AI in operations: how we’re turning buzz into business impact

Turning an idea into a finished asset, whether it’s a visual, a voice-over, or a full-funnel campaign, requires navigating a dense web of tools, systems and formats. At Cartel Agency, our AI developers operate at the intersection of creativity and complexity.

Over the past year, our workbenches have seen a fast-evolving stack: from ChatGPT for prompt engineering, ByteDance Seedream, Google Gemini/Imagen, Wan Image, Grok Image, Qwen Image and Reve Create for image generation, to Flux Kontext and Nano Banana for advanced image editing. We use them in tandem with upscaling models like SeedVR, Magnific or Crystal Upscaler to achieve highly detailed results.

Seedance, Kling, OpenAI’s Sora and Google Veo 3 have opened new doors in AI-generated video, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in storytelling.

In the audio space, we tend to use Suno for music and ElevenLabs or MiniMax Speech for voice synthesis. Often, these tools run in parallel, overlapping and interdependent, yet the final result still demands manual finesse to stitch the fragments into a coherent whole. AI is revolutionising the creative process, but doing it well is specialist work. It’s not plug-and-play. It’s craft.

A prompt can take you far, but a truly great idea starts with human insight. And the most striking work, what really moves people, still begins and ends with brilliant designers.

In pitch mode, speed is everything, but quality remains non-negotiable. We used AI to accelerate the creative process without compromising on craft. Character sketches were first drawn by hand, then transformed into photorealistic visuals that felt tangible and real.

Throughout the process, our designers played a central role, choosing the right tools, crafting the initial sketches, imagining the settings, prompting the visuals, and refining them in post-production. They brought coherence to fragmented outputs, composited assets, and added motion and sound to create a unified experience. AI helped us move faster, but the creative direction, storytelling and final polish came from our team.

We aren’t new to AI. For ACM Insurance, we’ve been using it as an essential part of the creative ideas. What are the odds of a dinosaur crushing your car? Exactly. Since we couldn’t get a dinosaur on set, we combined a live-action photoshoot with AI-generated visuals to create the illusion. Our motion designer animated the scene, added sound effects, and made the moment feel almost believable.

This year, we pushed further. Our TV spot itself was produced traditionally, because when it comes to broadcast quality, we don’t compromise. But across the funnel, AI played a key role. Using stills from the TV spot, we quickly generated short-form animations tailored to different touchpoints. It allowed us to extend the creative platform with speed and consistency, without losing the emotional tone of the original concept. The result was a campaign that blended craft and innovation. Because in our workflow, AI isn’t a shortcut. It’s a tool that helps us move faster, stay sharper, and deliver more impact across every layer of the funnel.

Two years ago, we started using AI to solve a very real challenge for Vasco: how to speed up product shoots without compromising on quality or consistency. Vasco wanted a smoother, more efficient creative flow that could keep up with the pace of their product development and show their products in different styles of bathrooms and homes. We stepped in with a hybrid approach that combined traditional production with AI-driven support. By automating parts of the visual creation process, we reduced the time between concept and final delivery. Our team used AI to generate visual variations and build reusable frameworks that made scaling easier. Every asset was curated to stay true to Vasco’s style. This wasn’t about chasing trends or experimenting for the sake of it. It was about solving a problem for the client. Long before the hype around Nano Banana, we were already applying AI to bring speed and creative consistency.