By PLUS Labs

At PLUS Communications, we’re all in on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI). We’re working closely with our clients in the tech industry on AI policy issues and partnering with them to deploy this exciting technology. We’re also empowering our employees to leverage AI to push the limits of their imagination, and to make our business more creative and efficient

In the first edition of our “AI Innovators” series, we’re featuring Managing Director Ryan Dysart. Ryan wears many hats at PLUS. He’s an innovative digital strategist, a talented designer and ad writer and an early adopter of AI. In recent months, Ryan has built several new tools using AI that are improving our creative process. He’s also an advocate for using AI to improve work flows and business operations.

“Ryan is showing real leadership on AI,” said Partner Chris Georgia. “He’s changing our culture and showing our colleagues how they can use this exciting new technology to advance their careers and deliver for clients. Ryan’s hard work, creativity and willingness to experiment is helping us stay ahead of our competitors and gain an edge in the marketplace.”

“I really enjoy working with Ryan on our advertising projects,” said Partner and Creative Director Trent Wisecup. “Ryan’s curiousity and dedication to mastering AI is strengthening our creative muscles and helping us keep pace with this rapidly-evolving technology. He’s doing stellar work and it’s making a big difference for our business.”

What is your favorite AI video or design tool?

For video, I love Google’s Flow interface for their new VEO3 model. It gives you a bit more control over the shot’s composition while still keeping the creative process really fast and easy.

For design, I go with the tool that wins for best name, also from Google, Nano Banana. Through Omnicom’s OmniAI platform, we get access to the latest image generation models, including Nano Banana via Gemini. It is the highest fidelity image tool I have tried. You know how you will ask AI to add something small to a photo and it ends up redoing half the image? Nano Banana actually listens. You can say, “Take this picture of a house and plant some yellow flowers in front,” and it will give you exactly that, not the same house with a new roof and a different number of windows.

How is AI helping PLUS with creative ideation and storyboarding?

First, let me get on my soapbox. I’m a big believer that AI does not give you good taste. Anyone with a free version of ChatGPT can write a prompt and create a script or even produce actual creative work. But taste, intuition and context are, for now at least, human skills. AI works best when it acts as a human amplifier, working alongside rather than instead of a talented creative.

That is exactly how we use it at PLUS. We are using AI to put a jetpack on our brainstorming process: handing it our own ideas and asking for new angles, taking a half-formed thought and turning it into a multi-dimensional concept or transforming a script we already love into a fully visualized storyboard in minutes. Most importantly, it helps us move faster without losing the quality that makes our work stand out.

What do you find most exciting about AI?

I’m excited by the unbelievably fast pace at which it is moving, but even more excited to see what that means for our team and how we adapt new ways of thinking and working.

The tools themselves will keep changing every few months, so chasing the latest one is less interesting to me than watching our team master the mindset behind using AI. We’ll need to keep experimenting, to try and fail faster and to use AI as a creative multiplier.

What concerns you about this powerful new technology?

My biggest concern is that people will stop thinking critically. It’s super easy to hand your problem to AI and take the first answer it gives you without doing the hard thinking yourself. The best work still comes from refining, questioning and layering in human judgment and experience, not just accepting what is quick and convenient. If we lose that, AI could make us all mediocre. But hey, that is probably what they said about the internet.

How many hours a week do you spend on ChatGPT?

Honestly, about as many hours as I spend at work. It is always open somewhere in the background, ready to help with whatever I am doing, whether that is writing, brainstorming or pretending to know Python.

And then there is the off-the-clock use. I probably owe AI half the credit for my recipes, and I’m sure it’s already sick of me using it as a replacement for WebMD.

With AI, it’s all about the prompts. What have you learned in interfacing with the models?

The best prompts start with context: Your experience, your voice, and examples of what you like or what has worked before. Anyone can ask AI to write something, but the quality of what you get back depends on how clearly you communicate what you actually want. The art is in being specific without overcomplicating, and in avoiding phrasing that sends the model in the wrong direction.

You really need to spend a lot of time with it and start to develop a feel for what kinds of prompts get you what you want and what does not. Over time, you pick up on the patterns, and it becomes more like a conversation than a command. I also really like using personas: Telling the model who it is supposed to be or who it is speaking to makes a big difference in adding tone and perspective you might not get from a blank prompt.

It all comes down to what you put in: Garbage in, garbage out.

Give some advice to our colleagues who are new to AI. What should they do to learn how to use the tools?

I say this to people all the time. Fire up voice mode on your commute, whether you are heading to work or heading home. Just start talking to it. Explain what you do, what kinds of tasks you work on, and the challenges you run into. It will keep you entertained on the drive, and it will naturally start offering ideas, shortcuts and ways to stay organized.

More importantly, those conversations help the tool learn about you. They build up the context that every future interaction is based on, which means you get smarter, more personalized outputs every time you come back.

What’s the next big AI project you want to work on?

Lately I have really gotten into web apps. Disclaimer: I am not a developer by any stretch. But there are so many AI tools that help write the code and take an idea from concept to working tool faster than I ever could on my own. It has been surprisingly doable and a really fun new way to think and problem-solve.

The first app I built was a mockup tool that shows our ads on phones and inside real ad platforms. Since then, I have been adding to the list, including tools for visualizing data, etc. I’m hooked.

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