Gen AI automation - live project learning

What we’ve learnt from our clients and live projects so far…

Hi!

It’s been a while since my last newsletter, but it’s been super busy over the last few weeks - things are really starting to take off. We only went live working for clients at the end of January. But in just 4 months we’ve already run 30+ projects for more than a dozen global clients.

In a way it’s a strange situation.

On one hand we’re only at the start of our journey, learning about Gen AI driven 100% project automation and how to optimise its impact. On the other hand we already have a wealth of live project experience to draw on. Important learning that’s already shaping how we work with our clients with Gen AI automation.

And that experience is across a wide range of insight, strategy and innovation projects (as well as a mix of categories and global brands). Projects we’ve run already cover…

1. Innovation
2. Brand Positioning
3. Topic-based insight
4. Brand Comms & Activation
5. Semiotics
6. Trends and Foresight
7. Naming

So I thought I would share some of that learning in this newsletter. Hopefully a window into the experiences across different project types is useful as we explore the impact Gen AI will have on our industry..

1. INNOVATION projects  

This is perhaps the most obvious use case for our project automation and one clients are often keen to trial first.

Current innovation processes (foundational insight through to ideation and concept development) can be a huge drain on time, money and resources. Often with variable results and residual feelings of workshop fatigue for many.

We’re told by our clients that 100% automated Gen AI projects bring a range of benefits to the innovation journey…

• Speed + rigour - results in hours or days instead of weeks without sacrificing depth of insight and richness of creativity
• 360 perspectives - Perfect blending of consumer, cultural and expert insight, harnessing internal data and online sources curated for the challenge
• Inspirational Stretch - Our models get to new places that human processes don’t (our clients talk about their experience of… ‘same people in the same room with same exercises getting to the same ideas’ using traditional methods)
• Iteration and creative control - the ability to re-brief, rerun and refocus insight, ideation and concept writing as often as needed, with instant results
• Freedom to add value - without the need to spend time managing project processes the team’s time can be focussed on adding high value human thinking

There are challenges too of course. 100% project automation has so many benefits, but it requires new ways of working to get the most from these benefits.  There are probably three key areas that are the most important challenges to navigate…

• Organisational buy in - the whole team needs to embrace a new way of working and commit time and focus to make it successful (the project is 100% automated, but it still needs a client-side human journey of discovery)
• Navigating content - it’s a rigorous project journey, covering multiple steps which potentially creates a lot of content . Probably not more than a traditional project, but that content is all available in as little as an hour from briefing, not drip-fed over weeks. And then you have the iterations and reruns. What content gets shared, with who, when and how is vital to success - something we’re learning more about all the time
• Taking ownership of the results - It’s easier for people to feel ownership of ideas that they were in the room for when created. We need to keep these moments of human interaction in the journey and get people working with and building on the ideas so this ownership is felt. Whether that’s a workshop or another approach

The good news is, if we navigate these challenges (something we do as part of our service) 100% automated innovation projects really work. Our clients tell us that we get them 80 to 90% of the way to where they need to be on their innovation journey, in a fraction of the time, resources and cost of traditional projects. (Which is a great result. We’re not expecting 100%, it’s still a human journey of discovery).It’s early days in terms or proving the results in market - but client feedback we’ve had comparing us head to head with more traditional methods suggest our Gen AI automation approach is as good, in some ways better. Including feedback from consumer testing.

2. BRAND POSITIONING projects

Many of the principles I describe above for our innovation projects also apply when we’re helping our clients get to differentiated and compelling positioning spaces for their brands.There are perhaps two key learnings over and above this that are specific to the brand positioning journey.The first is that the opportunity platforms we create from the foundational research and insight are rarely the answer in and of themselves. The positioning is crafted from insights and learning pulled together from across the platforms. That remains a uniquely human process. That’s a good thing. We’re not trying to automate the whole journey of discovery to get to a position. Just the agency inputs that help get the team there - faster, more iterative and at a lower cost.  The second is that the ability to take these platforms into ideation so quickly and early on in the process is a huge benefit… one that’s all but impossible with traditional approaches. We can take any platform and bring it to life with a range of innovation, comms and activation ideas all brought to life with concepts. It’s much easier to make a decision about a strategic direction when you can see what it might mean executionally.

3. TOPIC-BASED INSIGHT projects

Whilst many of our projects have taken us on a journey all the way to ideas and concepts, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes we’re working on purely topic based challenges where the foundational research and insights we generate are about gaining an increased understanding of a space.This is an area where our clients may have previously assumed that traditional consumer research was needed. Occasionally this might be true - and talking to consumers might be the only way of getting the answers they need.But we believe that most of the time it’s not the case. The answers are most often out there already, in publicly available online sources (not just social media - which often tells short as a source of insight) and in clients’ own data sources - reports and transcripts.Not only can these sources provide answers to foundational insight questions, they can provide a perspective driven by consumer, cultural and expert views, all in one integrated solution.And the results go beyond insights, including detailed opportunity platforms. These are hugely flexible - they can be theme based, target / tribe based, need based, occasion based and more… depending on the brief.

4. COMMS AND ACTIVATION projects

The same journey from foundational research and insight through to platforms ideas and concept applies as much to comms and activation challenges as to innovation.We’ve been helping our clients to sharpen their understanding of their communication targets, find different creative platforms and then generate comms and activation ideas from these. The frameworks we create aren’t just useful for driving idea creation for comms and activation, we’ve also been using them to map existing brand and communications to better understand the competitive space and guide how to optimise execution.This is where our semiotics approach complements our platforms approach…

5. SEMIOTICS projects

It’s early days, but we’ve already made great strides in automating the semiotic analysis process. Replicating the expertise and processes of semioticians in understanding not what is being said, but how meaning is communicated through imagery and language.We’ve used this to identify the codes of packaging and communication, and it can be used for cultural imagery too. The maps we create from these codes can be combined with the opportunity platforms work to create a more nuanced map of opportunity - combining they ‘why’ of market understanding with the ‘how’ of semiotic understandingAutomating the semiotic process opens up the opportunity to mainstream its use across a wider range of strategic and executional projects. Clients have told us that this simple and pragmatic approach is a refreshing alternative to the overly complex and academic semiotic projects they’ve experienced in the past.

6. TRENDS AND FORESIGHT projects

We’ve started to explore how our approach to research, insights and opportunity platforms can supercharge the trend and foresight process.We find the biggest challenge clients face in the space isn’t identifying the trends they need to be exploring. It’s identify and bringing to life what this means for their category and their brands and what they need to be doing about it in the next few years. Making it look and feel real.That’s the space where we’re working with one of our clients. We’ve been able to get to a comprehensive map of the future trends impacting their category in a matter of days, whilst their traditional method was taking months.

7. NAMING projects

This isn’t an area we set out to work in, but it’s a great of example of discovering just how flexible our 100% automated project are.We’ve been experimenting on a project with a client where we’ve generating potential names for a soon to be launched product.But this wasn’t just a creative ideation process. Instead we identified insight driven opportunity platforms and generated name ideas from these. Which means you don’t just get a name, you got the underlying needs and insights that underpin that name, from which to build a brand story around it.In many ways this all feels like months or even years worth of leaning in such a short time. Driven by the fast, flexible and iterative approach of Gen AI driven 100% automated projects.We can can’t wait to find out what else we’ll discover over the next few months and beyond.

Have a great week!

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