Ignite your company’s growth through a new 🧠 creative strategy in 2026

What will companies need from creative strategists in 2026?

AI has dominated the strategic goals of all businesses and companies, small or large in 2015, and it is more crucial, now than ever, for creatives to adopt a technological mindset, whether it’s for understanding the capabilities of the technology, how it works, or how to leverage it for increased efficiencies or streamlined processes. This knowledge will help us make informed strategic proposals for clients, whilst supporting them zero-in more on their goals and objectives.

However, as technology’s impact on human life is increasing, there is naturally a wider gap that is growing between humans and brands, and also between humans themselves. For example, customer support calls are replaced with chat bots. Assistants are replaced with ai, and a phone call to a friend is being replaced by a quick voice chat with Alexa.

In 2026, the ethical role of a creative strategist will be to find the right balance between technology and humanity, and to support companies in aligning their business goals and future visions to the capabilities being unlocked by the current economic shifts and human needs. We should provide the narratives that guide companies to move in a direction that unifies both humanity and technology into a more ethical future. The world gets shaped by the professionals who design it. So this is an opportunity for designers, strategists, and companies to shape what comes.

More than that, and in specific, there is a heightened need for the design craft to be balanced with visionary strategic thinkers. So, below are 5 core skills that will enable us to be effective creative strategists to best support our clients.

🎯 Strategic Visioning: The most important aspect of a project is the strategic vision: How does this product or service add value to people? How does it enhance an experience? Why should it exist? How have you proven this to be true? These are core questions to any business, any team, and should be the openers and closers of all projects, led and conducted by anyone, to ensure that its value gets manifested.

🦄 Creative Confidence: Not everyone is a designer -> Everyone is a designer. Anyone can and should be trained to find comfort in ambiguity, embrace different perspectives, and think like a designer. What is needed is empathy, an open mindset, and often times a sketchbook. Then, it's a matter of practice. Engaging teams, clients, and customers in creative workshops is one practical way to enable collective creativity and new ideas to arise.

🧠 Analytical + Creative Thinking: Methods like synthesizing research require both sides of our brain. It is an invaluable skill that helps us remain logical and imaginative at once, setting direction grounded in evidence. This is a super skill for literally anyone, independent of seniority or job type. Adopting analytical and creative thinking mindsets, at once, enables real change and growth.

💪 Adaptation over Adoption: When new tools emerge, it is often the impulse of people to jump on the train and adopt the new ways of doing things without much criticism or questioning. However, we should not feel the pressure to adopt blindly. Trends are an opportunity to adapt and remain flexible. It's a chance to do things differently, without losing focus of the purpose. We should be able to take a different and faster route and perhaps a better vehicle, however to the same destination.

🤷 Storytelling: Working on projects always requires narrative that helps strategists and clients communicate at various phases of a project, whether it’s at Discovery, Syhtesis, Design, or Development, the need to have a shared understanding of the problem, opportunity, and solution space, requires the mindset of persuasive narratives, which takes form verbally, in written text and visual formats.

The world keeps changing and the multi-dimensionality of craft, knowledge, strategy, and technology in one mindset, will be core for us to ignite ethical growth in the brands that we design for, keeping in mind our agency and power in unlocking and reshaping the world.