‘Human becomes the premium’: The Female Quotient AI Summit highlights creativity over automation

In an era of rapid automation and machine learning, The Female Quotient’s second annual AI Summit delivered a powerful message: Humans must remain at the heart of the creative process.

Last week, New York City’s Webster Hall was filled with women eager to understand the technology transforming our world today. Throughout the summit, panels featuring some of the brightest minds in marketing and media explored how AI is reshaping work across brand marketing, sports, health care and social media.

One theme rang loud and clear: Even as automation accelerates, human judgment, creativity and accountability are irreplaceable. Without them, work can lack substance and even endanger others.

Cathy Hackl, CEO at Future Dynamics, underscored this point in her keynote, declaring, “Human becomes the premium and luxury.” Hackl, who is building “world models” for brands — some which include AI-powered robots — argued human insight should define the next era of innovation.

Still, women have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to adopting AI. In 2023, women’s adoption rate of GenAI was half that of men’s, but it is expected to close by the end of 2025. Yet, women represent only one-third of the AI workforce, according to a 2024 Deloitte study. “We can’t afford to sit still as women. We have to work harder,” said Venus Williams, tennis champ and co-founder of furniture app Palazzo.ai, during a hot seat conversation.

On one panel dubbed “Beyond the Prompt: The New Creative Partner,” Marisa Thalberg, executive vice president and chief customer and marketing officer at Catalyst Brands, which owns retailers like JCPenney, Brooks Brothers and Aeropostale, explained that AI is just an enabler. “It helps us get to insights faster, get to ideas faster. But at the end of the day, it’s still my years of expertise and judgment and intuition that decide whether I like the outputs I’m getting,” Thalberg said.

Cass Zawadowski, global executive creative director at Lyft, emphasized the need for balance between human discernment and machine speed. Zawadowski described how AI has helped her Lyft team move faster and collaborate more fluidly without losing the uniquely human perspective that defines their work.

“AI is allowing us to bring partners in sooner, to kill ideas faster, but the connecting part, the human part, that’s still us,” Zawadowski said.

Even Nick Tran, known for his fast-moving campaigns during his time as the global head of marketing at TikTok, underscored that automation is only one piece of the puzzle, even though he now believes what once took weeks or months, brands will be able to create whole campaigns with 24 or 48 hours. Still, Tran, the president and CMO of First Round, a joint venture between Diageo and Main Street Advisors, said he doesn’t see it replacing humans.

“We rely on it to handle the automated tasks that used to slow us down, so we can focus on the storytelling and cultural moments that matter,” Tran said.

Ultimately, the conversation reframed AI not as a rival to human creativity but as a powerful amplifier of it. As Dhruv Patel, chief product officer at Rokt, put it, AI excels at the mechanical and analytical, the “spatial reasoning stuff,” but people bring the empathy, curiosity and originality that machines can’t replicate.

That missing human factor is apparent, and potentially dangerous, when it comes to the changing world of social media where feeds are now embedded with AI-created content that merges real-world with simulations.

In a panel called “The Creator’s Edge: How AI Is Redefining Influence,” futurist and YouTuber Taryn Southern pointed out the hazards of AI in a creative space such as social media.

“I’m concerned about the same thing I was concerned about 10 years ago, which is the underlying incentives governing these platforms and how those underlying incentives will push the use of AI in a negative way that we don’t want. We’re already seeing clickbait rewarded with followers,” Southern said. “In this way, are we also going to see accounts that are untruthful, dishonest, provocative win? And when that happens, what does that do to society? What does that do to truth?”

Sofia Hernandez, global head of business marketing and commercial at TikTok, even echoed the sentiment: “I don’t know that we can trust the system or everyone else putting out the content, so we just have to be better and more diligent. It’s about media literacy and thinking critically.”

At a time when headlines often focus on replacement, the message from this stage was refreshingly human: AI can accelerate ideas, but only people can give them meaning and direction.

As Nadja Bellan-White, group CEO of M&C North America told The Current: “I’ve been in this industry for 30 years, and if you assume that this machine knows more than I do after 30 years, you’re making a mistake. The machine can’t look in a CEO’s eyes and say, ‘There’s a problem here.’”