What’s your creative challenge? What annoying step in your process could be a tool? I think that AI can help you through the friction and over the chasm. Because building isn’t the bottleneck any more.

Unblocking your creative workflow is just a prompt away.