What you need to know 

• The scale and pace of the AI transformation has left many struggling to keep up with the latest developments and marketers are no different.
• Founder of creative shop The Royals turned founder of AI advisory Move 37, Dave King says that the technology is difficult to grasp without having used it and that's led to a stark knowledge gap - worse than any he's seen in his career to date. Fears of getting AI wrong, given the unique ethical and security concerns, are at the crux of the issue.
• The challenge tends to be more acute within larger enterprise companies, where experimentation is less encouraged than their start-up counterparts, King argues.
• Independent media agency This is Flow is tackling the gap with clients via a  'Playgroup' AI workshop series which kicked off last week facilitated by King. 
• The intention of the workshop, per founder and CEO Jimmy Hyett and chief strategy officer Catherine Rushton, is to provide clients with the space and time to deep dive AI principles and learn how they could apply in their own organisational contexts - plus some confidence to get started. 
• Princess Cruises head of marketing Chloe Jones says the key challenge to date has been finding the time to experiment but after learning the broader strokes of AI application, her team is more confident about the opportunities for efficiency the tech might provide in spaces like content creation: "It’s not necessarily using AI for actual content creation, because cruising is a very emotional product. It’s hard to convey that emotional hook… we believe in the authenticity of the photography, user-generated and owned content."
• Care Pharma's head of marketing Daniela Fra says the company has investigated a custom AI solution, but so far cost has been a barrier. After This is Flow's session, she says she's been encouraged to test-and-learn and build hands-on experience with gen AI: "I don't think there's any question around the value of AI. It was maybe surprising the cost to do this. There’s the security aspect as well, as it’s a lot of proprietary data."
• The Playgroup concept falls under This is Flow's broader AI strategy, spearheaded by an internal taskforce that has been working to drive new efficiencies for the agency and its clients - with the support of leadership. 
• A2 Milk, Experience Co, Elida Beauty, Carnival Corp and Workwear Group marketing teams were others that joined the Playgroup AI session. 
• It's an approach that resonates with former STW CCO turned consultant Chris Savage's warning to agency's to embrace AI quickly or risk an "extinction event". He reckons that AI capabilities will become a key criteria for clients within the next two years. 

The latest and greatest developments of the artificial intelligence (AI) transformation have dominated headlines since OpenAI debuted its first Chat GPT model back in 2022. The chatbot demo racked up one million users globally within five days, prompting a US$10 billion investment from its biggest backer, Microsoft.

Since that turning point, the updates have come thick and fast as Microsoft, Google, Meta and almost every other big tech player with skin in the game joined the AI race. Just two weeks ago Google set out plans to integrate new ‘AI Overviews’ into the Google Search experience of more than a billion users by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, martech and software providers (Salesforce, Tealium, Qualtrics and Adobe, to name a few) have spent big to keep pace with the new AI-powered features hitting the market by AI competitors.

It’s a lot to absorb and marketers, like most, are grappling.

The sheer scale of the AI opportunity (and challenge) is overwhelming even for those in the know, and many have so far been more comfortable with their head in the sand - Dave King says it's the crux of the issue for many marketers.

“In my whole career, I haven't seen anything so unevenly distributed from a knowledge point of view,” King told Mi3. The founder of independent creative shop The Royals, now spends his days working with brands to implement AI technologies into their businesses via his generative AI consultancy, Move 37.

King says that fear of what they don’t know has made some marketers almost avoid AI exploration. “It's very emerging technology and it's very confusing. It's hard to explain, and there's no manual… it's hard to imagine a game plan if you don't know what's possible, and you don't really know what's possible if you haven't really used it too much.”

The knowledge gap is not evenly split, he says. It tends to be more of an issue within enterprise companies, where experimentation is less encouraged than their start-up counterparts.  

“With a larger organisation people can have that fear of failure, and the risks, the safety concerns, and some of the ethical concerns about AI - which are real - probably rise to the top. They're disproportionately [weighing on] their minds because of the culture of an organisation.”

And while remaining aloof to the incoming changes might be do for now, it could force businesses into a game of catchup in the not-so-distant future. The only way to get ahead, per King, is through experimentation.

“The sooner we get in and play, experiment, understand the constraints and the pros and cons, especially with large language models (LLMs), the more you're able to kind of keep up speed with what's coming up and take advantage of it,” he says. And he notes that the earlier businesses can adopt the tech, the more time they’ll have to aggregate their data and optimise workflows.

It's on that basis that King found himself running a room full of marketers through an AI workshop last week.

