2025-10-21
TikTok's Combined Intelligence: How Human Creativity + AI Drive Impact
At Advertising Week 2025 in New York, Jellyfish US Managing Director Karen Bennett joined TikTok’s Rachel Ryan and National Research Groups’s Grady Miller to explore the evolving role of AI in marketing and creativity. Framing the discussion around “combined intelligence,” it emphasized that AI is the instrument, not the music. The creative ideas and human nuance still come from people.
Rachel Ryan, Head of Research and Insights at TikTok, shared findings from a global study showing that creators are embracing AI as a tool to scale their work efficiently, without sacrificing authenticity. Tasks like editing, captioning, performance analysis, and translation are being automated, giving creators more space for imagination and Storytelling.
Karen Bennett, US Managing Director at Jellyfish, highlighted how brands can operationalize AI to enhance speed and performance while maintaining the human touch. For example, using proprietary tools like Pencil, teams can generate creative more quickly, cost-effectively, and effectively, feeding insights directly into media campaigns and content strategies. Or using Share of Model™ to understand how LLMs perceive your brand.
“Start with your audience. Use AI to get a nuanced understanding, then let humans bring empathy, imagination, and refinement.”
Karen Bennett, Managing Director US at Jellyfish
The discussion underscored three key takeaways:
- Transparency builds trust.
- Hybrid approaches combining human creativity and AI outperform extremes.
- Efficiency should never replace empathy and imagination.
By leveraging AI responsibly, brands can achieve measurable growth, maintain cultural relevance, and ensure their creative work remains memorable. The overarching message: AI accelerates and amplifies, but humans still compose the music.