What the enterprise needs is gloriously human: Key lessons from ServiceNow's Ryan Hammill

Ryan Hammill started his career writing sports and crime reports on deadline at the Orange County Register. From there: an advertising portfolio, an agency job in the same building they later shot Westworld, seven years at Amazon across advertising, Amazon Music, and AWS, and finally ServiceNow—where he now runs global brand campaigns as Principal Creative Director.

That path matters because it produced someone who thinks about enterprise creative from an unusual angle: not just as an aesthetic problem, but as an operational one.

Hammill has run campaigns that reached over eight billion people globally through NFL, Formula 1, and PGA partnerships at AWS. He has also managed the unglamorous work of making those campaigns run in twelve countries on a budget that had to stretch. When he talks about what AI changes for creative teams—and what it doesn’t—he’s working from a very specific kind of experience.

Hammill joined Capsule’s Creative Table session for a conversation hosted by Capsule CEO Champ Bennett on the role of humanity in enterprise creative work at the moment AI has made production cheaper and faster than ever.

The session—titled "What the Enterprise Needs Is Gloriously Human"—wasn’t a conversation about AI replacing creatives. It was a conversation about what the creative leader’s job actually becomes when the tools change.

The Jeff Bezos principle, applied to creative

Hammill opened with a mental model he took from his time at Amazon: a piece of Bezos thinking he’s found genuinely useful beyond the e-commerce context.

"Don’t think about what’s coming next. Think about what will never change."

For Amazon, Bezos applied this to customers: people will always want lower prices, more selection, more convenience. If you solve for those things consistently, you win regardless of what technology arrives. Hammill tried to apply the same logic to creative: what are the things that never change?

His answer was three: never be boring, never be irrelevant, never be insincere.

The first two are familiar enough. Boring work fails immediately. Irrelevant work—work that gets attention but has no utility or meaning in context—fails almost as fast. But the third one, Hammill argued, is the one people struggle with most, and it’s the one AI most directly threatens.

Sincerity means showing up as something genuine rather than as a performance of what a brand is supposed to sound like. It means resisting the accumulated jargon of enterprise software—words like “solution,” “impactful learnings,” the AI-era equivalents that have already wallpapered the drive from SFO into San Francisco.

ServiceNow’s creative team pushed on this principle enough to bleep out an F-bomb in a B2B ad—not as a stunt, but as an expression of how the company actually sounds when it’s being honest about what work is like.

"That’s a very sincere version of us showing up," Hammill said, "that doesn’t include the word ‘solution’ or ‘impactful learnings’ or any of this other jargon."

Taste vs. humanity: Why the distinction matters

One of the sharpest ideas in the session was Hammill’s argument against the conventional wisdom that’s currently circulating in creative circles—the idea that AI will favor people with taste.

He’s skeptical of that framing, and his reasoning is specific: taste is exclusionary. When someone says “AI will favor people with taste,” what they’re often saying is that the people at the top of the creative hierarchy—CMOs, creative directors, the senior arbiters of what’s good—will be the ones who survive the AI era, because taste can’t be replicated. There’s a self-serving quality to that argument.

Humanity is different. Humanity isn’t about whether something is sophisticated or refined. It’s about whether something is real, whether it moves you, whether it proves a person was actually there. And it’s harder to dismiss. You can argue about whether something has taste. You can’t argue about whether it made you feel something.

"It’s not even taste—it’s humanity," Hammill said. "Because I think that taste in some way is exclusionary."

That distinction has practical implications for how creative leaders think about what AI does to their teams. If the question is “who has taste?”—that’s a question that sorts people by seniority and expertise. If the question is “who can make something provably human?”—that’s open to anyone with something genuine to say.

What “provably human” looks like

Hammill used a series of examples to make this concrete.

KLM Airlines produced a safety video animated on Delft ceramic tiles—the blue-and-white hand-painted pottery associated with the Netherlands. The video played as a frame animation. At the end, the camera pulled out to reveal thousands of individual tiles that had been hand-painted to make the animation. The proof of craft became the content itself.

