Face Value: How AI Facial Recognition Is Transforming Creative Efficiency

At Air, we've always believed that great content organization is the foundation of creative speed. When your visual assets are properly tagged and instantly searchable, everything downstream moves faster—ideation, production, approvals, and distribution. It's the difference between a smooth creative engine and a workflow filled with frustrating bottlenecks.

But here's the reality we've observed across thousands of customers: custom tagging is simultaneously the most important and most avoided task in asset management. When we dig into why, the answer is always the same: it's too time-consuming.

Our customer data tells a clear story. Creative teams want their assets to be searchable, but the manual labor required to make it happen is overwhelming. For assets featuring people, the challenge is particularly acute. A photo from a company event might contain a dozen faces, each requiring individual identification and tagging. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of images, and you've got a tagging backlog that feels insurmountable.

We built Air to solve real pain points in creative operations. As we watched teams struggle with manual tagging, we kept asking ourselves: What if we could make the most important but time-consuming aspect of asset management virtually effortless? What if we could transform tagging from a dreaded task to an automated background process?

This led us to create Facial Recognition—solving personal frustrations like our endless quest for a professional headshot of Ari, our chronically unserious head of content, while tackling a fundamental workflow challenge for creative teams everywhere.

The Before Picture: Manual Tagging Madness

Let me paint the before picture: A marketing team uploads 200 photos from their latest event. Among these images are the CEO, 25 customers, and various team members. To make these images searchable by person, someone needs to:

• Open each image

• Identify each person manually

• Tag them individually

• Repeat for all 200 images

• Repeat this process for every new batch of photos

For a typical enterprise with 5,000+ assets featuring people, this translates to hundreds of hours annually spent on manual identification. One customer calculated they were spending 48 minutes per 100 images on manual tagging alone.

The human cost extends beyond just time. The creative operations manager at a major retail brand described the process as "soul-crushing busywork that prevented my team from doing the creative work they were hired for."

The After Reality: Recognition in Seconds

With our new Facial Recognition feature, here's what happens instead:

• Upload those 200 event photos

• The system automatically detects and extracts all faces

• Tag a person once, and the system recognizes them across all assets

• Find any image containing specific people instantly

• Focus your valuable human attention elsewhere

The same process that took hours now happens in the background while your team works on things that actually require human creativity.

Beyond Time Savings: The Ripple Effects

While the immediate time savings are obvious, our beta customers reported additional benefits:

• Improved asset utilization: Teams actually use more of their existing assets when they can find them easily

• Better rights management: Quickly identifying which images contain which people makes compliance and usage rights tracking significantly easier

• Reduced duplicate photography: When you can find existing photos of people, you avoid unnecessary photoshoots

• More complete tagging: Manual processes inevitably lead to shortcuts; automation ensures consistency

As Maggie, a Senior Director of Marketing at the James Beard Foundation, told us: ”We’re digitizing archival photos to celebrate the 35th James Bear Awards, and I’m loving having facial recognition as a tool for this”

The Human Touch Still Matters

Despite the power of automation, we've designed the feature to keep humans in control. The system suggests identifications, but workspace admins validate connections, manage permissions, and maintain oversight.

This balance ensures you get the efficiency of AI with the judgment and context only humans can provide. It's like having a super-efficient assistant who does the grunt work but still lets you make the important decisions.

Getting Started

If your team manages a significant library of assets containing people, Facial Recognition could transform your workflow almost overnight. Curious about how it would impact your specific workflow? We're happy to walk through a personalized demo showing exactly how much time your team could reclaim.

And as for our head of content, Ari? What once took us 45 minutes now takes seconds, though I'll admit we still occasionally search for those less flattering shots — just for fun.

Your creative team wasn't hired to click on faces all day. They were hired to create. Let's give them their time back.