Kia AI assistant

In 2023, Kia wasn't just refreshing a logo. They were repositioning the entire brand around a new design philosophy, "Opposites United," a vision that finds harmony between the organic and the technological, between nature and precision engineering. And they were doing something quietly ahead of its time: investing seriously in an AI assistant before the world had caught up to what that meant.

This was before ChatGPT was widespread, before AI assistants became a cultural conversation. The infrastructure, the expectations, the vocabulary for what a brand AI could be were all still being invented. That context made the producing more interesting and more demanding. We weren't referencing a playbook. We were helping write one.

I was the producer on the project day to day, and one of the things I brought to it was a genuine understanding of Korean culture and how Kia's team thought and worked. Bridging creative and strategic intent across cultures requires more than clear communication. It requires knowing what's being said underneath what's being said. Being able to show up for the Kia team in that way built a level of trust that shaped the entire project. It's part of why, during a period when in-person work had largely disappeared, the Kia brand team flew in for a hands-on workshop with us at Buck. That kind of investment from a client reflects the quality of the relationship as much as the work.

Internally, my focus was keeping the Buck team closely aligned to Kia's vision as it evolved. "Opposites United" is a rich and specific idea, and the risk on a project like this is that it becomes surface-level aesthetic rather than something with real philosophy behind it. Staying close to the Kia team meant we could course correct quickly and keep the creative rooted in something meaningful.

The assistant rolled out globally, embedded across Kia's ecosystem as a permanent expression of the brand's future direction. Looking back, it feels like an early signal of where everything was heading. Producing at that frontier, before the tools and the culture had fully arrived, is exactly the kind of challenge I find most exciting.