Gabriele Lanzafame sat on a bench outside

Working at faith, Gabriele

Thinking

Life at VCCP

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Date

15/09/2026

To celebrate three years of our AI creative agency and innovation hub, faith, we’re highlighting some of the people who help make our award-winning team great

Gabriele Lanzafame

Midweight Prompt & Diffusion Model Engineer, Bernadette and faith

VCCP: Tell us a little bit about your job.

There’s lots of things I do in my job. I could be training a model to recreate a specific character. As an example, with something I’m working on at the moment, I’m training the model on all these different characters. And I can also be working on video models to train the models to animate, and it's also lots of experimentation with agents, so it could be testing voice agents, or simple chatbots. There's loads of experimentation obviously so it's like you'll play around you know, you'll never stay still or be bored.

VCCP: What led you to VCCP?

Well, I come in every day, like on a bicycle (laughs). When I started VCCP, I got a call from the recruitment team while I was doing my shift as a Barista. They called me and were like we have this position of diffusion model engineer.

And I was like, I know about the diffusion models, but not really the engineering part, but go through what you want with me. I didn't know anything about advertising before that. I just knew coding. And then I realised you can apply these skills really well in advertising because there are a lot of things that you can use AI for. 

I looked at how VCCP had been using AI, and one thing I saw was the Bubl Generator. I wanted to know more about that so when [Creative Directors] Ben and Morten were interviewing me I had lots of questions. I also realised we are a bit weird here, but it's in a nice way.

VCCP: How do you describe your job to a member of your family?

Most of the time I just say to them, you know, ChatGPT, I do that kind of stuff. I don’t really explain to my family about my job. I just say, ChatGPT, that. But sometimes they see some of the clients I work with, like for example, Daisy was on TV in Italy. And they were like, you didn't tell us about this! You don’t talk about this stuff! 

VCCP: Daisy vs Scammers made it to Italy? 

Yeah, on the news. And then my father was on Facebook saying, oh, my son, he made this. This was made by my son. 

VCCP: What does a typical work day look like for you?

My days really vary,  some days I get a request as a designer, which I wouldn’t call myself a designer but with that, I can flex, I can just try to do that job. So most of my time is spent in front of a screen, looking at new technology - I try to explore and see where I can apply new things for our clients or in our work for the agency.

VCCP: What's the most exciting thing you've worked on recently?

There’s a new client and it's a good project to be working on. It's mixing all of these different technologies all together. This is also one of my favourite parts about my job - building applications that people can use.

Part of the job is acting like the architect of a high-tech kitchen. I set up the workspace so our designers can easily use our AI tools to create assets. To make it run smoothly, I connect the 'UI' to the 'kitchen' in the cloud, where massive computers do all the heavy lifting. It requires a lot of complex technical wiring behind the scenes, and honestly, that’s what I appreciate most about my job. However, my favourite work will always be Daisy for O2.

VCCP: What do you think is the future of Gen AI? 

I’d say there are three things. The first one is about how people are starting to get bored of it - and you can see that on social media. People don't want all this AI all around. So I think what people want is just to detach, and they have this feeling of, I don't want that slop they see from some brands.

Or the second scenario is we can collaborate. I think for me, the one I like is that we can collaborate together. So it's like, you're just using AI for all the boring stuff that you don't want to deal with anymore. But for all the thinking or for getting the idea. For the main things that make us human - they need to stay with us.

The worst scenario is AI robots that get together and take over the world, Terminator-style.

I'm personally against that one, because why don’t you just leave them inside a movie, you know?

VCCP: What’s one thing in your job you bring a challenger mindset to? 

Trying to explain it. Like this (laughs)  It's more trying to explain that AI can’t do everything you want and you might get problems before the final results. You still need to tweak and do your traditional job in the same way you did before but you’ve got an app for little things that make your job faster. So, trying to explain that aspect to people.

And that fits in with our philosophy of, like, it's not a magic button. At the end, it's always you, it's a human using the AI. And, at the same time, it's how you use it, like you are your magic button. 

People give AI a bad instruction and then they go, why isn't it doing what I wanted it to do. I know everything at the end is based on public data and public data is lots of data. We cannot imagine how much there is - we cannot visualise that. But AI has patterns, like Chat GPT looks so friendly and happy because there are some guards around them. But there is a way to inject bad prompts and then AI just acts in a bad way.

VCCP: How would you describe faith in 3 words?

Ooh. I’ve got them in Italian. Visionari. In English, that is like looking forward. Fun, because it's quite fun, isn’t it? It’s fun working on this many different projects for many different clients. And, uh, feet on the ground, I would say, like, grounded. We’re not just saying use AI  we’re pushing people to think about why we’re using it.