Apple’s TV launch video was shot on actual film or optical prism—something that could have been AI-generated but deliberately wasn’t, and that choice was visible in the final product.

And then there’s Hammill’s daughter and her friends. They’re thirteen, and they’ve stopped using filters. Instead, they take wide-angle selfies that distort their foreheads, or photograph their feet, or send each other pictures that seem willfully bad. The point is exactly that: to prove they made it.

"Show me that you’re not a robot," Hammill said. "Prove that you’re not a robot."

This is where things get interesting for enterprise creative. The craft move and the teenager move are actually the same move: both are proving humanity by doing something that AI, optimized for correctness and visual quality, would not do.

As AI production gets more sophisticated, the things that prove a human was involved are increasingly the things that are strange, imperfect, or specific in a way that an optimization process wouldn’t choose.

Hammill even proposed—half-joking—that the next great Super Bowl ad would contain a typo in the closing frame, and that people would lose their minds on social media over it. "Provably human," he called it.

How humanity shows up in real creative work

Hammill shared three campaigns from his AWS tenure that illustrated these ideas in practice.

The F1 campaign for AWS ran in 2024. It used bespoke AI developed by Rascal Post inside Flame to create what appeared to be a live-action commercial. Almost everything in the middle of the spot—the people, the car, the environments—was AI-generated. Only the opening and closing shots were real.

The spot ran across twelve countries. The creative concept—a lens through which data becomes visible—was human. The production used AI to execute at a scale that would have been impossible with traditional methods.

The NFL campaign for AWS was shot over a week at an indoor football facility at the University of Florida. A Technocrane, practical snow, a 360-degree crane shot, and AI-powered data physics rendered in Flame—seventeen times, because the flakes were too big or the glow was too much and they had to re-render and re-comp.

This was prior to the current generation of generative tools; Hammill noted that what took four to five weeks then could probably be produced in a week now.

The Curiosity Kid campaign for AWS addressed a different problem: how do you explain what a cloud computing platform actually does, in a way that travels across very different markets?

The answer was to explain it like you would to a child—specific, concrete, and relatable. The campaign ran in multiple countries, cast for market maturity, and was shot in a "supershoot" over ten days in Cape Town to cover five different locales. The cost savings over shooting in each country separately: more than $1.5 million.

The long tail of human storytelling

The session’s final act was about scale in a different direction: not how to make big campaigns bigger, but how to make content available to the people inside large organizations who have something genuine to say and no way to say it in video.

Hammill told a story about a marketing manager in Paris at ServiceNow who made videos that felt like Michel Gondry—paper craft, handmade customer logos, AI doing the animation and scene transitions.

The content was human and specific and “very French,” as Hammill put it. It wasn’t the highest craft level he’d ever seen. But it was genuine, it was for an audience that knew her, and it performed.

"She’s a part of that community," Hammill said. "She understands what moves the French sensibility for storytelling in a way that I can’t."

The enabling condition was access to tools that let her make something. Not the premium production infrastructure that runs an NFL campaign, but enough to take what was previously a deck slide and turn it into something that scales.

This is the dynamic Hammill believes is opening up: as the tedious, expensive parts of video production get automated, more people can participate in the human parts.

There are people inside every large organization with a genuine story to tell and twenty customers who would care about it—people who never made video before because the barrier was too high.

"Automating those parts will allow more and more people to participate in the human parts of video making," Hammill said.

The takeaways for creative leaders

The question Hammill returned to throughout the session was not whether AI replaces creatives, but what the creative leader’s job becomes when production cost collapses.

His answer is essentially: the same thing it’s always been, but the stakes are higher because the competition has more shots.

When everyone has the same tools, efficiency stops being a differentiator. What remains is the idea, the sincerity, the proof that a human was there.

The brands that can maintain those things at scale—not by locking everything down, but by enabling more people inside their organizations to tell genuine stories within a governed creative system—will be the ones that don’t get lost in an avalanche of AI-generated content that looks polished and means nothing.

"It’s not about making faster widgets," Hammill said. "It’s about making more powerful stories."

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