Event
The Robots Are Coming – Speakers
Speakers
The State of AI in Agencies Right Now
“These are the freshest AI insights anywhere in the world.”
The day after The Wow Company publishes its latest BenchPress report, Peter Czapp will take The Robots Are Coming stage armed with the very latest AI data.
Based on responses from around 700 UK agencies, this session cuts through the hype and shows what’s actually happening on the ground. Who’s using AI across their whole business – and what advantage that’s really giving them. Where it’s speeding up delivery and improving value. And where it’s quietly creating new risks.
“Some agencies are delivering more quickly, and reducing their costs dramatically.” Peter explains. “But nearly 40% are seeing clients take work in-house. Around a third say clients expect to say less.”
Peter will also highlight where agencies are falling behind – from lack of AI training, to missing policies, and teams becoming distracted or over-reliant on tools that aren’t delivering value.
What Good Looks Like: Using AI Inside Creative Teams
Every agency has people using AI. But it’s usually down to a handful of enthusiasts juggling models across multiple tabs – creating a prompt in ChatGPT, downloading an image from Midjourney and loading it up as a reference into Runway and Kling.
Everyone has their own method, it gets reinvented with every brief, skill levels vary across the team, and when the work comes in it doesn’t scale.
That’s the problem Jules Love keeps seeing inside agencies experimenting with AI. Yes, the tools there – but they’re not joined up, and if a client wanted to understand your process you’d struggle.
In this breakout session, Jules will take you inside the creative AI workflows Spark now uses across its programmes – showing what good actually looks like when AI is treated as an agency capability, not a personal productivity trick.
At the centre is Weavy – a node-based creative AI platform Spark adopted early, and which has since been acquired by Figma to become Figma Weave,
“We realised this was the right horse to back,” says Jules. “These node-based tools are the future – they make AI reusable, shareable, and industrialised across a team.”
This session isn’t about replacing creatives. In fact, it’s the opposite. “Clients aren’t paying you for your photoshop skills,” Jules explains. “They’re paying you for your creativity, taste, and knowing what’s right for the brand.”
You’ll see live demos of how these tools work, why they still require real craft to get right, and how agencies can use AI to create things clients can’t get from someone churning out prompts in two minutes.
And crucially, Jules will explore the bigger shift: moving beyond “doing the old stuff faster” – and using AI to create entirely new, differentiated creative ideas that keep your agency’s secret sauce intact.
The AI Role Plan: Better Prompting Means Better Thinking
“People think they know how to use AI – then throw whatever at it and ask why the output’s rubbish.”
That frustration is exactly what Hayley Meakes, Director of Gain Momentum, sees every day working with agency teams. AI is everywhere, but most people are still stuck using it for the basics.
As Hayley puts it: “The challenge is, people are using it just to write emails. And we’re saying ‘no – you can take any of these day-to-day actions and get AI to help you do them better’.”
But moving from a beginner to a power user doesn’t require learning complex coding; it requires a Role Plan. By creating a grid of every action you perform in a day, you can identify exactly where AI can help you work faster and smarter.
“By starting with a role plan, you suddenly think: which one of these items would I like it to help me with?” Hayley says.
In this practical session, Hayley will help you navigate which aspects of agency life can be passed over to a reliable GPT and automated every time you need it to.
It’s not about spending money or time focusing on a plethora of tools, but understanding how you can apply AI to your role and the tasks you perform in your job.
“With AI, you only get good results if you put in good things. It’s garbage in, garbage out.” She says. “AI’s like my dog, he’s eager to please – but every now and then he’ll piss on the carpet.”
You’ll leave with a role plan, a clearer idea of how to prompt, a repeatable way to use AI in your daily role, and far more confidence than when you walked in.
Building Your First AI Agent with n8n
Ever wished you had an AI agent that could quietly take the routine and repetitive work off your plate – without needing a computer science degree to build it?
That’s the question Ann Stanley, Founder of Anicca Digital, has spent the last two years answering – not just for herself, but for the hundreds of agency owners she’s trained.
Ann came to n8n with a specific problem: the other automation tools expected you to think like a developer. “I didn’t have the coding skills,” she says. “Tools that looked promising until you had to write JSON from scratch or debug code you didn’t fully understand.”
n8n completely changed that.
“n8n is very visual and modular,” Ann explains. “You start thinking in components: forms, triggers, the AI brain, outputs. You connect them together, and suddenly work starts happening without you.”
In this 45-minute session, Ann will build a working AI agent live – from scratch, one node at a time. You’ll build your own joke machine triggered from a form that will send you a joke each day.
She’ll also showcase examples of production agents her team has built, so you can see where this leads once you’ve got the fundamentals down.
This is a practical, hands-on session for teams who want to see how AI agents actually work, not just hear about them.
AI Tool Show and Tell
“Go and test it. Just do it. Why tell clients what you could do for them? Just go into the meeting without a presentation pitch and say ‘look at this thing we’ve built’.”
That line from Arran Kirkup at Indiespring sums up this session.
Across three very different agencies, the same pattern keeps showing up: the teams making real progress with AI aren’t just pitching their ideas – they’re building rough, imperfect things and putting them in front of clients fast.
Arran talks about ditching the polished pitch altogether. Instead of decks full of hypotheticals and market research, his team prototypes quickly, shows something tangible, and uses that as proof of intent. It might not be scalable at that stage – and that’s the point. “We’ve built this thing, it’s not super scalable in the current state it’s in, but we can take it out, test the market, and build the full thing for you.”
Then there’s Mark Alford at Managed Language, who nearly gave up on AI altogether. Convinced it mattered but sceptical his team would use it, Mark was surprised when they quietly built their own solution, starting with quality assurance.
The result is a practical AI QA tool embedded into live workflows — reviewing multilingual content, flagging tone and consistency issues, and catching errors before human review. It’s already reducing rework, increasing output, and earned Managed Language a £50,000 R&D tax credit. No hype — just something that works.
If you want to see what other people are building and developing with AI, this session is one you can’t miss.
Fewer People, Better Work: Secrets Inside Progressive Agencies
“When I was a CEO, my job was essentially three things: training people, refining processes, and building teams that could deliver consistent quality.”
Jeremy McDonald, Founder of WeArePioneers.AI spent years perfecting that playbook. “Now AI has completely torn that up.”
In this session, Jeremy lays out why the traditional agency model – more clients, more revenue, more people, more cost – is breaking down fast. And why a new model is already replacing it.
“Now I can build any process, layer in data, add scale, and output work in seconds that used to take days,” he says.
Jeremy works hands-on with agencies to build custom AI solutions: agent-powered dashboards that improve upon, and outperform, work previously done by entire teams.
The result? Fewer people, tighter operations, and radically different margins.
At the heart of it is a simple shift. “The new handbook for any agency delivery is just three words: scale, data, process.”
In this session, Jeremy will walk through AI automations his team has built, show how agencies are using them to transform client delivery, and explain what this means for the future shape of agency teams.
This isn’t about replacing creativity. It’s about changing the economics that sit underneath it.
If you’re tired of abstract theories and want to see the blueprint for the future of agency operations, this is the session that will show you how to stop chasing headcount and start scaling intelligence.
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