The Agency AI Conference
Tuesday 23rd January 2024 – 1.15pm to 5pm
The Royal Institution, London
• Get inspired to deploy AI in your agency
• Learn how other agencies are using AI to improve their work and help their clients
• Discover new ideas to improve your copy and creative workflows
It’s been a year since you first tried ChatGPT, and noticed the first straw in the wind hinting at what was to come.
What have you done since then?
- Is AI handling all your agency’s ‘grunt work’ yet?
- Is your team excited about AI – and enthusiastically trying to weave it into the fabric of your agency?
- Are you collectively looking for opportunities to help clients blend AI into their business
Or are you still stuck in a tepid experimentation phase?
Join us at the biggest agency AI conference yet to hear how other agency leaders and their teams are deploying AI in real situations.
2023 was about experimenting with AI tools and running a few experiments. But in 2024, the race is on to transform your business before AI transforms it for you.
Five Rooms of AI Learning and Inspiration
Who you’ll hear from 🎤
How Can You Make AI Sound Like You?
The problem with using AI in your agency is that it makes your copy sound the same – boring, lacklustre, and repetitive.
The key things to tinker with? According to AI whiz Heather Murray, it’s ‘perplexity’ and ‘burstiness’ – how you pick your next word, and how long and short your sentences are.
While AI works on balance and probability, humans are much more random and varied in their approach to speech and writing.
“We don’t organise our sentences, we don’t speak in patterns. Humans are almost entirely random in their sentence lengths, and we’re quite creative with how we pick our next word,” Heather explains.
“Perplexity and burstiness together generally are the reason why we can detect AI-generated content so easily, because it’s so low in the two. Whereas humans have high levels of both, meaning we’re a bit more creative and authentic.”
👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Heather will give you a live demo of how you can train AI to sound like you – and less like a robot – in just a few simple steps.
What Impact Will AI Have on SEO?
With Google set to launch an entirely new system called Generative Search Experience (SGE), which incorporates AI-generated answers for searches above all other results – what does that mean for SEO?
“SGE seeks to answer users’ questions directly in the search results page without them needing to go through to any other websites,” explains Tim Cameron-Kitchen, founder of Exposure Ninja.
“This is profound for marketers because if you’ve got a business reliant on getting traffic from Google to your website, SGE potentially disrupts this.”
The introduction of SGE to Google’s search engine means that agencies will potentially need to completely rethink their content, SEO and PPC strategies.
👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Tim will be showing us how SGE is working in its early stages, and how your agency can adapt its online strategies to make the most of this AI advancement.
“We Hired an AI Assistant – Then Fired It For Lying”
AI seems to generate a feeling of fear in a lot of people.
Katy Powell, co-founder of Bottled Imagination, could sense this fear in her team. So she decided to test the theory – was AI really capable of doing what her agency does?
So they decided to go big or go home: they hired an AI assistant.
But it didn’t exactly go as planned…
“On a surface level, it looked like it could provide the information that we asked it for. But when we kept poking and poking, we realised it was just coming up with it on its own!”
👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Katy will be sharing the story of her agency’s AI assistant – from recruitment to dismissal. If you’re in need of some light-hearted reassurance that your job is safe, this is not one to miss.
How Can You Find ‘Quick Win’ AI Use Cases?
How do you find ‘quick win’ use cases for AI in your agency?
Turns out you are staring at them every time you open your email.
“Your email inbox is a great place to start,” says Tanveer Mohammed, CTO of Niya. “Your inbox is essentially a list of tasks and processes that haven’t yet been automated.”
“You’re not trying to build AI to replace an entire human’s workday. You’re trying to build AI to replace that one little thing that takes two hours and gets constantly repeated.”
“The key thing is to replace specific, repetitive tasks – not an entire human’s work day, and should be focused on operational efficiency and internal improvements.
👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Tanveer will talk about how to spot opportunities to save time and money by getting AI to help – rather than replace – your team.
“Crafting AI-Powered Solutions for Client Success”
While most of us are focused on using AI tools to make processes more efficient, other agencies are miles ahead when it comes to problem-solving for clients.
One of those agencies is eight&four.
Their journey with AI started like most others: using it to handle the finicky, pernickety, ‘business-as-usual’ tasks. But this summer, the agency ventured down another route – and began building their own AI-powered tools.
“Rather than focusing on business-as-usual stuff, how can we use AI to do things that we’ve never been able to do before? How can it help us create a brand-new service? By listening to client pain points, how do we build tools that specifically deal with those pain points?”
👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Kate and eight&four’s Creative Technologist Sam Glyn Davies will discuss the inception of their ‘creative technology’ team, and how the agency is creating their own AI-powered products to bring a whole new meaning to how they service their clients.
The AI Revolution: What Does It Mean for Agencies?
“AI is more than just automation and algorithms – it’s about redefining the very essence of marketing efficiency and creativity. It’s time for agencies to step up their game.”
This is the finding of Receptional’s recent report on the impact of AI on agencies and how they operate.
“We’re witnessing a shift where AI isn’t just a luxury – it’s a necessity for staying ahead,” says managing director, Justin Deaville.
