"How can I frame our adoption of agentic AI away from purely operational efficiencies to our clients?" This was a question an agency exec posed to me, and though it was the first time that I was abruptly asked for assistance on how an agency should position their adoption of Gigi to their clients, I'm sure it's the question that every agency leader is asking themselves as they embark on their AI adoption journey.

Last week in this AdExchanger article, Bob Lord, President of Horizon, answered this very question (note: to no surprise, Horizon is an early Gigi customer) citing that agencies who view AI adoption as merely an exercise in cost cutting "are not chasing the other profound potential of AI, which can help them become a growth partner to their clients by using AI to help advertisers' businesses grow faster than they could without AI." Bob nails it. AI adoption provides an agency new capabilities to allow them to increase the level of service and better achieve their clients' business outcomes.

I thought it would be helpful to break down how we see this executed in practice across our customer base, and in doing so, illustrate to brands why you should strongly encourage your agencies to adopt AI to your benefit and not to the cost-cutting benefits that are often correlated with AI adoption:

Improved Optimization Sophistication and Cadence

One of the benefits we promote to our customers is that Gigi cuts the operational cost of managing the Amazon DSP by 80%. Empirically, we've proven this to be true. Common tasks that our customers would normally run in ADSP that could take up to an hour can now be done in minutes with Gigi. In reality, there are some important nuances to this claim.

The main caveat is that we cut the operational costs of the tasks that our customers "previously" executed in the Amazon DSP. The emphasis is on previous because so much of the value that Gigi creates for our agency customers are net new capabilities. For example, 0% of our customers leveraged bid adjustments (note: this continues to be the most underutilized performance lever in the Amazon DSP) on all their clients prior to using Gigi because they are far too manual and cumbersome to execute effectively at scale. Within weeks, our customers are able to do this across every single account and every single line item. Reviewing and understanding the effect of bid adjustments though is actually now incremental time spent by the agency in adding a net new capability to the benefit of the client.

In addition to net new capabilities, frequency of optimizations now increases exponentially. A sad reality is that many agencies actually just set and forget ADSP campaigns. A recent Stratably report found that only 27% of brands optimize their ADSP campaigns weekly, and 73% optimize monthly or less. It's a crazy stat which shows the low standard of service on this media channel. Conversely, once an agency adopts Gigi this fundamentally changes. In recent case studies, our agency partner Bluebird cited their monthly cadence improved to daily and our agency partner DEPT cited a 4x higher optimization cadence.

Yes, operational efficiencies can be realized with agentic AI, and as we become even more comfortable with these tools, increased automation will allow these operational efficiencies to be realized further. But, in the interim, net new capabilities and new ways of working can invariably lead to an incremental lift in operational efforts all to the ultimate benefit of the brand.

Elevated Service Level and Standardization

The best media agencies have an opinionated perspective on how media should be bought and measured, and execute this perspective in the exact same way across every client. While every agency exec would nod their head at this statement, every functional leader knows that it is a faint aspiration in reality.

Agencies write their best practices for human media managers and concede when these best practices are not met because humans are inherently limited. Tradeoffs are made. A common tradeoff is that small clients or more complex clients don't receive the elevated service level that larger and easier to manage clients receive. This results in operational inconsistencies and client churn. With agentic AI, these tradeoffs no longer need to be made. A functional leader can rewrite best practices so that every client receives the exact same standardized service level because agents do the work, not humans. And the only thing a functional leader now needs to manage is evolving the best practices to keep up with changes in the media channel or adapt to newly learned insights from agentic collaboration.

Compounding Intelligence

Brands hire media agencies for a simple reason: they believe the agency they hire is better equipped to achieve their desired business objectives than if they were to do it themselves, and are willing to pay a premium for this service. Agencies are able to grow their business by meeting and exceeding this bar consistently across a collection of clients.

They are able to do this because they've made the upfront human capital investments to generate expertise in the media channels they operate. A scaled agency with 10 years of operating the Amazon DSP has significantly more institutional human capital on the Amazon DSP than a brand who recently decides to in-house. This human capital expertise is an investment that has compounded over a decade.

Across every vertical, agents are force multipliers for existing expertise. The best writers become infinitely better, the best engineers become 100x engineers. The same is true in agentic media buying. Agentic AI enables a media buyer to wield their expertise in a given media channel to produce outcomes they were never able to dream of when they were previously manually executed. Further, once token capital is blended with human capital, newfound intelligence is created, and the foundation of expertise an agency has compounds. As agencies rapidly begin to adopt agentic AI, the intelligence gap between a brand just starting on this media channel and an agency who has deployed agentic AI expands. And the promise for a brand to hire an agency becomes more deeply reinforced.

Cost savings are the easiest thing for an agency to measure and the least interesting thing for a client to buy. All three of the capabilities above accrue to the brand, and they compound. Every quarter an agency operates this way, the gap between what they can deliver and what a brand can do alone gets wider. That's the story to bring to your clients.