The Challenge

Design touches nearly every function at Cloudinary, but as the company scaled, so did the volume of everyday creative requests: decks, campaign assets, social graphics, internal comms. When turnaround couldn't keep pace, teams began self-serving with DIY or outsourced work that drifted from brand standards, eroding not just visual polish but customer trust in the product itself.

My Role

I conceived, own, and am directing this initiative end-to-end, strategy, system architecture, and creative vision, partnering closely with Sales leadership and GTM teams to define requirements and use cases. Two designers on my team are building it out under my direction.

The Approach

Rather than scaling headcount to meet demand, I set out to scale the system: an AI-powered brand infrastructure that lets any team at Cloudinary generate on-brand content and design independently, while keeping designers focused on the strategic work only they can do.

My guiding principle for the project, and for how I lead creative in the AI era generally:

"We will use AI and perfect its strengths, while preserving our own."

The system pulls together Cloudinary's own platform (Assets, metatagging, Moderation) with content and visual guidelines, and integrates with the tools teams already work in, Slack and Monday, so brand compliance happens automatically. It:

• Generates on-brand content - landing pages, email, decks, and ads, checked against brand voice and diction
• Generates on-brand design - typography, color, and layout from our visual system, with approved imagery sourced from Assets by metatag (never AI-generated)
• Routes for human approval automatically, sending drafts to the right content or design reviewer
• Feeds sales enablement - the same libraries and guidelines power personalized, brand-grade outreach in our AI SDR tool; enterprise accounts stay human-led, smaller accounts self-serve

Bringing It to Life: The Biennale Gathering

I directed an interactive booth experience that launched and demoed the system publicly at Cloudinary's Gathering event at the Venice Biennale. Attendees picked a real business need (a deck, an ad, a campaign asset, an event-branded social post), generated it live at the booth, and had it sent straight to their inbox, brand compliance built in by default, nothing to carry home.

Why It Matters

This is what AI-first creative leadership looks like when it's grounded in expert craft, not replaced by it: using AI to remove friction from routine production, while keeping designers upstream on the strategic, editorial, and brand-defining work only they can do. It's a system built by designers and used by everyone, proof that scaling a brand doesn't require choosing between speed and standards.

Outcome / Impact

[Add specific outcomes here: adoption across teams, reduction in production requests/turnaround time, Sales team engagement with AI SDR integration, Biennale attendee engagement/reception, executive feedback]