REPORT: How Agencies Are Innovating with AI in 2025

Increasing efficiency is an obvious use case for AI – but stopping there is like caging the bird before it’s even learned how to sing.

“Using AI to do stuff quicker and cheaper is a death spiral – you’re just going to end up passing all that saving on to your client,” says Jules Love, co-founder of Spark AI. 

“The real opportunity is in innovating and creating new, better ways of engaging audiences.”  

And forward-thinking businesses’ are already proving this:. 

• VCCP has opened its first AI-first agency, faith. 
• Absolute Vodka is using ChatGPT to research flavours for localised cocktails and Midjourney to create custom posters.
• Coca Cola is using AI to personally customise thousands of video ads for different demographics. 

“The big networks are already pouring millions into this. If independent agencies want to keep up, they have to stop thinking about AI as an efficiency tool and start seeing it as an innovation tool.”

At The Robots Are Coming, Jules and co-founder Emma Wharton-Love will delve into their new AI report to show how agencies like yours are embedding AI in a way that enhances creativity and drives innovation – helping them stand out in the market.

How to Get an Extra TWO Hours Every Day Using AI

In the agency world, time is finite – you have to make the most out of every hour in the day.

AI can help you do that. But most agencies are still only scratching the surface. 

“The overwhelming majority of people I speak to every day use it to translate their emails into a different tone. That’s it. They still believe that’s all it can do,” says Heather Murray, founder of AI for Non-Techies.

“The things that make your everyday easier, whether it’s inside or outside of work, that is a whole world that I think is really exciting.” 

Used in the right way, AI can free up hours of your day. 

👉 At the Robots Are Coming, Heather will share her tips and tricks for prompting AI to make the most of her time – covering everything from email workflows and automation to thought organisation and handling tricky client conversations.

How to Find and Leverage the AI Data You Already Have

Most agencies think they need to start from scratch when it comes to AI. But chances are, you’re already sitting on a goldmine of data – you just don’t know it yet.

“Last year, we were marvelling at AI-generated meeting notes, but now we’ve got 300 days’ worth of them recorded. That’s data,” says Antony Mayfield, CEO of Brilliant Noise.

The question is: how do you manage it, and how do you get value from it?

Antony has been working at the intersection of AI, strategy, and agency operations for years now – and he’s seen first-hand how agencies are failing to make the most of their own data.

👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Antony will break down his simple framework that will help you make sense of your AI knowledge, harness the data you already have, and use it to create smarter workflows and more impactful AI-driven decisions.

“We Built an AI Platform to Run Our Agency”

When Fergus Dyer-Smith got exclusive access to Open AI’s original GPT model, he and his team at Wooshii wasted no time.  

They began by mapping out each step of their creative processes, looking at where they could integrate AI to speed things up. Soon enough, they’d built a tool that their sales guy could use to whip up a proposal in less than an hour.

From there, they kept on building: “Proposals, RFPs, production briefs, feedback analysis – all done in minutes.”

Now, agency giant Publicis Pro are using their tool – and it’s had a direct impact on their bottom line: “They’ve now openly said this has hit their net margin. It’s literally a more profitable business,” says Fergus.

👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Fergus will take us through how Wooshii’s AI tool can help your agency speed up your creative processes and expand your team’s capacity with a few button clicks – complete with a live demo to show you exactly how to use it.

There’s A Prompt For That!

AI can be a real cheat code for your agency – but only if you know how to ask the right questions.

From marketing and sales to data analysis and personal productivity, agencies are discovering that the right prompt can shave hours off their workload. But most people are still stuck using the same basic ChatGPT requests.

That’s where Jonjo Rowlands and Simon Douglass come in.

Simon, founder of Curated Digital, has tested hundreds of AI tools and has built a playbook of prompts that help him create faster than ever before. 

Meanwhile, Jonjo focuses on making your AI outputs appear more human, tweaking prompts so your content sounds like you..

“It’s a mindset thing more than anything – rather than a specific prompt,” says Jonjo.

“AI shouldn’t be thought of as just a quick and easy way to produce something without any effort. It should be a tool in our arsenal that speeds us up in certain areas and makes us better in others. It’s not just a ‘press go and it will do it for you’ button.”

👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Simon will take you through his favourite agency use cases, and break down the AI prompts that he uses daily, while Jonjo will show you how to refine AI output so it actually works for your business.

Got a favourite prompt? Bring it along! We’ll be inviting audience members to submit their own prompts for on-the-spot improvements.

LIVE CASE STUDY: How to Utilise AI in Client Services

AI can speed up client work, sure – but what if it could do more than that?

“The challenge for client services teams is keeping on top of everything: who needs attention; what’s going on in the client’s industry; how to keep accounts moving forward,” says Glen Calvert, co-founder of Kaizan.

“We wanted to create something that doesn’t just collect data but actually tells teams what they need to focus on.”

