Luma AI And Infinite Studios Are Moving In. Where Do Agencies Fit?

At Luma AI, valued at nearly $4 billion, roughly one in five employees is a working creative: an artist, filmmaker, or designer.

“We don’t just create the technology,” says CEO and co-founder Amit Jain. “We create the models and the agents, and then we go in and help companies build their teams and the tools to do this end to end.”

Jain, a physicist by training, led work on the Passthrough feature for Apple’s Vision Pro and, before that, the integration of the first LiDAR sensors into the iPhone.

His pitch to brands: “You know your brand best. Don’t outsource that. Build a team of great people in-house who live and breathe your brand, then work with our partners and us to bring it to life at global scale.”

That’s a pointed message for an industry built on agencies. To help brands build those teams, Luma embeds its own artists and filmmakers with brand and studio teams to make work alongside them. Luma calls them forward-deployed creatives. The idea comes from enterprise tech, where AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic embed engineers with customers.

As Jain puts it, “Imagination just got a team.”

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Experts recognize experts. Luma’s creatives come from their clients’ worlds, and they know AI. When they collaborate with a brand’s in-house team, they speak its language.

In enterprise tech, companies bring in systems integrators to ensure new software works within their business. Forward-deployed creatives play a similar role for AI. They learn the brand and help the team that owns it build what it needs.

How AI Threatens The Traditional Agency Model

Jain sees AI’s real threat landing on the traditional agency model. In that system, he says, creative people can end up treated as a resource, not as talent. “Humans are not machines,” he says. “We’re not good at producing the same thing 30 times, but we’re very good at making something spectacular once and then moving on to the next thing.”