At the nearly $4 billion-valued Luma AI, roughly twenty percent of the workforce consists of active creators, including filmmakers, designers, and visual artists.

“We don’t just create the technology,” explains CEO and co-founder Amit Jain. “We create the models and the agents, and then we go in and help companies build their teams and the tools to do this end to end.”

A physicist by trade, Jain previously spearheaded Apple’s Vision Pro Passthrough feature and the integration of initial LiDAR sensors into the iPhone line.

His core pitch to corporate brands is straightforward: “You know your brand best. Don’t outsource that. Build a team of great people in-house who live and breathe your brand, then work with our partners and us to bring it to life at global scale.”

This serves as a direct challenge to an entire sector built on agency intermediaries. To facilitate this in-house transition, Luma deploys its own internal artists and filmmakers directly into client operations—a concept borrowed from enterprise tech labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which embed engineers with their customers.

As Jain succinctly puts it, “Imagination just got a team.”

The Industry Parallel: Ball Knows Ball

True experts naturally recognize peer expertise. Luma's creative personnel originate from the very industries their clients inhabit, and they possess deep fluency in artificial intelligence, enabling them to communicate seamlessly with corporate in-house departments.

Much like enterprise software deploys systems integrators to ensure smooth enterprise integration, forward-deployed creatives guide brands through generative AI adoption. They immerse themselves in brand identity to help internal teams construct the precise infrastructure they require.

Alexia Adana, who served as Luma’s inaugural forward-deployed creative, observed how poorly structured AI integration typically unfolds. “It was coming from the top down, a mandate: you’ve got to use AI,” she recalls. “But there was nothing else, no training, no support.” She notes, “We don’t ever give the platform and then just say, good luck. No matter what level of skepticism you have, no matter what level of expertise, you’re a creative. You like to make things. So let’s start there.”

Describing her dual role, Adana bridges the gap between software developers and client problem-solving. This feedback loop directly spawned Layers, Luma’s popular image-editing tool. When brand designers repeatedly hit roadblocks trying to alter a single element of an almost-complete asset, clients, Luma creatives, and engineers engineered a solution together. Layers now allows creatives to modify one isolated detail while protecting the rest of the image composition.

The Mounting Pressure on the Legacy Agency Model

Jain believes the true existential threat of artificial intelligence targets the traditional agency framework, where creative professionals can easily be reduced to expendable resources rather than empowered talent. “Humans are not machines,” he asserts. “We’re not good at producing the same thing 30 times, but we’re very good at making something spectacular once and then moving on to the next thing.”

“Brands actually aren’t waiting around,” notes Jain. “Our best customers are some of the largest companies in the world that you might consider legacy. They have the most to gain.” While conventional processes often involve hundreds of vendor partners and six-month planning loops, some major players are bypassing their agencies entirely, approaching Luma directly to request internal team-building assistance.

Luma maintains a selective roster of agency partners, including Publicis and Serviceplan, alongside massive enterprise clients such as Coca-Cola, Adidas, Visa, Mazda, and Lufthansa. However, Jain cautions that traditional agencies can occasionally “slow you down,” leading Luma to seek out agency partners actively committed to transforming their workflows.

Infinite Studios Bridges Craft and Code

Adrienne Lahens began her journey by studying the workflows of independent AI artists. Following her work helping establish TikTok’s Creator Marketplace and rolling out TikTok Symphony—the platform’s AI advertising suite—she immersed herself in the AI artist ecosystem to understand their core operational needs. The standouts in this space, she observes, are brilliant problem-solvers who approach creative hurdles with technical precision.

Lahens co-founded Infinite Studios alongside Chief Product and Technology Officer Mehmet Bal, who previously managed engineering divisions at Adobe, including the Firefly initiative.

Infinite's production platform leverages proprietary AI agents to assist creators, brands, and agencies in conceptualizing and executing creative direction, enabling them to generate, adapt, and scale content seamlessly.

Campaigns are dead. We need to be thinking as a content engine and a modular storytelling system. — Adrienne Lahens, Co-founder and CEO, Infinite Studios

Lahens' past experiences heavily shaped the company's software architecture. Having witnessed firsthand where brand-creator collaborations break down, she notes that a typical creator video often undergoes manual review by roughly five brand teams via email threads. She estimates that nearly a third of those videos ultimately get shelved due to minor revisions, such as adjusting a logo or sharpening a product label. Infinite allows creators to execute these fixes independently while managing revisions from brands and agencies without compromising artistic intent.

The forward-deployed creatives at Infinite operate as “a hybrid of a creative and an engineer,” according to Lahens. They evaluate organizational metrics and objectives to customize systems explicitly tailored to client goals.

Offering advice to contemporary marketers, Lahens urges them to expand their ambitions. “This space is no longer constrained by production or budget. This space is constrained by imagination,” she states. Furthermore, she stresses that “campaigns are dead. We need to be thinking as a content engine and a modular storytelling system.” She also discourages superficial automation: “There isn’t really efficiency in just pressing a button and getting cheap outputs. There’s efficiency when you build the right infrastructure and the right system to actually scale creative in a way that’s truly intentional, truly on brand.”

A prime example is Infinite's work with First Round Collective—the joint venture between Diageo and Main Street Advisors responsible for Cîroc and Lobos 1707. For the Cîroc Athletic Club lifestyle initiative, Infinite combined forward-deployed creative talent with systems engineering to build a two-stage generative workflow. While stage one manages photorealistic asset generation (covering casting, styling, composition, and brand color alignment), stage two applies an Impressionist-inspired aesthetic. This ensures bottle shapes, typography, and color signatures remain strictly consistent across vastly different artistic explorations.

The Blueprint for Modern CMO Creative Teams

If imagination has officially secured its own dedicated team, as Jain contends, contemporary Chief Marketing Officers must carefully evaluate their internal roster. Moving forward, competitive advantage will belong to in-house creatives who intimately understand their brand, working shoulder-to-shoulder with forward-deployed technologists who master the underlying tools. Any agency hoping to retain its relevance will need to master both domains.