Cash App on keeping creative distinctive in the age of AI

AI has made it easier than ever to produce good-looking ad creative. That’s the problem. When every growth team has access to the same tools, the same models and the same workflows, feeds start to blur into one another, and the advantage that speed once offered disappears.

For Rachel Luo, who works on Cash App’s consumer growth team, the answer isn’t to slow down on AI. It’s to be far more deliberate about what stays human.

From payments app to banking ecosystem

Cash App’s growth challenge has changed as the product has. “Most people know Cash App as the way to send money to friends, but it’s grown beyond that,” Luo explains. “In the last few years, we’ve built out a whole banking ecosystem. The entry point is our customizable, no fee debit card and from there you can buy bitcoin, do your taxes, invest, even get a Mobile Plan.”

Her role sits at the front of that funnel. “I’m on the consumer growth team, so my job is to bring new people to the app. I do creative strategy for our paid ads, with a focus on building AI systems that enable us to create ad content at scale.”

The moment AI clicked

Luo’s career has always sat where growth and creative meet, applying a performance lens to creative work. The turning point on AI came from an unexpected source: Kalshi’s AI-generated NBA Finals ad in June 2025.

“An entire ad made with AI, pushing the limits of what I thought was possible at the time. It woke me up to the ways we could and should be using AI.”

That shift in thinking carried into her previous role at Orchard, where she led the development of the company’s first fully AI-generated TV spot. The Cash App role, with its explicit AI mandate, was the natural next step: “the perfect marriage of two things I’d done before - creative and growth.”

AI raised the floor, not the ceiling

If everyone can now make polished creative, what actually differentiates it? For Luo, the answer is unglamorous but clear: “Taste and a commitment to craft.”

“AI has raised the baseline - more people can make good-looking creative with less skill, which is exactly why so much of it looks the same,” she says. “What sets creative apart now is a distinctive visual brand, rooting your messaging in customer insights and truths, and those still require a level of craft and depth.”

It’s a useful reframe for app marketers. AI is excellent at closing the gap between average and good. It does far less to close the gap between good and memorable, and that’s where brand identity and genuine customer understanding still do the heavy lifting.

What humans should never hand over

As AI takes on more of the production pipeline, the question of where people fit becomes pressing. Luo’s line is firm: ownership.

“Every line of copy and every image we generate, a person should stand behind it as if they’d made it by hand. The risk comes when we step back from responsibility for what we create. That’s when we start getting 35 page docs that could have been 5, and AI slop that no one wants to read.”

The point isn’t about limiting what AI does. It’s about accountability. Volume without ownership produces noise, and noise is exactly what users scroll past.

Remember who you’re talking to

If there’s one principle Luo wants growth teams to hold onto, it’s this: “There’s still a human on the other side of your ads.”

“A few placements now run through layers of LLMs, but most of the time you’re talking to a person. Marketing has always been about understanding human behavior and what motivates it. That hasn’t changed, even as almost everything else has.”

For teams under pressure to ship exponentially more creative, that’s the anchor. Scale is now cheap. Understanding people is not, and it remains the thing that makes an ad work.