AI Workflows for Agencies
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way digital creative agencies operate, offering innovative solutions to streamline workflows and improve client outcomes. A recent survey by Artwork Flow revealed that nearly 85% of creative operations professionals believe their day-to-day tasks will soon become AI-enabled.
By automating repetitive tasks, personalizing client interactions, and delivering data-driven insights, AI enables agencies to work more efficiently, focusing human effort on creative output and high-value strategic initiatives.
AI advancements are also helping agencies reduce costs, optimize resources, and deliver more impactful, customized solutions for their clients. In this article, we’ll explore how AI is reshaping agency workflows, the benefits it can offer, and the potential challenges related to AI usage.
Benefits of AI in agency workflows
The benefits of AI have been discussed at length in a number of publications, but the main ideas can be distilled into three key points:
- Enhanced productivity: AI can streamline workflows by handling mundane tasks, allowing human talent to focus on more strategic and creative work.
- Personalization at scale: AI can enable hyper-personalized customer experiences by tailoring content and campaigns to individual preferences and behaviors.
- Cost savings: Automating tasks with AI can reduce labor costs and increase project turnaround speed.
If any of these benefits align with your agency’s goals, finding the right AI tool can significantly increase your chances of success.
How agencies are using AI
AI is already streamlining workflows and increasing productivity for digital agencies.
Lauren Richardson, senior account executive at Marketing Signals, emphasized this point when she said, “Repetitive admin tasks can drain valuable time that could otherwise be spent on more strategic or creative projects. Automating some of these tasks using AI can free up time, supercharge productivity, and reduce errors all at once.”
From facilitating the creative process to quickly analyzing large datasets, AI tools are revolutionizing agency operations. Below, we’ve outlined a few of the major processes AI is “supercharging” for agencies, as well as some of the practical tools you can use to those ends.
Creative brainstorming assistance
Gone are the days of staring at a blank page. AI acts as a co-pilot in the creative process, serving as a sounding board and brainstorming generator.
Tools like ChatGPT and DALL·E assist teams in brainstorming, conceptualizing, and prototyping new ideas. These AI-driven platforms can generate unique visuals or copy that help inspire final, human-created products.
A growing use case for AI in creative agencies is storyboarding and visual content creation. By leveraging AI, agencies can create detailed storyboards, explore alternative camera angles, and generate background images while planning creative projects. This not only speeds up the production process but also improves the quality of the final output, ensuring teams can visualize and iterate on ideas more effectively.
This shift is enabling agencies to create and deliver more personalized campaigns that adapt quickly to real-time events, making their operations more agile and responsive.
Content and code consistency
Agencies are also using AI to improve consistency across written content and code.
AI tools can analyze copy to ensure a unified tone of voice and brand message, even across large-scale projects and campaigns. This consistency not only enhances brand cohesion but also streamlines the creative process by reducing the amount of manual oversight and revision required.
And copywriters aren’t the only agency professionals who are getting writing assistance from AI. As any developer will tell you, a lot of the process of writing code includes repeatedly using similar strings and snippets—but even one error in those repeated lines of code can cause a break.
Tools like Code Rabbit and AlphaCode from DeepMind are helping developers write code faster and more accurately, making it easier to meet development deadlines.
Data-driven insights and personalization
AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data provides agencies with powerful insights into market trends and customer preferences. This data allows for the optimization and personalization of content, often in real-time, to ensure highly targeted and effective campaigns.
Tools like MonsterInsights, Semrush, Hotjar, HubSpot, and the Google Marketing Platform all use AI in some capacity to improve data analysis, competitive research, user behavior analysis, or content optimization for WordPress sites.
In some cases, AI can also automate responses or trigger specific actions based on these insights, making it even easier for agencies to deliver timely and relevant content to users.
Drawbacks and challenges of implementing AI
As with any new technology, it’s important to understand the risks and drawbacks before implementing a new workflow.
Three of the most commonly cited drawbacks to using AI are the lack of inherent quality control, the inability to copyright AI-generated content, and the consequences of overreliance on it.
Quality Control
AI-generated content often lacks the nuance and quality of human-created content. Using AI to build a project from start to finish without any human intervention can create an uncanny valley effect, and your audience will be quick to sniff out inauthentic content.
While AI is useful for checking simple grammar or style mistakes based on specific guidelines or even providing a content outline, agencies will need to refine AI outputs manually to meet their standards for quality.
Skilled, experienced human designers and creatives will always need to tweak AI outputs to create the best-quality final product.
Copyright law for AI content
AI-generated output is currently non-copyrightable, making it impossible for clients to protect their branding and marketing efforts if they use AI-generated content right out of the box.
The lines are also murky when it comes to creative collaboration between humans and AI, but agencies should err on the side of caution. In a 2022 case, the U.S. Copyright Office partially retracted a copyright registration because it was deemed that the human author was not involved enough in the creation of the visual work in question.
Kristina Kashtanova wrote an 18-page graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn, using Midjourney to create all the imagery. The Copyright Office eventually decided that Kashtanova’s initial prompting of the tool and additional editing were “too minor and imperceptible to supply the necessary creativity for copyright protection.”
The Copyright Office did allow protection for the text of the story, which Kashtanova wrote, as well as the final compilation of text and images as an integrated work. “[Kashtanova’s] authorship is protected by copyright,” said a representative of the Copyright Office in a letter to the author. “However…the images in the Work that were generated by the Midjourney technology are not the product of human authorship.”
For agencies using AI to enhance their creative output, it’s important to be able to show exactly what AI contributes to a project and how that output has been altered and refined by the humans on your team if you want to ensure the final product is copyrightable.
Over-reliance on AI
All these concerns mentioned here can be boiled down to one important theme: There are consequences when AI models are left to their own devices.
For agencies, there is a real risk of processes becoming too dependent on AI. When human creativity and input are left out of the creative process, you risk your brand’s authenticity with your audience.
If left unchecked (or under-supervised), AI also has the potential to exacerbate existing ethical issues, including the potential for bias and loss of data privacy. Because AI models use existing data to generate outputs, algorithms can reproduce existing biases if the data set they work from isn’t diverse enough.
Plus, most emerging AI tools have little to no protection regarding the information users enter. This unrestrained data collection and lack of transparency or regulation regarding how that data is used can be concerning for agencies. For this reason, it’s important never to enter private or privileged data into an AI tool—especially public tools like ChatGPT.
Agencies must navigate all these concerns carefully to ensure the responsible use of AI.
Use AI tools with confidence
The key to leveraging AI effectively lies in balancing automation with human creativity and maintaining a focus on ethical and responsible use.
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