Victoria Adams: Why Human Judgment Matters More in the Age of AI

When Victoria Adams started building her career in marketing, the industry looked very different. The tools were different. The channels were different. Websites were still emerging as a serious business requirement, social media did not exist, and artificial intelligence belonged more to science fiction than a marketing plan.

Today, Victoria is Founder, Partner and Creative Director of Excentric, a Canadian agency specializing in branding, design, web and digital marketing for national and international clients across Canada, the United States and the UK. Over the course of her career, Victoria has watched technology fundamentally reshape how marketing is created, delivered and measured.

Now AI is accelerating that change again.

But Victoria does not see technology as the threat to creative businesses that some make it out to be. If anything, she believes it is making one distinctly human quality more valuable: experience.

“Technology can help us move faster, but it still can’t decide where we should be going,” says Victoria. “That is where experience matters. It helps us recognize a strong idea, understand what a client really needs, and know whether something will genuinely move their business forward. Those abilities are becoming more important, not less.”

That perspective comes from building a business that has continually adapted to change, rather than resisting it.

Building a business that keeps evolving

Longevity in the creative industry requires a willingness to continually adapt.

Over the years, Excentric has evolved alongside the needs of its clients. What began in a very different marketing environment has grown into an award-winning creative agency working across brand strategy, creative, digital, web, and video for organizations in health, technology, nuclear and defence, among other sectors.

Victoria believes the challenge is knowing what needs to evolve without losing sight of what makes a company valuable in the first place.

AI may represent one of the most significant shifts yet. But Victoria believes the question for agencies and their clients is not whether to embrace it. It is how to use it intelligently.

The tools are becoming extraordinarily powerful.

Knowing what to do with them is another matter entirely.

When everyone can create, experience becomes the differentiator

As AI makes it easier to create, knowing what is worth creating becomes increasingly valuable.

Generative AI can produce a page of copy in seconds. It can develop concepts, generate imagery, analyze information and dramatically shorten production cycles.

Victoria sees enormous opportunity in that.

But greater capability also creates a new challenge. Businesses can now generate almost unlimited content, ideas and imagery, making strong creative judgment more critical than ever.

“You can generate ideas very quickly now,” Victoria says. “But someone still has to know which one is worth pursuing. More output isn’t necessarily more creativity.”

More importantly, clients rarely come to Excentric because they simply need “a website” or “a campaign.” Behind the requested deliverable is usually a larger business challenge. A company may need to reposition itself, articulate what makes it different, reach a new market, simplify a complicated story or bring a fragmented brand together.

For Victoria, this is where the role of a strong agency becomes increasingly important. As execution becomes faster and more accessible, the agency’s value shifts further toward strategic thinking, experienced guidance and sound judgment: helping clients make sense of their options, challenging assumptions when necessary and ensuring that individual marketing decisions support a larger brand and business strategy.

AI can help accelerate the tactical work but it cannot replace the responsibility of knowing why the work should exist in the first place.

Experience powers innovation

Experience means learning from what has worked or failed in the past and using that knowledge to make better decisions about what comes next.

Years of solving complex brand, marketing and business challenges create a deeper understanding of what makes an idea effective, where opportunities may exist and when a different approach could produce a better result. That perspective allows experienced teams to explore new technologies and new ways of working with greater purpose.

Innovation, then, is not about adopting every new tool or chasing every new channel. It is about asking how new capabilities can improve the thinking, strengthen the creative and ultimately deliver a better outcome for the client.

Technology should expand what a great team can accomplish, not replace the experience and thinking that make the work effective.

Build the company you would want to hire

The best way to build an agency is to think like a client.

That philosophy extends beyond technology into the way Victoria has built Excentric itself.

Early on, she began thinking about a very simple question: if she were the client, what kind of agency would she want to work with?

The answer shaped the business.

She would want access to senior people rather than meeting them during the pitch and then having the work passed down through layers of junior staff. She would want creative and technical people working together rather than operating in separate silos. She would want an agency small enough to care deeply about the work but experienced enough to handle sophisticated assignments.

In short, she wanted to build the company she would want to hire.

Excentric has never pursued growth simply for the sake of becoming bigger. Victoria is more interested in the calibre of the work, the capabilities of the team and the complexity of the challenges they are trusted to solve.

That philosophy has also influenced Victoria’s evolution as a leader. In 2022, she brought longtime colleague Kristy Smith into the business as an equal partner, recognizing that her complementary strengths would help take Excentric into its next chapter. Together, this combination of senior-level creative, brand, digital and technical expertise gives clients access to experienced leadership across every aspect of their brand and marketing.

The advantage of staying human

The more technology can do, the more important the human side of the agency relationship becomes.

As AI makes certain production functions faster and more automated, agencies will need to reconsider how they create value when clients have access to the same extraordinarily powerful tools.

Victoria sees that as a healthy challenge because the most valuable role an agency can play is also one of the hardest to automate.

It is sitting across the table from a leadership team and helping them define what their brand needs to stand for. It is understanding a complex business well enough to identify the story its customers need to hear. It is knowing when a company’s positioning no longer reflects where the organization is going. It is bringing brand, creative, technology and marketing together so that they work toward the same business objective.

And sometimes it is having enough understanding of the client’s business, and enough trust, to say, “We don’t think that’s the right approach. Here’s what we recommend instead.”

That is the role Victoria believes strong agencies will increasingly play: not simply as suppliers of marketing deliverables, but as trusted brand and marketing advisors. AI can enhance that role, giving agencies powerful new ways to work smarter and more efficiently without replacing the strategic guidance clients rely on them to provide.

The creative challenge is finding clarity in complexity

That philosophy is particularly relevant to the sectors in which Excentric does much of its work.

Health. Technology. Nuclear. Defence.

These are organizations with sophisticated products, highly technical subject matter, multiple stakeholders and complex business challenges. Their marketing cannot simply look good. It has to make complicated ideas understandable without oversimplifying them. It has to build credibility. It has to speak to very different audiences while remaining true to a coherent brand.

AI will undoubtedly become an increasingly powerful part of how that work gets done. Victoria welcomes that evolution.

The organizations that succeed will be those that make better decisions about what deserves their attention, what strengthens their brand and what genuinely moves their business forward.

The tools will continue to change. They always have.

Helping clients navigate that change with clarity, confidence and human judgment is the enduring advantage that comes with experience.