At MAD//Fest London – the marketing industry's biggest, loudest get-together – we asked 100+ marketers to sketch one thing: the AI tool or solution that would make your work more human. No survey, no committee, no consultants. This is what their collective intelligence revealed.
Real, unretouched sketches from the room – tap any one to reveal the AI-generated concept it became.
Hand the world's most content-hungry industry an AI genie, and you'd expect campaign machines. Instead, of 65 unique ideas, only four are tools for producing more marketing. The rest listen (HearReal), feel (SentioLayer), simplify (Clarify), protect (SlopShield) – or hand back time (Adminator, drawn as a single button that "clears up the admin so you can spend more time with real people doing cool stuff"). The room's definition of "more human" isn't better output. It's a better relationship with the work itself.
Every insight on this page is drawn directly from the audience's own submissions – sketched live, transformed by AI, analysed after the room emptied.
Read together, the sketches stop being individual wishes and start sounding like a shared declaration – a crowd-powered manifesto for what marketing wants from AI.
A button that clears the admin backlog. A dashboard that runs on zero admin. An agent that wins back evenings. The room didn't ask AI to do more marketing – it asked AI to hand back the hours, for real people doing cool stuff.
From the room: Adminator – one button, admin gone · SignalFlow – "a project dashboard with 0 admin required" · Myriad – the life-admin agent that wins back evenings
Tears of joy and tears of sadness read the same in a spreadsheet. The next generation of tools listens to real customers in real time and comes back with the why, not another chart of the what. Overnight, not next quarter.
From the room: SentioLayer – "AI doesn't understand where these emotions come from" · HearReal – real people, real insight · RapidPulse – customer feedback in 24 hours
Loyalty that knows the person, not the spend. Storefronts that reshape themselves for whoever walks in. Service that drops the jargon the moment you're confused. Targeted is over. Known is next.
From the room: PersonaLoyal – "loyalty schemes that actually know the person" · IntelliFront – a storefront for every visitor · Clarify – de-jargons the website for confused customers
The same room that generates content at machine speed sketched slop detectors, AI alarms and brand voices with real personality. When anyone can make infinite content, what feels genuinely human is the scarcest asset in marketing.
From the room: SlopShield – the ad slop detector · AegisAI – the "is this AI?" alarm · VoxPersona – brand voice with actual personality
Beyond the consensus, the sketches surfaced some genuinely novel ideas – the kind no industry panel would dare to put on a slide.
StratosLeap was drawn as an engine that takes deliberate strategic leaps – "strategies that aren't reliant on data you actually know". The deck stops describing last quarter and starts betting on next year. In a discipline drowning in dashboards, one marketer asked for licensed intuition.
Theme: strategy & creative leapsRelayAI sketched product LLMs that sense nuance, frustration or a decision that matters – and hand over at exactly the right moment. The handoff stops being a failure state. It becomes the feature customers remember.
Theme: service that knows its limitsZeitgeistAI and SynapCulture imagined engines that map the threads between subcultures, moments and movements as they form – so brands join the conversation while it's still a whisper, not a wave. Trend decks arrive quarterly; culture doesn't.
Theme: culture & zeitgeist radarFlawForge: "a text humaniser machine that turns your AI generated content into error written human content that no one would believe was AI generated." When polish costs nothing, the flaw becomes the fingerprint – and one marketer built the machine that fakes it.
Theme: the authenticity premiumEvery deduplicated submission was analysed and clustered. Here's the full distribution – and what each theme signals.
Total coverage exceeds 100% – most ideas spanned multiple themes, reflecting the integrated thinking of participants.
Because a signal report can be a data table – or it can be an eight-page crowd-powered manifesto in graphic-novel form. Four declarations, four what-ifs, one closing argument: less hype, more human. Proof that strategic doesn't have to mean dry.
Flip through all eight pages – or download "The Human Touch" to keep.
The most strategically valuable signals aren't the consensus – they're the places where 65 ideas pull in opposite directions.
The same room that wants AutoScribe writing its relationship emails and PersonaTwin drafting in its own voice also sketched SlopShield, AegisAI and FlawForge – tools to detect, flag or disguise machine output. The industry is building the engine and the brakes simultaneously. If your roadmap has AI writing more of your brand's words next year, who on your team is playing SlopShield?
