The First Draft Principle
How AI gives us a faster way to begin—and more time to be human.
Vignette 1: The Producer in the Studio
In the past, a session with an artist could mean hours of tweaking sounds, building beats layer by layer, hoping to land on something that feels right. Now, a producer sits down, opens a prompt window, and types in a mood: “moody synth, mid-tempo, cinematic, weekend-night energy.” Within seconds, five sonic directions appear. None are final—but one clicks. It becomes the foundation for a sound that evolves with the artist in real time.
What changed isn’t the taste or talent. It’s the timeline. The AI didn’t write the track—it gave them a head start. That’s the First Draft Principle.
Vignette 2: The Strategist in a Boardroom
A brand strategist used to spend days combing through research, trends, and past campaign decks just to build a brief. The synthesis phase was long, sometimes stalling the creative process before it began.
Now, they drop key inputs—objectives, audience signals, cultural moments—into an AI agent trained on the company’s playbook. The agent returns a rough strategic outline—tension statements, references, media ideas. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid start.
They adjust, rewrite, rethink. And in half a day, they’ve built a strategic narrative that might’ve taken a week. Not cutting corners—reclaiming time to think bigger.
The First Draft Principle: Rethinking How We Work in the Age of AI
This principle was born while training teams on our AI-native product. Again and again, I saw the same pattern: the moment someone could go from a single prompt to a usable first draft—in minutes, not days—their entire posture toward AI changed. Skepticism gave way to curiosity; hesitation turned into experimentation. Speed to first draft became the fastest lever for shifting mind-sets.
This isn’t about letting AI finish the job. It’s about letting it start the job—fast. A beat, a sketch, a tagline, a storyboard, a strategy outline. The point isn’t perfection. It’s momentum.
Take a music producer. Where once they’d spend hours building loops from scratch, they can now prompt a model to generate five rough directions in seconds. None of them are “the one,” but one of them sparks something—and from there, the real work begins.
This is true across disciplines. Creative directors, strategists, writers, designers—we’ve all been trained to begin with a blank page. But what if the blank page becomes the second step? First draft thinking means we start from something, not nothing. And from there, we do what only we can do: we edit, refine, elevate, and decide.
The First Draft Principle is not a shortcut around judgment. It’s a faster way to get to the point where judgment matters most.
Why This Matters
The First Draft Principle isn’t just about speed. It’s about unlocking more meaningful work. When we stop spending our best energy getting started, we free ourselves to focus on the parts of the process that actually need us—our taste, our judgment, our humanity.
AI isn’t here to finish the work for us. It’s here to meet us at the beginning, offering a spark. What we do with that spark—that’s still entirely up to us.
Whether you're scoring music, shaping strategy, designing a product, or writing a campaign, the First Draft Principle offers a new way to begin. Sometimes, a better beginning makes all the difference.
Reflection: From Spark to Masterpiece
AI doesn’t erase the blank page—it just makes it appear later in the process. The First Draft Principle shifts the drudgery up front so craft, taste, and creative risk can move center-stage. It’s a reframing of where our unique value truly begins.
/ The Second Draft Is All Yours: Because the first draft is already done.