Gelato - AI-Native Creative Function
Rebuilding a creative team for scale, speed, and storytelling
The Brief
When I joined Gelato, the creative team operated as a service desk, responsive, overextended, and struggling to keep up with the company’s pace. With the rapid evolution of AI tools, we set the goal to transform it into a strategic, AI-native function: one that could automate repetitive work, protect brand quality, and multiply creative output without adding headcount.
The Work
The first shift was mindset: Creative’s job wasn’t to produce assets, but to design systems that made great creative inevitable.
We built an automated workflow connecting Figma, Lokalise, Storyblok, and Hubspot through n8n and make integrations, allowing content to move from concept to live in hours rather than days. A unified copy platform, trained on our tone of voice through Claude and Gemini, ensured consistency across every channel. Prompt and tone libraries replaced guesswork with shared intelligence, and modular templates became our creative infrastructure for email, landing pages, and paid assets.
We introduced a tiered workflow model: Self-Serve, Fast-Track, Custom, ensuring that 70 percent of recurring work could bypass bottlenecks. Alongside automation, I rebuilt our briefing and QA systems, giving the team sharper accountability and greater freedom to focus on conceptual work.
The transformation wasn’t just operational, it was cultural. The team shifted from executors to enablers, learning to think like system designers. Velocity increased, standards rose, and confidence which had perceived Ai innovation as a threat, returned.
The Outcome
Within three months, a four-person team was operating at the scale of forty while improving quality and brand cohesion. Automation reduced manual effort by more than 30 percent, freeing capacity for strategy and storytelling. The creative function became Gelato’s internal model for modern marketing and inspiration to other functions, lean, intelligent, and still unmistakably human.