Agencies are already tapping into the potential of AI in all sorts of areas, but Receptional’s report highlights that despite an increase in usage, we’re still in the ‘exploratory phase’ right now.
“Agencies need to look beyond mere content creation and understand AI’s role in broader strategies like SEO, customer engagement, and even the ethical implications that are increasingly at the forefront,” says Justin.
“It’s about turning potential into performance, and ensuring your agency doesn’t just ride the wave of AI evolution – but actively shapes it.”
👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Justin will be sharing all the juicy stats and opinions from his agency’s report – and what it means for the future.
“Our Agency Specialised in AI – Here’s How We Got the Team On Board”
Brilliant Noise has a reputation for staying ahead of the digital curve. So when AI began to tiptoe onto the scene, founder Antony Mayfield knew this was where they should be focusing their efforts.
Now, the agency offers AI-powered digital solutions to help clients grow, through things like personalisation, experimentation and automation.
But while the decision to pivot was a no-brainer, Antony knew that getting the team on board would be a challenge.
“It requires a lot of patience,” he says. “AI sparks some strong emotional reactions – it’s a big change in the world and that can be quite scary. People see a lot of threat in it, so they disagree with it.”
To get his team onside and ready for the pivot, Antony ran a ‘hacker’ session around the adoption of AI.
“You need to get hands-on with the technology in order to get a felt sense of what it means,” Antony explains. “We broke into pairs, took a real work problem and tried to create a way of doing it with AI.”
👉 In this breakout session, Antony will tell us his agency’s story of specialisation in AI-powered marketing and will outline exactly how he got his team – and his clients – on board.
“How We’re Using AI In Our Agency”
“We’re trying to reposition how the industry thinks about AI and marketing. Rather than it being a risk to headcount and capacity, it’s more about improving and expanding the capabilities of your organisation.”
The narrative around the use of AI in agencies has shifted from whispered potential to resounding success – with many businesses implementing the tech into their marketing and operational processes.
But despite some businesses taking the new tech in their stride, the playing field is still pretty uneven.
So in this breakout session, we’ll be spotlighting several agency leaders on how they’re leveraging AI to not only enhance creative endeavors but also streamline complex processes.
- Lau Miguez, senior digital PR strategist.
- Joe Kaul, founder and Group CEO of ONQOR group.
- Michael Dingle, co-founder of Reason – a product strategy and design agency.
👉 Come along to this panel discussion on agency use cases for AI and discover some new ways of implementing automation and AI technology into your agency’s day-to-day.
“How We’re Guiding Clients On AI – and Why”
To some, it may seem counterintuitive to show your clients how to use AI tools. Surely you – their agency partner – should be the one experimenting on their behalf. Otherwise, what would they need you for?
But Zoe Bevis sees this as a surefire way to retain her clients.
This year, Zoe’s agency Revere decided to go all in on AI.
While operations director Ryan McKenna looked into resolving internal inefficiencies within the agency’s processes, Zoe focused on being totally transparent with clients – empowering them to use it in-house so they could free up budget for bigger and better ideas that could never be done before.
“Our vision is: if we help clients with AI, they’re going to stay with us,” says client services director Zoe. “One, we’ve got really good partnerships anyway, and two, with the leftover budget, think of all the other amazing content experiences that we couldn’t create before. Things they can’t do in-house, that AI can’t do either. That’s the journey we’re on.”
👉 At Robots, Zoe and Ryan will be telling us all about Revere’s ‘Lead On AI’ project – and will delve into how they’re using AI to run the agency more efficiently and explore new ways of servicing clients.
What Impact Will AI Have On The Marketing Industry?
While it’s easy to get lost in the abilities of AI and the doors it can open – it’s equally important to be candid about the impact it will have on the agency industry.
Many agency leaders are waking up to the idea that AI technology could completely transform the industry – and not in the ways you’d probably like.
One of those leaders is Joe Kaul, founder and Group CEO of ONQOR Group. Joe says AI adoption in its current form could have a disastrous outcome on the industry.
“People will say, ‘Why would I hire a junior when I can get an AI to do the same job?’”
“But they’re screwing themselves in 5-10 years when there are no juniors available on the market, and they then don’t have anyone to promote to midweight or senior positions when people start retiring.”
👉 At Robots, Joe will deliver a candid keynote speech on the direction of travel when it comes to AI adoption in agencies – and the domino effect this could have on the entire marketing industry.
Meet agencies who are using AI to evolve and succeed
The Robots Are Coming is an afternoon that will help you get inspired, and meet other people that you can learn from. It’s aimed at agency leaders and their leadership teams – but anybody can come. It’s a blend of interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
The Robots Are Coming – FAQs 🤖
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 1.15pm, so try to arrive by 1pm.
The afternoon’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet things to keep you going, but please eat a sandwich before you arrive. The schedule doesn’t leave us time to serve lunch, unfortunately.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are all agency leaders with interesting stories to tell about using AI in their processes workflows.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is for anybody in your agency who cares about AI and processes.
The event is mostly pitched at agency founders and their operations teams, but anybody can attend if you think it looks up your street.
