The UK creative sector is having a moment. Growing at over 1.5 times the rate of the rest of the economy, contributing £124 billion in GVA and employing 2.4 million people, it is not a sector on the margins (DCMS, 2025).

It is one of the most important engines of growth in the country, and the government knows it.

The ambition is significant. Annual investment in the Creative Industries is targeted to rise from £17 billion to £31 billion by 2035.

UKRI has committed £75.6 million into CoSTAR, the UK’s creative technology R&D network. A dedicated createch sector, the fusion of creative innovation and cutting-edge technology, is projected to generate £18 billion in GVA and 160,000 new jobs over the next decade.

AI sits at the heart of all of it.

And yet, for most creative leadership teams right now, AI feels less like an opportunity and more like an unresolved question.

The potential is obvious. The path forward is not.

Creative people are not resistant to change. In our experience working inside agencies and production studios, they are often the first to spot what a new tool could do.

The curiosity is real and it is widespread.

What holds most creative businesses back is not attitude. It is the weight of what is at stake. Client trust, creative IP, people’s livelihoods, reputational risk. These are not abstract concerns.

They are the lived reality of running a creative business, and they deserve a more considered response than a rushed experiment.

The evidence makes the challenge concrete. Nearly half of all vacancies in the Creative Industries are hard to fill, with specialist and advanced IT skills identified as a growing threat to competitiveness.

Creative SMEs frequently lack the capacity to fund upfront technology investments or access the infrastructure they need to stay competitive.

And while high-growth businesses in the sector secured over £23 billion in equity investment between 2013 and 2023, the unmet equity gap still stood at around £3.1 billion.

The sector is not short of ambition. It is short of the right foundations.

The companies that get the most from AI are not the ones that moved fastest. They are the ones that did the unglamorous work first.

That means asking the questions that tend to get skipped in the excitement of a new tool.

How is our data organised? Where does client IP live and who has access to it? Are our systems and workflows secure enough to introduce new technologies without creating new vulnerabilities? What do we want to keep human, and why?

Data readiness, security architecture, and clear principles around what gets automated are not obstacles to AI adoption. They are what makes responsible adoption possible. And from there, genuine experimentation and scaling becomes something to look forward to rather than something to manage around.

This is not a technology problem. It is a transformation problem. And transformation requires leadership, not just tools.

Both the UK government’s Creative Industries Sector Plan and the UKRI Future Avenues for Createch report are clear that the UK has a genuine opportunity to lead the world in this space, not just as a consumer of AI tools, but as a global standard-setter for how creative IP is protected, licensed, and commercialised in the age of advanced technology.

The UKRI report highlights that almost all leading generative AI models are currently being developed without adequate IP permission or any mechanism to remunerate creators.

This is an urgent issue for every creative business, not just a policy debate.

That opportunity does not belong to the biggest companies. It belongs to the ones with the clearest thinking.

The Creative Industries Sector Plan sets a target for the UK to become the number one destination worldwide for investment in creativity and innovation by 2035.

The businesses best placed to benefit will be the ones building the right foundations now, not the ones still trying to catch up later.

For creative companies, the question is no longer whether AI will reshape the industry. It’s how quickly and confidently they can respond.

The organisations making progress are not necessarily the ones experimenting the most. They are the ones taking a structured approach:

These are not theoretical questions. They were at the centre of our recent AI Transformation breakfast briefing we hosted with Moore Kingston Smith, where creative business leaders came together to work through the practical realities of adopting AI -data readiness, infrastructure, client IP, security, and creative ownership.

This is not about wholesale transformation overnight. It’s about putting the right foundations in place so that change becomes manageable, not disruptive.

At KoobrikLabs, our work with creative teams centres on:

Explore how we support AI transformation for creative teams.