Andrew Waters Stays Ahead of the Machine

Andrew Waters has texted co-workers from the middle of a mountain bike trail on countless occasions. While riding. Not from a water break or even his car. From the trail.

"My body does its thing and my brain can be in another world," he says. He's calculating every variable ahead of him, from rock to turn to squirrel. Meanwhile, another thought cuts through: "Here's a solution."

Andrew's method is his restlessness.

Pressed to distill what he does, he targets underneath the job titles. "More than anything, I'm a problem solver," he explains, "and my curiosity is the cornerstone of my capability."

His work moves across photography, visual narrative, brand and UX design, and AI systems engineering -- a range shaped by more than 20 years of experience leading identity and web design for Turner Sports and Warner Media, building a Hyatt design system, and helping shape identities for brands like Peacock Sports Pass from the ground up.

His whole spectrum of talent may be best shown in his photography. Andrew has stood on the sideline of an NCAA Final Four blowout with no drama and nothing to point a camera at, considering, "How am I gonna make a great image out of this?" No tool answers that question for him.

He's fed the spare, minimalist frames he shoots for himself into AI tools, asking for more in the same style.

"It will not do it correctly," he says. He's not disappointed. In fact, he's delighted.

"I'm happy that there's a gap between what it can do and what it can't do, and I fit right in between that."

So here is where Andrew stands, once and for all: he isn't for AI or against it. He's for what disappears. A retouch that once took an hour in Capture One now takes twenty seconds. The top action-sports camera bodies can be trained to lock focus onto an athlete's eye without chasing it. The machine absorbs the routine -- and the eye behind the frame stays his.

That gap is Andrew's whole story. He is fluent in agentic workflows and the enterprise UX stack, and he's the kind of person who wires color-changing LED lights to a weather feed with an AI agent just for fun.

"I've always been excited about how to make things efficient and how to replicate and reproduce things at scale," he explains. He sharpened that instinct over more than 12 years at Turner Sports, which then carried him into systems thinking and AI.

"Storytelling, problem solving, and technology," he says, "are the things that I wake up and do every day, without thinking."

On the other end of the spectrum is the AI that won't stop announcing itself. Andrew has a smart photo frame upstairs that irritates him every time it tries to guess what he wants.

"I get annoyed when it tries to think for me," he continues. He doesn't want to be told what to watch any more than he wants to be told what to eat, "but I would like to be reminded that a type of produce is in season -- I would enjoy that."

He points to Flighty, the flight-tracker he uses to keep an eye on his two college-aged daughters. The app quietly tells him when a flight lands, which gate, when to leave.

"It's doing that intelligently, and it's not overt," he says.

The AI that doesn't disappear leaves fingerprints, and Andrew has been tracking them -- a visual signature, a sameness the design forums are already tired of.

"It's not the folks with six fingers. It's not things that are visibly wrong," he says. "It is the set of patterns and visual executions that become rote."

He can already date it: "The visual style of late 2025, 2026, when everybody threw a design system at a chatbot and had it build a website."

It harkens back to CD-ROM clip art and stock photography of the late nineties, when everyone drew from the same disc and every brand wore the same face. CD-ROM clip art was new then, too. "The tools will change, but the quality of the input will definitely impact the quality of the output."

Andrew learned on black-and-white film in a wet darkroom, and now watches colleagues wire into a venue and fire frames to editors who publish them thirty seconds later. It's off-putting -- "Now everybody can say, 'You had no excuse to not get that shot.'”

But he refuses to let speed flatten what he brings: the big aesthetic picture, or the smaller calls -- whether or not to be clever, for example.

Andrew thinks a lot about something a design professor from his school days once said:

A beat later, he pairs it with his own metaphor. "Everybody makes a chocolate chip cookie because they're good," he says. "They're safe. That doesn't mean you shouldn't come up with a different take on it."

It's how he runs a live project. He locks down the safe version first, then slips something that pushes a client's limits into the mix.

He thinks "certain things are okay to be expected," which makes the unexpected exceptional, even if the cutting-edge doesn't always win. But whichever option a client picks, "That's cool," he says. "They're both satisfying."

That philosophy -- lock in the safe version, then push the edge -- is exactly why the Sageworx model works for him.

Andrew is very familiar with the value of working with a marketing collective versus a freelance consultancy or large agency. A curated collective like Sageworx is more like working with an ensemble. Everyone is cast for a specific role, but they are there to create a story, to blend methods and play off one another.

"It takes the best parts of those individuals," he says. "You are getting true experts, true passionate individuals taking their experience and their backgrounds and blending them into a solution."

"I've never worked on something with Sageworx where I felt that people were going through the motions," he says. "We are all truly excited about creating something new through what we do."

Underneath it is a conviction that a set of skills and experience exists to be used, not stored. Sageworx gives him the reps, the creative muscle "effectively used," the room to explore projects, build relationships, and learn more.

Andrew doesn't divide the work into glamorous and unglamorous categories. He will do a run of fifty postcards for a friend, be "so jazzed," then turn out something for a major brand and halfforget he did it. "They both have equal value in my mind," he says.

That's part of the enigma. Andrew can do award-winning, blue-chip brand work and still seem more interested in the next problem than the credit list.

"I enjoy the creative process. I enjoy making stuff. It's a bonus if it sells," he ponders. "I have so many things I've created that have never seen the light of day."

"That's why I created Tokyo Fish -- well, that's why I am creating Tokyo Fish."

"I have to seek out things that encourage, enlighten, and inspire me, so it can fuel my work," he says. "Otherwise, everything starts to feel robotic."

Andrew's restlessness doesn't clock out. In addition to being an avid mountain biker, he's a museum junkie raised by creative parents, a reader of artist biographies, and, by his own admission, someone who does his best AI tinkering in front of Below Deck on a Monday night.

"The duality of my life is pop culture, outdoors, and technology," he says. "That's just kinda who I am."

All of it feeds the compulsion to create.

The funniest thing about a man who makes constantly is that the one project he never gets to is his own. He's owned tokyofish.com since the late nineties, and for most of those years it was a domain without an actual website behind it.

"The farmer's kids going hungry," he calls it. "I'm always working on something else."

Andrew explains this conversation might be the push that finally gets the site built.

"I've spoken this into existence," he says. He'll figure out the details on the next ride -- somewhere between a turn and a squirrel, when his body is doing its thing and his brain is building out a website to unveil all his curiosities.

It fits the pattern. The machines can handle the routine work: retouching the image, automating the drag. But the need to build something new -- for the joy of the process, and the strange world waiting behind Tokyo Fish -- is a gap only Andrew can fill.

The question for every brand right now isn't whether to use the machine. It's what, or better yet, who, is moving fast enough to stay ahead of it.

To follow along with Andrew's work, check out his progress at tokyofish.com or reach out on LinkedIn.

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