Retention Edge E26: The Truth About AI Creative

This week on the Retention Edge podcast, we spoke with Sam Davies, Head of Content at Creative Force and Dreem.

The topic was AI - more specifically, how AI is reshaping ecommerce content production, from product imagery and video to speed, trust, and brand differentiation.

Our conversation with Sam centered on a practical question: what changes when high-quality content is no longer gated by budget, studios, and long production cycles?

We talked through the opportunities AI creates for smaller teams, the risks of low-effort “AI slop,” and why taste, judgment, and transparency matter more than ever.

Sam had some crucial insights for today’s creatives who want to scale content production, without completely nuking their trust by leaning too far into AI.

Let’s run through the key takeaways from our chat now.

Speed Is Now a Bigger Competitive Advantage Than Budget

For years, high-quality ecommerce content was gated by budget.

Big brands could afford photo shoots, studios, models, reshoots, and long approval cycles. Smaller brands had to make do with whatever they could produce quickly; often at the expense of polish.

Now, AI-powered content tools are collapsing timelines that used to stretch weeks into hours. The interesting thing about this is it’s flipped who has the advantage.

Smaller teams can test creatives, refresh PDPs, and ship new assets faster than enterprise brands stuck in layered approval processes.

That means lean teams actually hold a real advantage now - not necessarily the brands with more money to spend.

One Good Input Can Power Your Entire Content Engine

Instead of planning separate shoots for PDPs, ads, social, and video, today’s AI tools let brands start with a single solid product image and generate multiple outputs from it.

That same input can fuel product pages, paid media, email creatives, and short-form video, without repeating the entire production process.

This “one input: many outputs” model makes consistency easier and reduces the constant scramble for new assets. It also makes it far more realistic to keep content fresh across every channel without ballooning costs.

If you’re not repurposing and reusing content across different areas of your business, you’re playing the game on hard mode.

AI Content Is Only as Good as the Taste Behind It

This is something I believe strongly in.

The brands getting strong results from AI aren’t pressing a button and hoping for magic. They’re treating AI like a junior creative, giving it:

• Constraints

• Context

• Direction

It’s still important to know how a product should look, how a model should move, or how a brand should feel. AI doesn’t replace that.

It rewards judgment.

If your team has taste and clarity, you can scale your creative production to the moon. But without it, you’re left with a mess of noise (and slop!).

Transparency Matters More Than “AI vs Human”

There’s a lot of pushback (and I’m expecting even more this year) around AI content.

But it’s not really about AI itself. It’s about trust. (Especially in ecommerce)

Shoppers care whether an image accurately represents the product, not whether every pixel was captured in a studio.

This is an important distinction for brands hesitant to start using AI.

Brands that are open about experimentation and focused on representation tend to avoid backlash. Brands that try to pass off AI as “real” content risk losing credibility.

AI Lowers the Bar to Entry — but Raises the Bar on Taste

AI makes polished visuals accessible to everyone. With that, clean and polished content is no longer a differentiator.

Looking “good enough” is not good enough anymore. It’s just the baseline; there’s no excuse not to have a certain level of polish.

What will separate strong brands from forgettable ones is consistency, restraint, and identity. Knowing what not to publish will matter as much as knowing what you can generate.

The more our feeds and browsers are flooded with low-effort AI content, the more taste becomes a moat.

The Big Picture

AI doesn’t replace creative teams. It compresses time to execution.

It just means more iterations, faster testing cycles, and a greater importance on knowing what’s good and what’s slop.

With good judgement, lean workflows and the right attitude towards experimentation, you can now compete far above your weight in the creative domain.

Check out the full episode here:

You can get it on Spotify too, if that’s your thing. Wherever you listen, don’t forget to like, rate, review, comment, subscribe. Each interaction helps us bring more experts on to share their wisdom (always free, btw).

If you want to learn more about Sam and what he does, here’s where to get in touch:

• Connect with him on LinkedIn

• Check out his work at:

  • https://www.creativeforce.io/

  • https://dreem.ai/

I’ll be back later in the week with the latest from around the ecom world, plus our regular deep dives into retention and sustainable growth strategies.

Talk soon,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: thinking about launching your own app? Go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.