15 Business Functions Where Artificial Intelligence Can Assist Agencies

Businesses across industries are actively seeking innovative ways to leverage artificial intelligence. As creative powerhouses, agencies are naturally finding some of the most unique and effective methods of using AI technologies and tools to enhance their operations.

Some of the ways agencies are applying AI today focus on managing everyday, routine tasks, while others are more forward-thinking, driving outside-the-box ideas and strategies. Below, 15 members of Forbes Agency Council explore different business functions where AI can assist agencies in achieving their long-term organizational goals and developing new capabilities.

1. Quantifying Value And ROI

Artificial intelligence has been essential to our agency in quantifying value and return on investment for clients and their internal teams. AI-backed platforms that accurately track metrics such as industry share of voice among competitors, website traffic, new website users and social shares have bolstered the tangible value of clients’ PR programs. – Heather Kelly, Next PR

2. Targeting Highly Qualified Audiences

Given how big of a role user experience has on conversions, I believe that AI will be leveraged by smart agencies on data points, unifications of tracking and, in general, improvement in behavioral analytics. We will lean on AI to home in on the most highly qualified audiences and prune wasteful spending on irrelevant targeting. – Aleksandar Sasha Jovicic, Executive Digital

3. Augmenting The Creative Process

AI can and should be used to augment the creative process—not replace it. What I mean is that AI can better inform the creative process. In addition to relying on past experience and focus groups, agencies can use AI to provide insights into what types of copy or imagery have best performed in the past. – Mark Skroch, BCV Social

4. Developing Brand Strategies And Experiences

AI has huge potential to reshape the way we use and analyze data in the pursuit of the rich insights needed to develop brand strategies and experiences. A lot of brand work relies on pattern recognition, connecting the dots and finding meaningful outliers in a vast sea of information. AI tools allow clients to go deeper into data sets and get to stronger answers with greater speed and efficiency. – Howard Breindel, DeSantis Breindel


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5. Elevating Content Creation

Systems are being elevated by the use of AI in content creation. These systems are very good already. Content is critical in effective marketing, and these systems, if used well, can relieve a massive burden and cost for businesses by generating content for blogs, webpages and much more. Customer service AI is also getting really good. Some fast food chains are now fully using AI to take orders. – Jason Wilson, Strategy, LLC

6. Eliminating Repetitive, Administrative Tasks

At our company, we use a variety of AI services that aim to take away repetitive, administrative tasks and free up time for creativity and collaboration. DeepL’s translation service is increasingly useful, while Copysmith fast-tracks copywriting jobs. Finally, Otter’s spookily accurate service saves our creatives hours of transcribing and lets us get on with the job of actually creating. – Julia Linehan, The Digital Voice PR Agency Ltd

7. Accelerating The Copywriting Process

One great way to utilize AI in your workflow is in copywriting. AI copywriters such as Writesonic and CopyAI can greatly accelerate the writing process. They certainly won’t replace writers anytime in the near future, but they can alleviate writer’s block, generate ideas faster and provide creative momentum. – Tomas Oscar Andrén, UPRISE Management

8. Using AI For Chat And To Answer FAQs

One of the best ways to leverage AI is to make sure that you are using it in chat and also to answer FAQs. This is a great way to work through the process of ensuring that you can cut down on human interactions and make things as easy as possible. – Jon James, Ignited Results

9. Completing Repeatable Processes And Removing Redundancies

Agencies struggle with completing processes and following systems. AI will help work happen quicker, enable processes to occur smoothly and, along with that, ensure no mistakes are made. For example, Zapier helps to get tasks done in one click. Zapier would be great for repeatable processes and removing redundancies in tasks, therefore saving human time and effort. – Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day

10. Handling Paid Media Campaign Changes At Scale

Agencies can leverage AI across their paid media campaign efforts to account for thousands of data points at scale. This can positively impact paid media specialists in a big way, as they can now stay focused on strategy rather than menial, manual campaign changes. Overall, this gives them more time to focus on more clients or expand the results for their current book of business. – Bernard May, National Positions

11. Meeting Search Engine Optimization Objectives

Even the most compelling, well-written piece of content can underperform without proper optimization. That’s where artificial intelligence can be extremely valuable. Tapping into an AI tool for help with meta descriptions, use of keywords and H tag formatting can help your agency meet SEO objectives and deliver real results to your clients. – Sara Steever, Paulsen

12. Increasing The ROI Of Programmatic Ad Buying

Digital advertising is a great place to incorporate AI. Programmatic ad buying automates the process using real-time bidding through a dynamic ad exchange. The AI learns and adapts over time, so the ROI increases over the length of the campaign. While it might sound as if this eliminates the need for human input, it allows media buyers to focus on planning, optimizing and improving campaigns. – Michelle Abdow, Market Mentors, LLC

13. Scanning Reviews To Identify Problem Areas

As a healthcare marketing agency, we use AI to gauge patients’ collective sentiments through their written reviews of their healthcare providers. This AI feature scans the content of the source text to identify the topics revolving around the practice and presents the insights in a word-cloud format. It enables providers to learn about their problem areas and develop strategies to fix them. – Ajay Prasad, GMR Web Team

14. Sustaining Conversion Volume For Direct Response Media

Artificial intelligence is a perfect fit for direct response media such as paid search and social media. As audience data disappears and targeting on Facebook and Google becomes less refined, leveraging platforms’ AI tools to focus on generating conversions is a great way to sustain conversion volume. – Donna Robinson, Collective Measures

15. Identifying Areas Of Weakness And Monitoring Well-Being

AI and data can be critical for agencies to identify key areas of weakness within the business and opportunities for growth. You can also leverage business intelligence to monitor well-being and productivity. As an example, for larger agencies, you can leverage AI to monitor staff absenteeism, retention and productivity, then make positive changes to improve workplace well-being. – Azadeh Williams, AZK Media

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/06/13/15-business-functions-where-artificial-intelligence-can-assist-agencies/