Microsoft Australia is revving up production of generative AI-powered videos as it looks to achieve “quality at scale” across its Clipchamp and Copilot platforms.

The global technology giant is recruiting an Australia-based “AI creative director”, who will be tasked with “defining the creative direction and craft standards” for AI-generated video.

The local hiring comes less than a year after Microsoft appointed Meta and Time Warner marketing veteran Mark D’Arcy as its first global creative director for Copilot, charging him with elevating the AI platform’s branding and design.

While this local role overlaps with D’Arcy’s in collaborating with Microsoft’s engineering, product and technical teams, a Linkedin job ad suggests its primary focus is Clipchamp, the Australian-founded video editing platform Microsoft acquired in 2021.

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The job ad reads:

“In this role, you will set the creative vision and quality standards for generative video systems used across Clipchamp and M365 Copilot experiences. Your work will shape how AI-generated videos look, feel, sound and communicate ideas through compelling narratives.

“This role requires both creative leadership and systems thinking: translating artistic judgment into scalable frameworks that guide AI-generated video.”

Core deliverables, according to the ad, will be creating “exemplar video libraries, gold-standard datasets, creative style guides for AI outputs and evaluation frameworks.”

Although Microsoft references creative director or art director experience as preferable, the role appears primarily aimed at applicants with strong product credentials, namely someone with a master’s degree in product design, human-computer interaction, user experience, or a similar field.

Mumbrella has asked Microsoft which team the role will sit within and who the successful applicant will report to.

The hiring comes amid a global surge in AI-generated video production, with Microsoft itself recently signing a landmark deal to integrate with OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generator.

Competitors, including Google’s Gemini models, Anthropic’s Claude family, and specialist platforms such as Synthesia and Runway, are all rapidly expanding their video-generation capabilities.

AI-generated video in advertising is quickly becoming mainstream. Coca-Cola’s global Christmas campaigns, for example, were created using AI over the past two years.