Introduction
Many are now familiar with AI chat assistants such as Open AI's GPT, Google's Bard, Meta's LLaMA, and X's Grok. Many can now achieve results that previously weren't possible prior to AI, and you wouldn't be alone in thinking that this change may have a negative impact on agencies with more business being capable of creating their own solutions. In reality however, the emergence of genuinely useful AI may provide agencies with the most benefits of all.
AI's Impact on Digital Agencies
One of the major problems with todays AI is the issue of false positive's, if you ask a chatbot today how many A's are in "Capabilities" it will say with absolute confidence that there are three, even though we all know that there are only two, this is a known issue known as hallucinations. We actually ran into this problem in early 2022 when attempting to utilise AI to generate formatted specification lists for products using their Title, MPN, and SKU to scour the internet for that products specs, and populate them neatly within a table. What we found is that in the absence of accurate information, AI would provide false information.
Now in 2024 however, this specific issue has been largely resolved, with web connected AI with access to up to date information, and custom models that are suited for specific tasks.
This now means that AI can be genuinely useful to agencies in completing tedious tasks much faster than it would take previously, resulting in more impact for clients without an increase in cost. This leads us nicely into our next point.
Speed to market
Vetted AI can be utilised in an abundance of processes to get from A to B faster without losing quality, from automated testing, to development, roadmapping, and even estimation.
By speeding these processes up it allows your business to move as fast as possible, the way this is done is by utilising AI to allow developers, designers, strategists, and project managers to move faster, AI is an assistant not a replacement.
Avoiding costly mistakes
With the speed in which the digital landscape is changing, it's more and more likely that with each new project there are aspects that haven't been done before within an agency, however with the help of AI, it's possible to find gaps, and ensure these unknowns are fully understood before commencing a project.
Upskilling
Pairing can be costly, by utilising AI as an assistant it allows agencies to up-skill team members with less reliance on pairing. It's important to ensure that any upskilling with the help of AI uses dedicated training models.
More work for the same cost
Reductions in time to deliver projects, generate reporting, and complete account maintenance, can collectively bring greater results for the same cost.
We believe AI has a place in agencies to allow team to complete tasks faster, only when they could actually complete that task by themselves if they had to. The need for vetted AI is still there and AI should be used with caution, any code used should be understood and critiqued by the person using it. At the end of the day if you don't understand what code is doing, you shouldn't be using it.
Conclusion
The rise in AI ultimately means that clients should see an even higher ROI as AI is introduced to streamline processes, and agencies only becoming more cost effective with time.
