Craft in the Age of Intelligence

Craft in the Age of Intelligence: How Fearless Experimentation Will Define Our Future at Relevate Health

The distance between an idea and its execution is collapsing.

Computational power that once required entire data centers now runs on our laptops. In just two years, AI capabilities in certain disciplines have leapt from rudimentary to remarkably sophisticated. This isn't incremental improvement; it's a paradigm shift. If you're a designer, a creative, or anyone who builds things for a living, you're feeling it.

Here's what I've noticed: the conversation around AI in our industry is still dominated by fear. Fear that the tools will replace us. Fear that craft no longer matters. Fear that experimenting with something new means admitting what we've been doing isn't enough.

John Cleese once said that nothing kills creativity more effectively than the fear of making a mistake. He's right. That fear, not the technology itself, is the real threat to our work.

I'm writing this as a designer, a creative leader, and someone who has spent the better part of two decades building digital experiences in healthcare. I'm also writing this as someone who believes we're standing at the most exciting inflection point our discipline has ever seen. Not because AI can do what we do, but because it needs the one thing only we can bring to it.

Craft.

It’s the creative, technical, and strategic expertise we've built over years, the instinct for what feels right, the empathy for the patient or HCP on the other end of the screen, the judgment call that gives AI it’s direction and its purpose; that's ours, its what we bring to the table. When we combine that craft with AI, we don't just participate in this transformation. We lead it.

What Relevate Health Is Building

At Relevate Health, we have recently sharpened our focus around two strategic pillars: Point of Learning solutions and Point of Clinical Decision solutions.

Our Point of Learning work is designed to help healthcare professionals (HCPs) refine, augment, and reimagine patient care, through peer-to-peer thought leadership, interactive learning experiences, virtual events, and omnichannel amplification. Our Point of Clinical Decision solutions meet HCPs in the EHR workflow itself, delivering critical insights at the exact moment they're making treatment decisions, navigating access and affordability, or connecting patients to support.

This evolution isn't a pivot away from innovation. It's a deeper investment in it. By focusing our offerings around these two pillars, we've created clearer lanes for AI to accelerate what we deliver. The strategic clarity makes the experimentation more purposeful, not less. Every AI-powered workflow we develop, every prototype we spin up, every agent we build now has a direct line to one of these pillars and, ultimately, to better outcomes for the HCPs and patients we serve.

This maps directly to Relevate Health becoming an AI-empowered organization through purposeful change, unifying our 23+ solutions into a connected ecosystem, supercharging our data capabilities, and scaling our Point of Care breakthroughs by using intelligent automation. AI isn't adjacent to our strategy. It is our strategy.

The Creative Amplifier

For a while, the narrative around AI and creative work felt like a zero-sum game. Either the machines were coming for our jobs, or they weren't. The reality, as it usually does, landed somewhere far more interesting.

Recent research from Harvard Business School and Wharton, published in Harvard Business Review, found that when used intentionally, large language models unlock more creative ideas not fewer. The researchers identified two mechanisms: persistence, or the ability to rapidly generate many variations, and flexibility, or the capacity to combine distant concepts in unexpected ways. The result is a richer ideation phase. But here's the critical nuance: human oversight and curation remain essential to maintain quality and originality. AI amplifies the creative process. It doesn't replace the creative mind.

This echoes what I'm seeing in healthcare marketing. Heather Hunt, VP of Creative Services at Xavier Creative House, put it plainly in MM+M: AI isn't here to replace marketers, it's here to empower them. She argues these tools function as catalysts for innovation, not substitutes for the authentic storytelling and patient empathy that define great healthcare work. She's right to emphasize that ethical adoption, transparency, and regulatory compliance aren't optional in our space. They're foundational.

What gives me the most confidence, though, is what's happening inside our own walls. My colleague Bob DeMello documented his own AI learning journey in his article "My Year of Learning AI", a transparent, thoughtful account of what it looks like to go from curious to capable. It's exactly the kind of internal thought leadership that signals something important: the innovation happening behind the curtain at Relevate Health isn't theoretical. It's real, it's ongoing, and it's coming from people across the organization.

As a member of Relevate Health's AI Center of Excellence (COE), I see this momentum firsthand. The COE exists to systematically integrate AI across our operations, ensuring compliant adoption, fostering innovation, and building organizational readiness. What excites me most isn't the structure. It's the energy. People are genuinely leaning in.

Beyond the Image Generator

When most people hear "AI in design," they picture generated images or maybe a chatbot drafting copy. That's a fraction of what's possible, and frankly, it undersells the opportunity.

