Everyone's Panicking About AI, But Smart Agencies Will Use It to Give Employees Their Lives Back.
Enhanced productivity leads to happier and healthier work environments, and more free time outside of work.
From sparking mass layoffs to reducing junior roles, there is much doom and gloom about how AI will impact the advertising business.
That fear comes with reason. According to a Sunup report, 91% of senior US agency leaders expect AI to reduce agency headcounts, and over half (57%) of agencies have slowed or paused entry-level hiring.
As an agency owner who has lived through many sea changes in our business, I have a more positive outlook. I believe we can use AI to improve job satisfaction and make our work more enjoyable.
In his most recent annual letter to JPMorgan shareholders, Jamie Dimon shared his view that AI will improve and extend our lives in the decades to come. He predicts that AI will enable a 3.5-day work week, ultimately leading to happier, healthier people with more time to pursue their passions and stay active.
Dimon predicts this transformation will occur over the next 30 years, but I believe we can improve our employees’ lives using AI now.
Agentic AI does the boring stuff
No one got into this business because they love mundane, mindless work. The best agency people are the most curious: they get excited to learn a client’s business, pilot new methodologies, craft unique creative, and always have their eye on what’s coming next.
Imagine the potential when what’s “next” also reduces the grind, eliminates mind-numbing admin work, and lets their brains breathe. AI agents can streamline many core agency functions, including account management, project management, and new business development.
An agent can ingest meeting transcripts, project scopes, RFPs, and client communications and synthesize key decisions and next steps. You’ll never have to go searching for when or where your client sent a document or provided feedback. It’s all instantly at the fingertips of your entire team. (Continued below)
Onboarding faster
Agencies often face the new employee quagmire: You hire someone because the current workload is too much for the team to handle, but that team is too busy to effectively train and onboard a new hire.
Using AI to create a centralized knowledge base, accessed via natural language prompts, can help get new team members onboarded and up-to-speed quicker without burdening the rest of the team.
This should never replace training with teams and leadership, but it does provide an easy way for new hires to learn how your agency operates without needing to find time on everyone’s calendars. AI helps you create a central brain for your agency that anyone can access.
Client expertise at your fingertips
Being experts in our clients’ businesses is crucial, and we all do the best we can: we use Google alerts, listen to shareholder calls, read the trades, comb social media, and share insights from client meetings to other teammates. But we can still miss key information and get blindsided by an announcement.
AI can arm your teams with all of the information they need to be experts — on the client, as well as their category and competitors — in a fraction of the time. Your team will walk into every meeting or pitch feeling prepared and equipped to come up with solutions to business challenges. But most importantly, in a relationship-driven industry, your clients will feel seen, respected, and appreciated.
There is a lot of speculation and hand-wringing about the unintended consequences of AI. I believe that AI will empower our teams to accomplish much more, in much less time, and give them the ultimate bonus: more time to do the things that make them happy, healthy, and full of joy.
We are in the business of solving problems and being creative. AI has so much untapped potential to help us be better at both.