So he did.

Kaizan’s AI platform doesn’t just handle the ‘busywork’. It can also:

• Guide client service teams to spot risks and opportunities
• Surface client needs before they become problems
• Track engagement trends and pulls in real-time competitive insights
• Automate account development plans, campaign ideas, and project scoping

👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Glen will be taking us through his new AI-powered client services platform, exploring how agencies can use this tech to improve their client relationships. 

He’ll be joined by Holly Lucas, head of client partnerships at Anything is Possible, to deliver a live demo and agency case study – proving the impact this tool can have on service-based businesses. 

“Kaizan saves our team time on lower value tasks while allowing them to focus on the high-cognition, strategic and creative work we do best,” says Holly. “It’s been great to be part of Kaizan’s journey with Glen and input as the product has evolved.”

If you’re looking for practical ways to incorporate AI to measure your client relationships, empower your teams and aid cross selling, this is one to catch.

How Will AI Change the SEO Industry – And What Can You Do About It?

“SEO is dead!” people cry, every time a new shift happens in search.

But AI isn’t killing the SEO industry – it’s just changing it.

Dave Peiris, Head of SEO at Propellernet has been tracking these shifts closely. While some fear that ChatGPT and AI-powered search will siphon away traffic from Google, Dave isn’t convinced.

“The fear is that AI search will take traffic from Google, but we’re just not seeing that,” says Dave. “In fact, Google traffic is still going up.”

“What is changing, though, is how Google ranks content. There’s a bigger focus on brand, UX, and user behaviour than ever before.”

So, what does that mean for your agency – and your clients?

👉 At The Robots Are Coming, we’re bringing together a panel of SEO leaders to explore how AI is shaking up search – and what you can do to stay ahead.

We’ll discuss:

• How Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping search rankings
• Whether you should be optimising for ChatGPT
• Why brand credibility is now a key ranking factor -and how to build it

This open conversation isn’t about fear-mongering – it’s about practical strategies to make sure your agency thrives in the AI era of search. If SEO is part of your agency’s offering, this is one discussion you can’t afford to miss.

How to Embed a Culture of AI in Your Team

Sam Zindel can pinpoint the moment he realised his agency, Propellernet, needed to push forward with AI.

It was July 2024, and he’d just left a session at The Robots Are Coming about how to build an AI research team within your agency. One panelist in particular had left him feeling invigorated: Kate Ross, MD at eight&four.

At our last event, Kate explained how, in her agency, AI is seen as something that everyone needs to be involved with and thinking about. It impacts all job roles, not just a select few. Despite initial fear of and resistance to AI, they’ve made a lot of progress in getting people excited about AI.

“They’ve really grabbed hold of AI, and created a centralised system from which the whole company could be run from – which I loved,” says Sam. “It made me think: ‘We don’t need to wait for the perfect plan to form’.”

Sam got to work straight away:

• He introduced a “hygiene level” of AI capability for the entire business to adopt
• He invested in an external AI training programme for his entire team (49 people!) as well as individual ChatGPT licenses so it became a part of the daily routine
• He added in an “AI Growth Goal” into each team member’s personal development plan

“It’s no longer an option to not be using AI. If we’re not using it, other people out there will be. So we have to find a way to embed this in how we’re doing things.”

At The Robots Are Coming, we’ll hear from Sam about how he is embedding AI at Propellernet, and empowering his team to view this tech through a positive lens.

He’ll be accompanied by his OG inspiration, Kate Ross, who’ll share how her agency’s culture of AI innovation has developed over the last six months.

Where Should You Be Focussing Your AI Efforts?

The AI space is overwhelming. New tools are being introduced all the time, prompts are getting more refined, and trends that could lead to nowhere are appearing almost daily.

So where should you be focusing your time and resources? 

👉 At The Robots Are Coming, Industry experts Tara Thompson, AI learning specialist at Bauer Academy, and James Pierechod, founder of Visual Content Consultancy, will be offering their insights on the best place to start when it comes to integrating AI in your agency.

Tara has spent a lot of time helping businesses adopt AI, even getting published in Forbes – and her message is strategy before shiny tools. 

“It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got the latest software or the latest AI tools – if you do not do an audit of your agency, then it won’t help you overall,” she says. “What’s your biggest problem? If it’s business development, focus on that first. You can’t do everything.” 

James has also seen his fair share of agencies rush into AI investments that never pay off.

His time as an AI consultant has taught him a key lesson: most AI ventures fail because people are trying to solve the wrong problems.

“I’ve seen brands spend months building AI systems they don’t need,” James says. “I went into one company, and they were building an LLM – just so they had one that was theirs. Turns out it was costing them over £1m a year to keep updating it, and they couldn’t afford to keep it up to date.

In this session, Tara and James will show you how to avoid wasted efforts with AI – and turn your AI attention in the places where it’s needed.

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