The art of the pitch is like a duel.
“This client ain't big enough for the both of us” type beat. A dusty main street at high noon. Everyone pretending they’re relaxed (but actually wanting to puke behind the nearest cactus.)
The showdowns were dramatic, expensive, and somehow the purest expression of the industry’s competitive spirit. You’d walk into the room with a deck sharp enough to cut steel and hope your rival agency’s idea tripped on its own boots.
It was theatre. And the closest most creatives got to a blood sport without violating HR policy.
Now, the tumbleweeds have AI logos on them and the guns have been replaced with prompt templates. Womp wooooomp.
We’ve entered the “algorithmic suggestion” era.
No standoffs. No sweaty palms. No fragile egos preparing to be shattered by a client who doesn’t actually understand metaphor but still feels comfortable rejecting your entire existence in one swift "no."
Just a polite, unnervingly efficient pipeline where AI generates strategic territories, creative platforms, even first-draft scripts before you’ve even sipped your morning coffee.
Everyone is armed with the same tools, the same starting points, the same vibe. It’s kind of like showing up to a duel and realising both of you were issued identical pistols by corporate.
Where do you compete when the work begins from a shared machine-generated centre of gravity?
Where do you push when “originality” increasingly looks like a glitch?
Because at the end of the day, the pitch isn’t always just about winning business. It’s proving yourself. Your soul. That your ideas had heat and your brain could outrun the other guy’s brain when the stakes were ridiculous and the snacks were free.
The pitch was a cultural ritual that kept agencies feral, creatives caffeinated and strategists convinced their 90-slide narrative arc was actually a public service.
Now automation has flattened the arena.
The client can generate their own ideas before you even show up. Leadership teams quietly ask if a pitch is necessary at all.
Why pit two humans against each other when the AI can spit out five options in seconds? Why rehearse a big reveal when the client already ran your concept through an image generator out of “curiosity” and somehow thinks it’s the same?
The result is the creeping sameness that seems to be taking over every corner of creativity on the planet right now. A great homogenisation.
Not because people are less talented, but because the machine pushes everything toward the median. And when everything is median, nothing feels like a duel. Nothing feels at risk. Nothing feels fun.
THAT’S WHAT I’M GRIEVING. Ok. It’s not just the pitch deck, but the performance of it. The camp pageantry. The cowboy energy. The knowledge that you were about to swing big, bomb hard, charm aggressively, and pray the client’s CFO didn’t ruin everything.
In a world where AI handles the groundwork, maybe the only true creative showdown left is the one between you and the machine.
Is the new "duel" proving you can still think with teeth? That you can twist, subvert, provoke, seduce, or delight in ways no model can automate?
Because the pitch isn’t dead, obviously.
But it has moved. It’s no longer happening in the boardroom. It’s happening internally, every day, in the borderland between human taste and machine efficiency.
And in that showdown, you’re still the cowboy.
But you’ll need to draw faster. And aim weirder.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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