With AI technologies being deployed in innovative ways across industries, agencies can take unlimited approaches to integrating them into their operations to enhance capabilities and streamline processes. By integrating AI into their workflows with the strategic goal of improving client services, agencies can not only tackle time-consuming tasks and solve complex problems more efficiently, but also unlock new creative possibilities and data-driven insights to execute more effective campaign strategies for their clients.
As AI use cases in the market continue to evolve at a rapid pace, forward-thinking agencies are looking for innovative ways to harness its power for their clients. Below, 19 members of Forbes Board of Directors explore effective ways for an agency to leverage AI to deliver more value to its clients while strengthening its own competitive advantage.
1. Ask power users to drive adoption
Focus on integrating AI into everyday processes. Form a task force of power users to promote AI adoption, share tips, and brainstorm with customer-focused teams. Create dynamic personas using AI for real-time data analysis. AI-powered data analytics tools streamline data interpretation, providing valuable insights into consumer behavior to improve marketing strategies and drive efficiencies. Tom Hileman, World Prairie
2. Increase the impact of strategic applications
AI delivers value in two ways: by improving the speed of tactics and by increasing the impact of strategic applications. Generative AI is ideal for editing documents, conducting research, and increasing productivity. However, the greatest value comes from integrating AI into strategic applications, such as customer reporting, to improve insights and recommendations that optimize spend and improve outcomes. Susan Thomas, 10Fold Communications
3. Experiment with analysis tools
Try out several AI-powered analytics tools to discover the insights and shortcuts they provide. With AI tools, you can analyze data, improve keyword results, identify broken links, create a content strategy, audit your competitors’ websites, and much more. Just give them a try; you’ll be surprised how much they can improve SEO effectiveness and efficiency. – Jason Hennessey, Hennessey Digital
4. Simulate surveys with synthetic respondents
Generating insights on rare patient groups can be challenging. It often takes months of effort and significant budgets to collect data from a handful of patients. To solve this problem, some customers are experimenting with synthetic respondents to generate insights. These simulated patients, created using large language models, mimic real-life characters and provide survey responses. Abigail Stuart
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5. Upload transcripts to encourage content creation
We use an AI transcription tool to record the conversation of every call we take, including LinkedIn audio events, podcasts, and presentations. We then upload the call transcript, along with our prompts, to create stunning eBooks, guides, and blogs. Depending on who’s writing the content, a copywriter edits the tone. – Melanie Borden, The Borden Group
6. Quickly turn your ideas into images for your clients
AI can help visualize ideas quickly. When developing concepts for clients, it is often difficult to find the right images to convey what the creatives have in mind. With the use of AI, agencies can now easily, and without much investment, transform their thoughts into powerful images to convince clients of their ideas. Nhu Khue Ngo, OSK New York Inc.
7. Find the right journalists for your PR campaigns
PR professionals spend a lot of time searching for the best journalists to pitch their stories. Emerging AI tools will do this quickly by crawling the web to find the best correspondents. This is a win-win for both PR professionals, who will more easily and efficiently find the perfect journalists for a story, and journalists themselves, who will only receive pitches that interest them. Ayelet Noff, Sliced Brand
8. Use AI to understand rather than do
A unique strategy to help solve customer problems is to use AI to understand rather than act. Sure, anyone can ask an AI to write a blog post. But the real power of AI lies in understanding why customers behave in certain ways. This analysis will tell you what to do next. And it’s far more important than executing AI tactics. Roger Hurni, Next to Madison Avenue
9. Unplug and develop a thoughtful AI strategy
To succeed, John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t rush.” This sentiment is important for agencies evaluating the benefits of AI because there’s often an “artificial” sense of urgency to get something done. My advice? Unplug. Take the time to develop a strategy that considers your clients, their customers, and your employees. Lead with purpose, authenticity, and empathy. The rest will fall into place. – Thomas Zawacki, Axis data
10. Analyze creator and influencer databases
To enhance an agency’s capabilities and increase efficiency, one strategy is to use AI to address client needs and challenges. For example, in influencer marketing, AI can analyze large databases of creators and select influencers based on key parameters critical to the client’s marketing goals. Michael Kuzminov, HypeFactory
11. Write page titles and meta descriptions
We’ve found that AI can help write page titles and meta descriptions if you feed it the content of a page. This gives our writers more time to write in-depth content, increase the volume of content published, and optimize the content we create for search. – Trey Robinson, Amplification of history
12. Turn long content into short content
List the most time-consuming and repetitive projects and processes and look for potential AI solutions that could do the heavy lifting, such as creating YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels. Manually changing long-form content to short-form content can take hours or even days, but there are AI platforms that can automate this process and give your client and agency more time for other projects. Bernard May, National positions
13. Analyze proprietary customer data
Using AI to analyze first-party data can revolutionize an agency’s capabilities. By having it analyze customer data, you can use AI to personalize marketing strategies, provide predictive analytics, and automate routine tasks. This leads to highly targeted campaigns, optimized resource allocation, and increased efficiency, improving both agency performance and client satisfaction. Alex Yastrebenetsky, InfoTrust
14. Gain new perspectives on problems
AI tools are fantastic for providing a different perspective. AI technology often works best when it has a starting point. When a customer has a problem, it’s incredibly helpful to have AI summarize or rewrite the problem statement so you can see the problem from a different perspective. Another use is to have AI look at different solutions you’ve created and suggest improvements or alternatives. Mike Maynard, Napier Partnership Limited
15. Perform project management tasks
AI tools are incredibly useful for note-taking, task creation, and post-meeting follow-ups, but we especially love them for project management. Today’s tools can send documents to clients for review, solicit feedback, create tasks based on client responses, and assign them to the appropriate users, allowing our account managers to focus on nurturing relationships instead of tedious work. Hannah McNaughton, Marketing Metrics
16. Improve the visibility of key performance indicators
Strategic decisions often go unnoticed when teams are busy with routine, day-to-day tasks. AI should primarily improve visibility into critical KPIs that inform strategic decisions in agency-client collaborations. Additionally, AI can automate repetitive tasks, allowing the team to focus more on strategic decisions related to media, creative, and marketing. Oksana Matviitchuk, OM Strategic Forecasts
17. Question assumptions and test ideas
AI can be a powerful interlocutor and devil’s advocate. Use it to challenge assumptions, test an idea, uncover flaws in your strategy, offer alternative perspectives, and discover hidden connections between things. This not only saves time and money, but also improves critical thinking and inspires innovation in the humans who use it. Evidence-based decision-making combined with expert intuition is a winner. Shanna Apitz, Adkins Hunt
18. Use AI note-takers in client meetings
I’m a big fan of AI note-takers during client meetings—with the client’s permission, of course. These tools allow me to stay fully present and focused. They provide me with a transcript that I can refer to after the fact to confirm details, and I’ve had clients tell me that the transcripts and meeting notes generated by these tools are just as useful to their team. Evan Nison, NisonCo
19. Generate customized SOPs for each client
One effective strategy is to use AI to generate standard operating procedures. For your employees and assistants to help you do your job well, you need standard operating procedures, but creating them can take some time. AI can quickly create customized and optimized workflows for each client based on their specific needs and goals, saving your agency time while delivering efficient, tailored solutions. Frederic Bussler, Bussler & Co.
