The General Store’s chief creative officer, Marcus Tesoriero, and The Hallway’s head of production, Kent Boswell, have launched Australia’s first AI-powered creative and film production company, after departing their respective agencies several months ago, Mumbrella can reveal.

Aicandy [pronounced “eye candy”] has been established to “blend human ideas with the power and efficiency of AI production, offering a revolutionary new model for brands and advertising agencies ready to evolve at the speed of culture”.

The pair stressed it will have human creativity at the core. Speaking exclusively to Mumbrella, Boswell said the AI is “just a tool”, comparing it to using a camera — without the artist behind it, it is a mere device.

Marcus Tesoriero and Kent Boswell

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“Yes, we are an AI-powered company, but it’s all about human creativity telling amazing stories that cut through, and we’re just using a different tool to do it,” he said. “And that different tool allows us to build stuff with scale, speed, and efficiency.”

Aicandy has been in the works for six months and, like a lot of bold ideas, it was invented over a beer.

“It came to us over a beer in Cannes last year. At the festival, it was glaringly obvious how AI was going to completely change the industry, and it kind of became a no brainer to set up our own shop,” Boswell said.

After working on it in the background for three months, both Tesoriero and Boswell bit the bullet in March, departing The General Store and The Hallway, respectively, to fully invest their time in Aicandy.

“I never wanted to start something on my own, and Kent’s probably in the same ballpark here, unless it was something that was truly unique in the market,” Tesoriero told Mumbrella. “When we started chatting about this, we could see AI was growing exponentially by the month, then by the week, then by the day. We knew we had to do this sooner rather than later.”

Claiming to be Australia’s first AI-powered creative and film production company, Aicandy spans five key pillars — creative, strategy, production, innovation, and entertainment.

The work will be “flavoured” with AI-enhanced workflows and rapid iteration capabilities, according to the co-founders. It hopes to move faster and work in a more cost-effective manner, enabling ideas once hamstrung by tight budgets.

Aicandy has also signed an exclusive global roster of AI film directors, which the co-founders said has helped them confidently go to market today.

“We are one hundred percent focused on creativity and craft,” Boswell told Mumbrella. “If you get that right, that’s where the good work comes from.”

Tesoriero continued: “[The directors] really understand storytelling, craft, direction, vision, and also have the technical know-how, so it’s a real combination. These aren’t people just cash grabbers who have done a Youtube tutorial on AI, they have the quality we’re after.”

On the roster are directors from  New York, California, Vancouver, Panama, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Belgrade, Casablanca, Cape Town, and Tokyo.

And while the industry may be familiar with other AI-powered creative shops — like Cuttable or recently named Marketing Technology Company of the Year Plus Also Studios — Boswell explained there is nobody doing what he and Tesoriero are.

“If you look at what we do, it’s a combination of human creativity and AI film production under one roof. So we’re not the same entities, yeah we all play in AI, but we’re very different from one another,” he said.

Tesoriero added: “There are people dabbling in it, you hear agencies talking about having ‘an AI person’ or say they’re starting to think about AI production… But we’ve been thinking about going all in on this for the last year, and we’ve got some of the world’s best AI film directors partnering with us now. So we’re actually here to help brands and agencies grow their capabilities and make the impossible.”


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