AutoScribe automates the "get well soon" note. ConvoLoop wants no more emails at work – just conversations. RelayAI's entire premise is knowing when a human must take over. The room wants both, and hasn't decided where the line sits. When the thank-you note writes itself, what is it worth to the person who receives it?
Eleven ideas want personalisation that knows the person, not the purchase history. In the same room, Permitra was drawn to flip data consent on its head and VetShield to anonymise identities entirely. "Known, not targeted" is the demand – but only a couple of sketches put consent in the architecture. That gap is exactly where the next trust battle will be fought.
The prompt asked for the tool they wished existed – so these absences are invitations, not oversights. They're exactly where the next advantage hides.
In a room of 100+ marketers, almost nobody sketched ads, media plans or attribution. No bidding tool, no funnel optimiser – the daily machinery of the trade went essentially undrawn, while the room queued up to fix admin, insight and trust instead.
What if the next pitch isn't a better campaign, but better hours? The tools this room wants to buy don't optimise the funnel – they upgrade the working week. Vendors selling "more output" are answering a question nobody in this room asked.
The room demanded more-human marketing 65 different ways – but nobody sketched the tool that proves it. No human-ness KPI, no trust index, no "did this actually feel human?" dashboard. The industry's newest ambition is currently unmeasurable.
What if you could price the human premium? The first brand to quantify what authenticity is worth – in attention, loyalty or price tolerance – sets the benchmark every competitor has to report against.
Put last month's AI-assisted content in front of your team: can they tell which lines a machine wrote? Could your customers? If the answer is no, decide what your human premium actually is – because someone in this room already sketched the machine that fakes it.
The room's most repeated wish wasn't reach or ROAS – it was time back. Audit one week of your team's calendar: which hours are admin that a button should clear? And name the first thing you'd reinvest them in that your customers would actually notice.
RelayAI's insight: the smartest AI knows its limits. List the five moments in your customer journey where a human matters most. Is AI currently guarding those moments – or squatting in them?
Every idea has its own page – concept images, AI roast, shareable idea card, and a full Deep Innovation report assessing feasibility and a draft launch plan.
Answer three quick questions and we'll point you to the ideas in the dataset most worth your attention – quite possibly including your own.
Download a single consolidated .md file and drop it into your LLM of choice, ready to query for insights related to your current projects.
Unfiltered, opt-in feedback captured live at MAD//Fest London – 52 responses, 96% rated the session positively.
He spoke truthfully and addressed the elephant in the room about the data and how we deal with it.
Very responsive with ideas and creative feedback to personal thoughts on your work and job role.
Super fun and interactive.
Very insightful! Loved it.
Great talk with supporting info.
Engaging and fun.
He spoke truthfully and addressed the elephant in the room about the data and how we deal with it.
Very responsive with ideas and creative feedback to personal thoughts on your work and job role.
Super fun and interactive.
Very insightful! Loved it.
Great talk with supporting info.
Engaging and fun.
No app. No survey. No consultants. Just pens, paper, a QR code – and an audience doing what no live poll has ever managed: thinking out loud, together.
Everyone sketches their idea. Pen and paper. No artistic skill required.
Scan a QR code, photograph the sketch. No app, no login.
AI turns every sketch into polished concepts – shown live on the big screen.
Themes, tensions and insights emerge from the collective input – in minutes.
You've just experienced the transformational power of AI-native thinking and doing. Strategy engagements used to take months to assemble these insights, but the audience produced the raw material live, mid-keynote – and the analysis you're scrolling was in their hands while the room was still buzzing.
VisuAIse Futures shows 10x thinking in action: the keynote stops being a broadcast and becomes a shared experience. Your audience stops being spectators and becomes your strategy team. And because they co-created every artefact on this page, they want to engage with it afterwards – psychologists call it the IKEA effect; event organisers call it post-event content people finally open.
Every industry has a future its people can already see – they've just never been asked to sketch it. If you're planning a conference keynote, leadership offsite or customer event, let's turn your next audience into your strategy team.
Or just email renee@ideapress-speakers.com
