Leonardo’s Workshop and the Future of Your Agency Work

Leonardo da Vinci didn’t work like a lone tortured genius grinding in isolation. He ran a workshop. Think of it as an early creative studio with a very opinionated creative director.

And honestly, the way he structured that operation is the blueprint for how you should be thinking about AI right now.

Which most of you aren’t. You’re currently treating AI like it’s either going to steal your job or make you lazy, when really it’s just sitting there waiting to mix your pigments while you argue with yourself about artistic integrity.

How the Renaissance Workshop Actually Worked

Here’s the system Leonardo built.

He accepted commissions that were far too large for one human to execute efficiently. Altarpieces, murals, court projects, engineering drawings. The kind of work that could consume years if you tried to do every brushstroke yourself.

Which would be noble, I guess. Also bankrupting.

So he broke the work into layers of taste and labor.

Apprentices handled the heavy lift first. They prepped panels and canvases, mixed pigments, transferred cartoons, blocked in backgrounds. They painted secondary figures, architecture, drapery, foliage. All the time-consuming parts that required skill but not transcendent judgment.

Leonardo focused on the decisions that couldn’t be delegated.

Faces. Hands. Subtle transitions of light. The emotional temperature of a scene. The sfumato that made things feel alive rather than illustrated (look it up).

He’d step in late, often repainting key areas, unifying the composition, and correcting anything that violated his internal sense of truth.

This is why art historians argue endlessly about attribution. Many works labeled “Leonardo” are actually collaborations where his hand appears selectively, usually in the parts your eye lingers on longest. The Mona Lisa is extreme Leonardo, every detail touched by the master. Other works are Leonardo-directed systems where he orchestrated the outcome without painting every square inch.

No one looks at a Leonardo painting and thinks, “You know what’s wrong with this? Leonardo didn’t personally grind the lapis lazuli.” (look that up too)

The Real Source of Quality

Speed came from parallelism. While one apprentice worked on a background, another refined anatomy studies, another copied master drawings to learn proportion. Leonardo floated between them, correcting, demonstrating, and always reserving the final pass for himself.

But quality came from something else entirely. It came from taste concentration.

Leonardo didn’t dilute his attention across everything. He applied it where it mattered most. He understood that his genius wasn’t in being able to mix the perfect shade of ochre or prep a canvas without bubbles. His genius was knowing exactly which moment of light on a face would communicate sorrow versus serenity.

That judgment couldn’t be taught in a reasonable timeframe. So he didn’t try. He built a system where judgment was centralized and execution was distributed.

Basically, he was smart enough to not confuse being good at something with needing to do it yourself forever.

Why This Matters Now

Here’s what most people miss about AI. They treat it like a threat to craftsmanship or a shortcut that cheapens the work. Both perspectives are wrong.

AI is your workshop system. It’s the apprentice that can prep the canvas, block in the background, handle the repetitive parts that require skill but not your specific judgment.

Your job isn’t to do everything. Your job is to be Leonardo at the final pass.

I use AI to generate the first draft, the structural options, the variations I can react to. Then I step in where taste becomes destiny. I reshape the logic. I add the insight that only comes from years of watching agencies succeed and fail. I make sure the emotional temperature is right for the founder who’ll read it.

And the AI is using my initial thoughts and instructions to get me this first version. I tell it what colors, what texture, and the image it’ll be painting. It then gives me a headstart. My time is then spent adding flavor and examples that’ll resonate, and, well…jokes.

The document’s better because I concentrated my judgment on the parts that matter instead of burning it on the parts that don’t.

Meanwhile, you’re still manually adjusting kerning (look it up) on slide decks at 11pm because you think that’s what professionalism looks like.

The Resistance Pattern

Most smart people resist this model for the same reason. They confuse doing everything yourself with maintaining quality. They think delegation, whether to humans or AI, inherently means accepting inferior work.

Leonardo would’ve found this mindset baffling. Doing everything yourself isn’t purity. It’s inefficiency disguised as virtue.

It’s also, let’s be honest, a little bit of ego. You like being the person who can do it all. It feels important. It feels irreplaceable. Right up until you realize you’ve spent three years building the world’s most sophisticated process for doing $50/hour work at $200/hour rates.

Genius scales when you separate creative direction from production, but never outsource taste. The strategic decisions, the emotional nuance, the final layer of coherence that makes something feel like yours rather than a committee’s. That stays with you. Everything else can be systematized.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The pattern shows up everywhere once you see it. Fashion houses where the designer sketches and art directors execute. Film directors who storyboard but don’t operate every camera. Great chefs who design dishes but don’t personally plate every order during service.

None of these people are sitting around worried that their genius is being diluted because someone else chopped the onions.

The master designs the system, trains the hands (human or digital), and shows up at the moment where taste becomes destiny.

For you, that might mean using AI to draft the first version of your framework, then spending your time refining the language until it feels true. Or having it generate ten different ways to structure a presentation, then choosing the one that serves your strategic intent and making it yours.

Or writing these words the way Leonardo painted faces. I give AI the background, the general shape, the technical elements. Then I come in and make sure it sounds like a real person talking to another real person about something that matters.

Not like a LinkedIn thought leader who just discovered metaphors.

The Actual Point

Your expertise isn’t in typing words or formatting documents or generating variations. Your expertise is in knowing which version is right, which angle is true, which frame will resonate with the person across from you.

Protect that. Concentrate it. Let everything else scale around it.

Or keep doing it all yourself. I’m sure your carpal tunnel has a lot of character.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​