Get early access to Air’s new AI colleague, your creative team’s new best friend

For today’s creatives, it’s easy to underestimate the amount of time you need to spend on the more trivial, ad hoc tasks. Every day should be a chance to get closer to creative goals, but it’s often made more arduous by small, frequent disruptions that divert our journey to that flow state. The answer isn’t always to deem this unattainable, or learn to adapt to a constant process of disruption, it’s more a question of how the process can be adapted to suit your needs.

Air is one platform that has these particular problems in mind, and has recently launched Paige, a set of AI features described as your very own “AI colleague”. Paige has facial and custom object recognition – which has the ability to query your creative library as if you were talking to your friend or colleague. Paige responds instantaneously with exactly what you’re looking for. It is now open for early access for brands and creatives, who can take part in the customisation of its features.

For Air, “AI isn’t the end of creative work, it’s the beginning”; Paige is focused on automating the tasks that creatives carry out every day, as opposed to a substitution for the creator, or creativity. It’s a handy tool, one aspect of which we’re already quite familiar with. “Anyone with an iPhone can, within seconds, search every photo they’ve ever taken by person and place. At Air, we believe that the same ease should be applied to your content library at work,” says Air head of content, Ariel Rubin. Which is true, the majority of smartphone users will be familiar with the slideshows, the reels automatically collated by month, the way their phones can pool baby photos and present-day photos of the same person into one ‘people’ folder and its other collation skills based on location. This is the same skillset with Paige, only for your many terabytes of work content. “There are infinite questions Paige can answer, like do we have images of the lime Spindrift can from last year? Are there any videos with Tyler in them? Or, do we have approved assets Dio uploaded and commented on?” Ariel adds.

Since launching in 2020, users of the Air platform have been able to make similar requests through its search function. “In countless demos, we’ve seen eyes light up when we show how our AI-powered search can surface a single asset out of thousands, using content-based keywords or colour selection,” says Air senior manager Conor Perkkio. “Creative work has the potential to be truly transformative and yet most creative requests are mundane tasks on existing assets,” adds Rubin. The platform was built to absorb that work of finding, navigating and organising assets, through automatic tags, and eradicating the need for file names. Paige takes things one step further. All of those signing up for early access will benefit from its facial and custom object recognition and natural language and guided search, alongside text recognition for images and video, audio-to-text content search, sharable saved-search boards, enhanced audio tagging and more.

According to Air, creative teams shouldn’t need a dedicated librarian or DAM consultant to help them figure out software or how to navigate content. “It should be easy, it should feel intuitive.” It hopes that Paige will be a tool that enables creatives and creative teams that are fed up with mindless logistics to focus their power on steering creativity and get back to doing the actual creative work they love.

Paige is available for early access. You can find more information and sign up here.