How Lica Trains AI to Think Like a Designer with CEO Priyaa Kalyanaraman

What if your brand had a creative director in the cloud?In this episode, I sit down with my boss and Lica’s co-founder/CEO, Priyaa Kalyanaraman, to unpack what we’re actually building and why it’s very different from yet another “type a prompt, get a pretty picture” tool.Priyaa has been working in AI and design long before it was cool. From building presentation design agents at Microsoft to experimenting with social creatives at Snap, she’s been obsessed with one question:How do you give everyday people and brands a “personal storytelling agent” that actually understands taste?We get into:• Why so many AI image tools create visual slop (and what’s missing under the hood)• How Lica trains a model to think like a designer, not just mimic a camera• What “brand DNA” actually means in model form, and how we keep visuals on-brand over thousands of iterations• Why Priyaa refuses to sell “fire your team, just use AI” and instead leans on a crawl–walk–run rollout with clients• How AI is becoming a great neutralizer for small e-comm teams who want to play at the same level as legacy fashion houses• What this all means for photographers, models, and designers (hint: they’re not going anywhere, but the job changes)• Her favorite thought experiment for anxious creatives: What if we could distribute your brain to millions of people and you got paid for it?•The ethics question everyone asks: when do we have to say it’s AI? and how she thinks about honest use vs deceptionIf you’re a founder, marketer, or creative who’s curious about AI but allergic to hype, this conversation is for you. We talk frankly about the limits, the opportunities, and the very human problems we’re trying to solve for brands and their teams.Listen to this episode of Creative Got Me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube and let us know:What’s the one part of your creative workflow you’d love a “personal storytelling agent” to handle for you?