The Everyman Cinema in Lincoln became the unlikely setting for one of the most honest conversations about creativity and automation that eCommerce professionals would have all year. eComOne’s Live & Uncut event on January the 29th 2026 didn’t promise easy answers about AI versus human capability. Instead, speakers challenged the premise entirely, asking whether the rivalry was even real or just a convenient narrative that missed the point.
Between live podcast recordings, panel discussions featuring brands like Hair Syrup and IMP & Maker, and presentations from Shopify’s partnerships team on agentic commerce, attendees witnessed something rare: practitioners admitting discomfort whilst offering frameworks for moving forward anyway. No one pretended to have it all figured out. Everyone acknowledged the ground was shifting beneath their feet.
Rowan Payne, Senior Creative at eComOne, opened his presentation with a provocation disguised as Jane Austen. What followed was an examination of creativity under pressure, the evolutionary biology of risk-taking, and why the printing press didn’t destroy authorship but amplified it. His talk, “Sense & Sensibility & Silicon,” reframed the AI debate entirely.
Live & Uncut: Sense & Sensibility & Silicon
Presented by Rowan Payne Senior Creative eComOne
In the process of making this talk, I aimed to examine creativity at a moment when many creators feel their control slipping. As AI becomes more capable, decisions that once demanded judgment now appear automated. The concern is familiar: that effort is being replaced by convenience, authorship by output, and intention by efficiency.
To frame this tension, I opened with a line I attributed to a version of Jane Austen that might work in a marketing agency in lincoln today:
In practice, this idea is usually simplified to necessity is the mother of invention. Many creatives believe their best work emerges under pressure. I’ve felt this myself, working late, compressed timelines, decisive moments. But while this behaviour is common, evidence suggests it is not optimal. It is habitual, not heroic.
Research conducted by primatologists in 2013 offers a useful parallel. When orangutans were placed in environments of scarcity, they did not become more inventive. They became conservative. Movement reduced. Novelty was avoided. Survival took precedence. Risk, in these conditions, was simply too costly.
When those same animals were observed in low-risk environments, where food was reliable and mistakes carried little consequence, behaviour changed. Exploration increased. Play emerged. Problem-solving followed. Creativity returned not through pressure, but through safety.
Human behaviour mirrors this pattern. Studies on financial stress consistently show a reduction in creative problem-solving when cognitive resources are consumed by urgency. Stress narrows attention, suppresses risk-taking, and pushes decision-making toward the familiar. Under pressure, the mind does not explore; it protects.
Pressure does not sharpen creativity. It compresses it.
Creativity flourishes when failure is survivable. This is where AI enters the discussion, and where the debate is often misframed.
AI is frequently positioned as a rival to human creativity. This framing is flawed. AI does not remove agency, it removes friction. It lowers the cost of experimentation. It reduces the penalty for being wrong. It creates space to try, discard, and try again.
Humans are exceptional intuitive thinkers. We synthesise vast amounts of qualitative information to reach decisions we cannot always explain but frequently trust. As Isaac Asimov put it: “I don’t know how I know, I just know.” We are also capable of expressing emotion and meaning in endlessly inventive ways.
Where we struggle is logic without context. Our brains actively distort data to avoid discomfort. We are particularly poor at processing large quantities of numerical information. The Approximate Number System explains why we instinctively understand “twice as big” but struggle with marginal differences or complex percentages. This is not a weakness, it is an evolutionary trade-off.
AI excels precisely where we do not. It calculates without fatigue. It compares without bias. It models outcomes without anxiety. By offloading this cognitive burden, AI allows creative professionals to focus on judgment rather than arithmetic.
This relationship between creativity and technology is not new. Jane Austen’s work is often romanticised as solitary genius, but the reality is more practical. Her novels were shaped through revision, correspondence, and response. She relied on the infrastructure of her time, paper, postal systems, and print, to refine her thinking. Technology did not dilute her voice. It amplified her discernment.
The same pattern appears elsewhere in history. Jean-Paul Marat did not ignite revolutionary sentiment through force or position, but through access. His newspaper, L’Ami du peuple, leveraged the printing press to distribute ideas at scale. The press did not invent those ideas, it removed the bottleneck. Suddenly, influence was no longer reserved for kings.
When tools become widely available, value shifts. When everyone could capture life realistically, realism stopped being the point. When creation becomes accessible, taste becomes decisive.
Today, creators face increasing pressure and shrinking margins for error. If we are to adapt, we must rethink authorship. The most effective creators will not be those who produce the most, but those who direct best. The role shifts from musician to conductor, setting tempo, shaping direction, and deciding what does not belong.
This is how I now work. When I recognised that a client’s strategy required a complete overhaul but struggled to articulate why, I used AI as a structured sounding board. I wrote freely, unpolished, instinctive, and asked the system to turn those thoughts into questions. One of them cut straight to the issue. Not an answer. Clarity.
In my personal research, AI functions as a reference engine. It surfaces summaries, contrasts schools of thought, and compresses large bodies of work into an accessible context. This does not replace judgment; it sharpens it by expanding the field of view.
In a recent account audit, a minor anomaly in sales data stood out, nothing impossible, just improbable. By modelling ninety days of unit-level transactions with AI, we identified duplicated purchases with near certainty. The resulting insight reduced wasted ad spend by over £8,000 per month. The conclusion was achievable without AI, but at significantly higher cost in time and attention.
In each case, AI did not act independently. It followed the direction. It extended capacity. It executed where precision mattered and stepped aside where judgment was required.
In every era, new tools provoke fear that something essentially human is being lost. History suggests the opposite. What defines human contribution has never been the tools we use, but the decisions we make with them.
Ready for more? We’ve got 200+ podcast episodes waiting for you over at the eComOne Podcast.
