Marc Lewis launches SCAFFOLD to preserve creative voice

Marc Lewis has launched SCAFFOLD, an AI platform for creative professionals who want to build and keep a personal AI trained on their own creative process.

Lewis, Dean of the School of Communication Arts in London, created the platform in response to concerns that widely used AI tools are making creative work look and sound more alike.

SCAFFOLD is designed for freelance creatives, in-house teams and agencies. Through a structured conversation with MarcAI, an AI model trained on Lewis’s coaching method, the system maps a user’s thinking, tastes, preferences and working habits into what it calls a Blueprint.

That Blueprint is then turned into an Exoskeleton, a personal AI agent intended to work alongside the user on live briefs. The agent can also work across the AI tools a user already relies on, rather than locking their work into a single platform.

The launch comes amid a wider debate in marketing, advertising and design over whether generative AI is eroding distinction in creative output. As brands increasingly use standard AI tools to produce copy, images and video, the concern is that their content will begin to converge with that of competitors.

Research from Kapwing, cited by the company, found that 59% of videos shown to new TikTok accounts in the platform’s For You feed were classed as “AI slop”. The same research found that rate was roughly three times higher than in a similar analysis of YouTube.

Ownership model

A central part of SCAFFOLD’s approach is ownership. Users keep the Blueprint and Exoskeleton they create even if they stop paying for the service, unlike subscription software models that keep access to user-trained systems and data within the provider’s platform.

The self-paced online version, SCAFFOLD Build, is priced at GBP £28 a month. The company also offers live coaching workshops with Lewis.

Lewis said the decision to let users keep what they build was deliberate.

“Most of what sits on your desktop, you rent, you don’t own it. And the day you stop paying, it locks you out and keeps everything you put inside it,” said Marc Lewis, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, SCAFFOLD.

He added: “The obvious, lazy, deeply profitable move would have been to keep that on our servers and rent it back to you forever, but we couldn’t do it.”

Creative process

Rather than relying on a large archive of past work to tune an AI model, SCAFFOLD is built around a guided two-hour session designed to capture how a person approaches creative decisions. The method draws on Lewis’s 15 years of coaching at the School of Communication Arts, as well as principles from cognitive science, according to the company.

The idea behind the method is that creative identity is shaped not only by outputs but also by judgement, taste, vetoes and habits. In practice, that means the system is intended to reflect how a user thinks through a brief rather than simply imitating finished work.

Lewis framed that as the rationale for the platform.

“AI hasn’t lived. It hasn’t danced. It hasn’t been dumped at 2am and then sat in a kebab shop at closing time trying to make sense of its life. That is where real creative work comes from and no model has it. SCAFFOLD keeps the human in charge of the machine. It learns your taste and your process, then does the grunt work in your voice rather than flattening you into everyone else’s,” said Lewis.

Lewis has worked in advertising education and creative coaching for more than a decade. Earlier in his career, he also founded and sold an internet technology company. His role at the School of Communication Arts has given him visibility across the advertising sector at a time when agencies and brand teams are rapidly testing AI tools for campaign development, ideation and production.

SCAFFOLD enters a growing market of services that promise to personalise AI for professional work. It aims to stand out in two ways: training the system through structured conversations about a user’s decision-making, and letting the resulting AI asset remain with the user rather than the platform.

For creative workers concerned that automation may standardise their output, the proposition addresses a specific fear: that faster production can come at the cost of a recognisable voice. SCAFFOLD’s answer is to make that voice the thing being modelled and retained.