Here's what AI looks like in our work today at Relevate Health: We’re using it for developing personas, building richer, more nuanced profiles of the HCPs and patients we're designing for. We’re using it for rapid prototyping, spinning up interactive concepts in hours instead of weeks. We use it for vibe coding (yes,that's a real term), where AI helps us explore technical feasibility alongside creative direction in real time. We're using it to draft and refine product requirement documents, ensuring our thinking is sharper before a single pixel gets pushed. We're building proof-of-concept experiences that would have taken entire sprint cycles a year ago. And we're developing entirely new agent workflows that reimagine how our teams collaborate with these tools.

This isn't AI as a tactical shortcut. It's AI as a strategic partner. The difference matters. A tactical approach asks, "Can AI make this faster?" A strategic approach asks, "Can AI help us think about this differently?" The second question is where the breakthroughs live.

A Personal Commitment to Fearless Craft

John Cleese had another observation that I keep coming back to: “to play is to experiment.” What happens if I do this? What would happen if we did that? The essence of playfulness is an openness to anything that may happen and a feeling that whatever happens, it's okay. You can't be playful if you're frightened that moving in some direction will be wrong. You've got to risk saying things that are silly, illogical, and wrong, because while you're being creative, there's no such thing as a mistake. Any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.

Gary Vaynerchuk approaches it from a different angle but arrives at the same place. He describes spending 39 minutes on a single prompt, not because he's trying to get AI to do his thinking, but because he's using it as a partner to think with him. He treats AI like he's sitting down with a colleague for coffee. This isn't about pushing buttons. It's about partnership. And his insight cuts to the heart of it: the winners won't be the people who are best at operating the tools. They'll be the most creative and the most human.

In that spirit, I'm making a public commitment. These are the expectations I'm setting for myself as a design leader, and I'm sharing them openly because I believe accountability fuels momentum.

My commitments:

• I'll experiment with AI and share what I'm learning. Hoarding knowledge helps no one. The more we share our experiments, the wins and the failures, the faster we all get better.
• I'll become proficient at prompting. This is the new literacy. Understanding how to communicate with AI effectively is as fundamental to our work as understanding typography or information architecture.
• I'll stay alert to opportunities where AI can improve the products, services, and workflows I'm responsible for. Not as an afterthought. As a default lens.
• I'll maintain a very high bar for design quality, regardless of whether humans or bots do the work. AI lowers the barrier to creation. It should never lower the standard.
• I'll never lose touch with the ability to craft with my hands, mind, heart, and gut. This is the non-negotiable. The tools change. The craft endures.

These commitments were inspired by Cameron Moll's thoughtful LinkedIn post on AI expectations for design teams — a framework that resonated with me immediately.

An Invitation

I'm not sharing these commitments because I have it all figured out. I'm sharing them because I don't, and I think that's exactly the point.

The future of design at Relevate Health was never about choosing between human craft and artificial intelligence. It's about recognizing that the most creative, most impactful results come from both, working together, guided by people who refuse to let fear dictate their process.

The competitive advantage we're building by approaching AI with curiosity instead of caution won't just be difficult to replicate. It will be impossible. Because it's not rooted in any single tool or technology. It's rooted in our people, our craft, and our willingness to play.

So here's my invitation: join me. Experiment. Share what you learn. Set your own commitments. Be fearless, not because there's nothing at stake, but because the risk of standing still is far greater than the risk of trying something new.

The distance between an idea and its execution is collapsing. Let's be the ones who close the gap.

References:

External Articles & Research

De Freitas, Julian, Gideon Nave, and Stefano Puntoni. "Research: When Used Correctly, LLMs Can Unlock More Creative Ideas." Harvard Business Review, December 17, 2025. https://hbr.org/2025/12/research-when-used-correctly-llms-can-unlock-more-creative-ideas

Hunt, Heather. "The Future of Healthcare Marketing: Building a Transformative Relationship with AI." MM+M (Medical Marketing and Media), 2024. https://www.mmm-online.com/partnercontent/the-future-of-healthcare-marketing-transformative-ai/

Internal Relevate Health References

DeMello, Bob. "My Year of Learning AI." Relevate Health Blog. https://www.relevatehealth.com/blogs/my-year-of-learning-ai

Relevate Health Solutions Overview. https://www.relevatehealth.com/solutions

Relevate Health Services Overview. https://www.relevatehealth.com/services

Inspiration & Quoted Figures

Cleese, John. Remarks on creativity and play. Via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKvd1pCPOZx/?hl=en

Vaynerchuk, Gary. Remarks on AI as a creative partner. Via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQWoRTGDlNU/?hl=en

Moll, Cameron. LinkedIn post on AI expectations for design teams. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cameronmoll_ai-design-leadership-activity-7336038511889813504-PP5O