This is Flow's half-day session was designed to crack through the fear-barrier that founder and CEO Jimmy Hyett and chief strategy officer Catherine Rushton had observed was holding their clients back from experimenting with the new technology. The first round of client workshops coined “Playgroup”,  was designed to do what it says on the tin – provide a safe space for learning and play. While this first session was focused on AI, Rushton says the plan is to tackle a whole range of new technology challenges.

“The world is speeding up, we're getting busier and busier - not just from a technology perspective of ‘this technology is literally developing so quickly’, but we as individuals and how we work,” says Rushton.

Many are overwhelmed by the pace at which things are moving, and some marketers were “almost scared” to come along to the Playgroup session, she tells Mi3. “It comes down to a human nature perspective - if you haven't played with it, or you feel like you're not an expert, you’re almost frozen in fear on both an individual level and at an organisational level.”

But clients are ultimately willing to do the work, says Hyett. “They know the outcome that they want it to achieve from it - they know there's benefits to it.”

Princess Cruises: Finding practical, non-sensitive data use cases for AI

For Princess Cruises head of marketing, Chloe Jones, one of the challenges getting on top of AI use cases is literally time. As she puts it, if manual processes “ain’t broke” it can be a challenge to prioritise development of new capabilities within the marketing function to find the long-term gains.

“In our industry, there’s been a lot of chat about AI and the impact AI can or is already having in the marketing industry. But as marketers, we are all time poor, there are so many other priorities and each publisher has their own platform, iterations of generative AI,” Jones told Mi3. “With previous training sessions, you get snippets but it’s hard to pull it all together as you’re learning fragments of different types of AI rather than a holistic overview of potential application of this new wave of technology.

“One succinct session explaining premise, possibilities then the playbook was a fabulous initiative to spark ideas and give myself and other members of our house of brands the confidence to get started on the journey. Where to start and seeing those gentle use cases were important, because we want to make sure any test-and-learn or application we would use this for going forward are beneficial. It’s about investing our energy wisely.”

Parent company, Carnival Corporation, has a global corporate policy covering practical and reasonable usage of AI given the sensitivity of the data it’s holding on passengers. As a consequence, Jones cites a desire to find initial AI use cases that don’t involve PII data as another aspect of her approach. That means AI usage and recommendations are likely to first concentrate on supporting content creation and “improving individual employee productivity”.  

“It’s looking at the process we are doing every month, every campaign where there has to be a more efficient, better way to do things,” Jones says. “It’s not necessarily using AI for actual content creation, because cruising is a very emotional product. It’s hard to convey that emotional hook… we believe in the authenticity of the photography, user-generated and owned content.

“It’s more about making our lives simpler and more efficient, and using these tools within our jobs not as a replacement for any team member. We see these tools as virtual advisors and collaborators to help organise decision making, or expedite thought processes. It’s also not done without proper review from human employee.”

Princess Cruises has been working with This Is Flow since September 2021 and is one of four brands from the broader Carnival portfolio with the agency alongside Cunard, Holland America Line and Seabourn Cruise Line.

“The [This if Flow] session was good for thinking about the broader strokes and most practical implementation we could use of AI,” Jones says. “I feel a lot more confident just to get started and possibilities and benefits using the tech will bring.

“To open that up to clients makes it clear senior leaders have invested a lot of time of their own to get up to date on new tech so they can ensure they can help us clients along the journey.”

Care Pharmaceuticals: Enterprise grade security delays putting AI to use

Over at Care Pharma, which runs brands such as Clear Eyes, Hydralyte, Murine, Fess and Aci-Jel, AI is definitely on the radar as a business-wide consideration, says head of marketing, Daniela Fra. Exploratory work has seen the group brief in and ask for costings plus what's involved in building out a custom AI solution for the group. Again the driver is sensitivity of data.

What's stopping the group using AI more right now is cost. “It's a little outside our reach from a cost perspective at the moment,” says Fra.

“There is a lack of understanding of what the costs might look like over time. That’s not to say that’s the only cost equation to consider, but those initial costs to actually build a platform or system that’s custom to us is an inhibitor.

“There’s also the element of time to consider. To implement in the business and upskill everyone takes time. We don't have a very large team, we’re a lean business, our IT function isn’t large, and we use a lot of external providers. We would need to bring in an agency to help us do this and build the smarts. So there’s the cost challenge initially, and showing the value to the business so they know whether to invest. It’s probably not something we do this year, but could easily be something we invest in next year.”

The emphasis for AI in Care Pharma firstly is in the regulatory function and driven by productivity gains.

“The regulatory team sorts through thousands of clinical papers, research and evidence. It’s part of their jobs because we need that for compliance and also to be able to find new positioning and playing fields. All that takes a lot of time, and you might miss things or not interpret things in the right way,” Fra explains. “What we have been looking at is how to take all the proprietary evidence we hold and summarise to a point that gives you insights. So it is a productivity use case and quality improvement exercise.

