How is Your Firm Reinvesting the Time Saved by AI?
Tim Williams
Business and revenue model strategist for advertising agencies and other professional services firms
Current estimates show most professional services firms are completing much of their work at least 12% faster thanks to AI-powered tools. How are your team members spending their new-found time?
This is a critical question that will only grow in importance as more and more of our daily tasks are completed faster, and perhaps better, by AI platforms and agents. The unfortunate but understandable instinct is simply to move on and get a jump start on the next project. But this misses the transformational impact AI can have on your firm.
Increasing your value, not just your speed
For knowledge workers, the central promise of AI is not to help us work faster, but rather smarter. If we employ AI only to help us keep doing the same work, but faster, our clients will quickly figure out they can adopt the same AI tools and simply duplicate what we do. We must use the AI revolution as an opportunity not to increase our speed, but to increase our value.
By setting AI to work on routine tasks, we can use the time saved to up-level the quality of our thinking. The challenge for agencies isn’t just to meet the increasing demands for more content, delivered faster. (AI can obviously do that very effectively.) The real challenge is to prove to clients that they still need us. Smart client organizations have already in-housed much of what agencies do, and AI is helping them to accelerate that capability.
More like consultancies, less like production houses
Our challenge — and opportunity — is to leverage AI to augment our expertise and problem-solving abilities. As clients become more and more like production houses, agencies must become more and more like consultancies, providing high-value solutions to thorny marketing and business problems.
Which means the time savings produced by AI in the areas of data collection, creative production, workflow management, etc. must be reinvested not in more of the above but rather in the areas of analysis, insights, and creative problem solving. Agencies are already at a crossroads where their service offerings are viewed as widely-available commodities subject to intense pricing pressure.
The path to a more profitable future is to get out of that business altogether and re-direct our energies to doing things clients can’t easily do for themselves. In fact, this should be the litmus test for designing our business models. Gather your leadership team and get agreement on the following:
”Big brain, small machine”
Most professional service firms are discovering that artificial intelligence can not only do the downstream work, but can significantly augment the effectiveness of the upstream work as well.
The resulting benefit is not just upsteam work that’s done faster, but better — idea generation, conceptual thinking, and divergent appraisals of solutions produced by humans. AI has the potential to make everything we do better because it can compare and contrast our ideas against the canvas of a global knowledge bank.
A majority of agencies still operate on the model “big machine, small brain” at a time when we need to present ourselves as “big brain, small machine.” Client organizations can already employ a wide array of software tools to create and run their own “machine.” The mission of agencies is to direct the time saved by AI into becoming a better, stronger “brain.”
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3moThe issue with a lot of these firms is they have often wrapped all this service based on ‘time’ - and expensive time at that! It needs to be repackaged and focus on the outcome - to which these firms have invested their IP and scaled it using AI. Big flip for them yes - but will be beneficial!
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3moWe all know how this goes, an agency / brand will just cut staffing for those who do the tasks in the "Do Less" column. So entry level and mid level folks will miss getting the reps they need to someday soon have the experience and skill to complete tasks in the "Do More" section. We're at a tipping point for what employment looks like in our society and as someone whose been working an office job since 2008, I'm still waiting for these new digital tools will make my work easier. Every time it's been more work for less people never higher quality work for the same number of people. ERP's were sold this way, same with Slack / Teams messages (are we still doing email + slack?!?), Project Management platforms (Asana, Trello, etc), hell even email hasn't really improved the overall quality of work when every spammer and sales person can email FirstName.LastName@YourCompany.com. Come on Tim Williams you know this how these technologies are applied, stop selling us the same thing these creators have sold us, it's never panned out that way.
Founder/President at Think and Make
3moIt saves time but does it create a bell curve if mediocrity? Bringing smart, high performaning individuals down to the middle and raise low performers to be better but just mediocre. If all your’re measuring is speed it looks great, but great thinking isn’t always the fastest. Just a question but a valid one I think.
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3moI think this assumes that agency people’s time isn’t at least 12% overbooked already 😉
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3moYou’ve hit on a couple of points I have been trying to raise about professional service firms (in my case, law firms). 1. AI can help you do things faster, but what do you do with that time? For most it is more work, whether more of the same or time spent on prompts, algorithms, and databases. Right now I see AI ending up much like email, which promised to save us time on communications but actually eats up more time than was ever saved. 2. How do we convince our clients they need us, rather than using AI themselves? Clients can put in the same prompts in many of the same databases that we can. Where is the value in a professional service provider? If we can’t/don’t answer that, we stand to be replaced. 3. How do you set yourself apart from other firms using the same AI tools that you are? Is the prompts you use really enough? How do we prevent every firm pumping out the same thing and looking the same?