By Jasmin Bedir, CEO at Innocean
If you’ve been following my musings on AI in this publication, you know that I love filmic references with a decent amount of humour. You may have also noticed that someone lost theirs entirely on the back of my last article, which led to a lengthy counter article (mind you, it was beautifully written) with the headline “Shots fired!”. And because everyone loves drama, the whole thing landed us in The Age. How exciting!
And here I was thinking that our industry had become rather boring.
On the topic of exciting, I do agree with Mr B that agencies like Innocean will look completely different in five years, and I’ve been publicly speaking and writing for months about the need for our industry to get on the tools and off our bottoms.
But I think I may have not been clear enough. Clarity seems to be quite elusive in general when it comes to AI. Right now, AI is what happens in the darkness. In the shadows. In black boxes, clutched to the chest.
Uncertainty, confusion, apathy and a general “someone else in my company/and or industry should solve this” attitude seems to be the current MO.
Let me shine some light on what we have been doing, which is exactly this:
Starting with the launch of our new AI register for suppliers, we will be tracking who is using what form of AI and tools on our projects and our clients’ projects.
This will give us insight into the commercial risks from our partners using these tools but also it will allow us to make sure value delivery is still in effect. Some suppliers may see this as an overreach, and I welcome a conversation about this with anyone at any time (and any conference).
As we all know, wherever there is mystery, there is margin – and while we’re all for businesses making a fair share of profit, we are taking a look at the level of production costs we’re spending. If we see the same production costs from suppliers, but AI is being used, we need to ask ourselves: Are we and our clients still getting a good deal? Are we ensuring that the skill we contract suppliers for is the actual skill we’re receiving?
To know how to evaluate the actual value of services and tools, we actually need to really understand them. We believe that learning through failure and not waiting for someone else to come up with solutions will determine who will and will not exist in the long run.
Running actual pilot projects where the entire purpose is to see how far we can push things has been mind blowing. Not just to see the pace of acceleration, but also the far-reaching impacts on governance in real time. In other words, it’s a real time crash course, where crashes happen more often because we’re still fumbling around in the darkness.
And that’s okay. It’s always darkest before the dawn (of a new era).
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Top Image: Jasmin Bedir