“I don't think there's any question around the value of AI. It was maybe surprising the cost to do this. There’s the security aspect as well, as it’s a lot of proprietary data.”

But even with this, Fra says the This is Flow AI session has encouraged her marketing team to allocate more time to test-and-learn and build hands-on experience with gen AI.

“We can start testing and see what’s out there, and try to see what insights it pools using some of the skills we have just learnt today,” she says. “I know with my team, you need to take them out of their comfort zone and environment, and being in another place surrounded by different people is great. It just gives them access to more support outside the day-to-day. That's a really important thing. Otherwise we get distracted and don’t focus on it.”

Care Pharma is one of This is Flow’s foundation clients and Fra applauds the agency for “always trying to continually learn and improve themselves”.

“This is Flow does a really great job of understanding our business and knowing things that could be relevant to us and that are important. We also know they would not recommend people who are not credible – we knew they would provide access to people who can articulate the benefits and opportunities within the AI space. For me, being here is upskilling my team, which is important,” she adds.  

Talk to walk

For This is Flow, creating an opportunity for clients to take a step back and learn was key to putting talk into action.

“The whole industry talks about AI so much, but putting it into practice is the missing step,” says Hyett. “The Playgroup series is all around getting actual people encouraged and immersed and getting started [with AI] - no matter what level you're at, you could be tapping into [it].”

Joining Princess Cruises and Care Pharma at the first Playgroup session were a range of This is Flow's other clients, including A2 Milk, Experience Co, Elida Beauty, Carnival Corp and Workwear Group. Participants were treated to a synopsis of how generative AI has evolved, and demonstrations of some of its lesser-known user cases. Then in groups, it was time to put together workflows for AI solutions that could be implemented within their own businesses.

The workshop series is part of the agency’s overall AI strategy, which was put in motion at the start of this year by a group of six or seven staffers who volunteered to spearhead the business’ tech transformation.

“The [AI] task force is there to look at every interaction within our business, whether it's internal, or whether it's with clients… and then [determine] how AI could drive some sort of positive benefit, or a resolution, or solve a pain point, just so we can keep evolving,” says Hyett.

Moving forward, the agency is looking to bring clients together for the Playgroup around three times a year. “We want to make sure that these sessions are really impactful and meaningful, and it's a big ask to have clients come out of their day for a few hours in a session,” says Hyett.

Each new Playgroup session will take on a different tech-related challenge - Rushton says she’s already gearing up to put together a workshop on TikTok and influencer marketing. “A lot of the people I speak to, and a lot of our clients are almost now embarrassed if they haven't been on Tik Tok,” she laughs

Where do agencies fall in the AI equation? 

This is Flow's efforts to tackle AI head on, and bring clients on the journey, resonates with former chief operations officer of STW (the hold co acquired by WPP in 2016) turned consultant, Chris Savage.

Savage, who attended the workshop, warns that agencies will need to get moving on the AI front to drive efficiencies as clients move to bring their own AI projects in-house.

"I believe that clients will and should in-house their AI activity to a very large extent -  it's going to be a huge growth driver for in housing and so it should be."

"Almost every aspect of what an agency does can be made more efficient and more effective by AI," says Savage, quoting Liven chief marketer (and former Commbank, Foxtel and Xero CMO) Andy Lark's assertions that "agency profitability will hinge on AI driven efficiencies". While Savage was himself initially skeptical of AI's impacts on the agency sector, he says he's now of the view that all "creative, comms and marketing" related agencies will have to embrace AI or else face "an extinction event".

AI is already broadly acknowledged to be coming for more junior level agency gigs - last month Chris Howatson told Mi3 that the eventual normalisation of AI automation will have most agencies headed for "smaller agency structures with more senior people". 

But Savage (like Howatson), remains optimistic that there'll still "be a massive role for human creativity. There's a massive role for the power of humans working together with machines to make our outputs even smarter. But we have to embrace this," he says. 

The rescoping of agency roles to compliment new AI capabilities will be "more than an evolution", per Savage, "it's a revolution". From there he says agencies will need to "reimagine" their services and outputs - defining what's AI-driven and what's AI-augmented. Within two years, he reckons, clients will view AI credibility as a key criteria when selecting their agency partners. 

But Savage acknowledges that keeping past with such a fast-moving beast is easier said than done - and that's particularly true for indie agencies, who lack the global supports and investment capabilities of the multinational networks.

"Even those who are working and fully engaged in the AI space say to me, they can't keep up - it's just too friggin fast moving."

But he urges agencies to "run towards the fire like Usain Bolt". "Run as fast as you can to embrace it".