Creative Thinking
Systems

Creative Thinking Systems designs, develops and operates secure AI workflow environments for creative and cultural organisations. We also build tools and publish research on what AI is doing to creative work.

We exist to ensure that AI serves creativity rather than displacing it, and that the people and organisations who create retain agency, ownership, and economic reward in the process.

Our Work

CTS works across three areas:

Diagnostics help organisations adopt AI on their own terms.

  • AI Readiness: Diagnostic assessments, workflow design, training, and implementation, tailored to the specific constraints and opportunities of organisations adopting AI. A structured entry point at any stage of AI maturity.

Systems give them tools they control and study how creative capability compounds.

  • Secure AI Workflow Environments: Secure AI workflows that run in your own infrastructure and connect to the systems you already use. Funding applications, board reporting, commissioning and approvals, archive and rights discovery. Your knowledge stays where it is. Each task is routed to an external, private or sovereign model according to how sensitive it is, and models can be swapped without redesigning the workflow.
  • Agent Culture: Research into how AI agents can cooperate through a cultural substrate in ways that make them collectively more creative over time.

Measurement puts value and loss on the record, what creative work is worth to AI, and how far AI content has displaced human voices.

  • Creative Value Monitor: Creative Value Monitor measures the value that creative work contributes to AI. It tracks how much creative work goes into AI systems and how much value those systems draw from it, the inputs and the outputs.
  • Dead Internet Monitor: A live diagnostic tool tracking the proliferation of AI-generated content and bot activity across social platforms, measuring how “dead” the internet is becoming.

Who

CTS was founded by Conor Roche with 20+ years building operations and deploying digital products and AI in the creative, media and public sectors across Europe, the UK, China and the Middle East, from London’s Roundhouse to Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District to a $500B development in the Middle East. He holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence (University of Bath) and a Harvard CopyrightX certification, has delivered European Commission research on AI policy and creative industries, is a NESTA Clore Fellow, and sits on the board of Dublin’s Gate Theatre.

Get in Touch

Most work starts with one workflow. We map it, design it, build it to production and hand it over, for a fixed fee. You keep your existing repositories and you are not locked to any one model provider. If you are earlier than that, the AI Readiness Assessment is a free starting point. We are also exploring co-funded R&D with universities and funding bodies. The same architecture applies to any organisation working with sensitive knowledge at scale.