Class 24: Capstone Presentations. "One of the most powerful things you can learn is when to walk away from the tools."
With Tony Jones (ex-Executive Creative Director, McCann; Co-founder, Creative AI Academy).
The class in brief
This was the final class of the 24-session Certificate Course in AI Design. Four capstone teams presented their Coca-Cola holiday campaigns to instructors Dominik Heinrich and Tony Jones and guest lecturers Ceren Topçu-Weigand and Sydney Seifert-Gram, then closed with a checkout round.
Dom's framing question ran under the whole night: models reason well close to the brief but cannot reach a genuine breakthrough on their own, so the humans in the room stayed the ones deciding what to keep.
After this page you know what each of the four teams built, the line Dom used to describe what creative people are not good at yet, and the lesson the graduating class named as its own.
The presentations
Four teams, one Coca-Cola brief
Only one team's process artifact survives in this record, the node workflow below from Trevor's group. The other three teams are described from notes only, with no comparable screenshot captured that night.
Team Girly PopJenny, Colleen, and Eunice Arce · "In My Giving Era"
A champagne-form holiday bottle with a peel-off label that becomes a donation shipping label.
- Scan the QR code.
- Land on a microsite.
- See a local Salvation Army's stated needs.
- The label ships the donation.
Colleen's working method was to upload screenshots of outputs she liked and tell the tool to train on them, inside a Claude Project that kept referencing the same source documents.
Group 2Trevor, Jayme Markus, and Jina Alhenawi · "The off-duty ritual"
"While it fizzes, you're off duty": a rule of three built into packaging itself, from a two-pack made to tear and share through a six-pack that plays a brown-noise Spotify track through built-in cardboard speakers.
Trevor, presenting for the group, batch-rendered the deck's key visuals in Figma Weave. The team's video used Seedance 2.5, run inside Krea, with Claude expanding each clip prompt to keep the actor and setting consistent from shot to shot.
Group DTim Petrochko, Dani Kaufman, Liza, and Sherry · "Extra Special Coke"
A six-pack sold with one extra can at the six-pack price, the extra meant to be given away, packaged in a recycled-plastic snowflake carrier built to be reused.
- Sherry wrote the pitch's jingle lyrics herself and generated the track in Suno.
- Liza mapped the idea's ripple effects across a season.
- Dani built a C-suite persona tool that could not be shared because it mimicked real named people closely enough to break platform guidelines.
- Tim opened the deck's first three slides and closed with a backwards-told story, handing off the middle section to Dani after his internet connection failed mid-presentation.
The Brass QuartetPaul Goodridge, Boris, Shuri Hyoun, and Spencer Delorenzo · "The World's First Open"
At midnight in each time zone, the first Coke opened reveals a wish sealed under the cap the previous December, then the signal relays on to the next zone.
Boris fed ChatGPT a set of 1960s Coca-Cola posters as reference, produced roughly fifteen keyframes from it, and animated the sequence in Seedance 2.5, run inside Krea.
The team judged three synthetic personas against the idea and found that each persona wanted to own what the ritual meant to it personally.
The frame
Models reason well close to the brief. They cannot reach the breakthrough on their own.
Dominik shared a slide from Adobe's head of AI research: intelligence is jagged, a static model cannot keep learning as it works, and rule-based systems are too rigid for brand nuance.
His proposed fix was a self-introspection loop: one output gets handed to a second pass with a different angle before a human ever sees it.
He then asked Tim directly about the assistant Tim had built and used across the semester, a notetaker that archives transcripts and pulls connections from classes several sessions back.
Dom's answer to his own question, after hearing it: designers are already good at evolving an idea, but not at continually checking whether that evolved idea still fits the original brief, the strategy, or the persona it was written for.
"What we are actually not good at is linking back if this still fits the brief, the overall idea, the persona. We don't do that much."
Dominik Heinrich, responding to Tim's description of his notetaking and archive tool
Where the class closed
The lesson the graduating class named as its own
Sydney Seifert-Gram and Tony both pointed to the same moment from Group D's process: partway through, the tool the team was using fixated on a detail that was not actually a problem, and the humans on the team overruled it and moved on.
Sydney called that the most useful thing a class like this can teach: recognizing the moment to set a tool aside rather than keep arguing with it. Two other checkout words carried the same thread.
Liza's word was "piqued." Just before it, in her own biggest-learning answer, she said AI still needs human input to succeed. She added that this holds true at a greater scale than most people hoping for transformation expect.
Trevor's word was "broad." He explained it as seeing everything available, then choosing the four to six tools that fit how he actually works, and knowing when to step away from the rest.
The night closed with practical next steps:
- An invitation to book office hours with Tony Jones to keep the community going.
- Word of a higher-level leadership certification the instructors are building for early next year.
- Ceren's reminder that the Pratt SCPS exhibition was still open for submissions, with the capstone decks themselves eligible as material.
The shelf
Tools and references
Tools named that night
- Figma Weave, for batch-rendering key visuals from a node-based pipeline
- Seedance 2.5, run inside Krea, for animating keyframes and generated clips
- Suno, for the generated jingle track
- Claude, used to expand and steady video clip prompts across shots
Named in the room
- Coca-Cola's "the vote will wait" campaign, launched days before the presentations
- Creative AI Academy, Dominik and Tony's corporate training company
- The Pratt SCPS exhibition, open for submissions the week of this class
Every frame from this class
1 capture, in order. Classes 22 and 23 were work nights with no capture archive; this single frame is class 24's record on the site.