Ad Age on 2.5 years of AI approaches

This week, Ad Age is all about small agencies ... I mean, always, but especially this week in LA. And I spoke with broadhead.'s Maija Hoehn to get the lowdown on how indie shops can make technological changes in their organizations. We came away with a blueprint, about how to increase clients served by 30% on a smaller staff. 👷 “Everyone can have AI now. It’s the agencies that know how to use it and operationalize it,” Maija told me. 🧈 They got the team on board by launching an AI platform internally, and treating it like a product. It's called Butter. 🗃️ Broadhead used AI to cut down on hourly billed tasks like status reports. 🛠️ Budget for AI like it is a staff-member, part of the labor costs. 💱 Then change the business model, once it's all implemented. 🟦 The full blueprint is below, and part of extensive small agency coverage 👇 https://lnkd.in/enJiTets

AI was one of the biggest topics at this year's Association of National Advertisers In-House Agency Forum, but it wasn't the whole story. The biggest shift isn't that AI is replacing creatives. It's that the role of in-house agencies is evolving. Today's in-house teams are expected to do more than produce content. They're becoming strategic business partners responsible for driving measurable impact, scaling creative output, and proving ROI. AI can help by automating repetitive tasks and speeding up workflows, but the real competitive advantage still comes from people. Strategy, creativity, and storytelling are what connect with audiences and build lasting brands, and music plays a big role in that. The takeaway? Use AI to work faster... not to replace the human ideas that make great creative stand out. Full article from APM's Zak Sirlin here: https://bit.ly/4p5SKCK

Spent some time with FreeWheel's Cannes Lions recap and this stat stuck with me: 43% of buyers say AI's biggest near-term impact is on planning and optimization, but only 22% are comfortable letting it manage campaigns solo. Feels like an accurate read on where we actually are. #FreeWheelEmp https://bit.ly/4vrwVz6

The Advertising industry has adopted and embraced enterprise AI very quickly. This article highlights initiatives by brands like Coca Cola, Mars, and Hershey, and shares perspectives from Madison & Wall and Rocket Mortgage (one of my personal favorites!) At AppFaktors, we balance the speed that AI-coding tools bring to development with the governance needed to meet regulation standards on a case-by-case basis, giving us the flexibility to help organizations across industries build enterprise applications. Check out the article and feel free to comment below with your perspective on AI adoption by industry. AppFaktors Allen Martin Lisa Wolfe Brian Krug Giridhar Padmanabh Vidya Srinivasan Anirudh Esthuri Srinidhi Narayan https://lnkd.in/gnDdVsNK

AI assistants can personalize recommendations, complete transactions, and remove many pauses that once gave users time to reconsider. That's a powerful convenience and tool for persuasion. As AI becomes a new advertising channel, the challenge isn't just what gets promoted. It's how effortlessly people can act on it. We’ve explored what this means in our latest edition of the Digital Life e-mag → https://zurl.co/EiNnN

Too much information and no clear direction. That's the problem with most websites, including the one we're redesigning for Carnot AI. The founders worked so hard on what they've built that they want to share everything at once. I totally get it! 😅 But when someone lands on it, they need to figure out 3 things in the first 5 seconds: What business/company/service this? Who is this meant for? What do I do next? If they can't they will abandon the website. Counterintuitive, I know, but more information actually pushes people away. Less, with clear direction, that's what makes visitors stay and actually do something. 🤗

Everyone talks about AI bringing buyers to your platform. But what about the sellers? Creating a marketplace listing is time-consuming. Taking photos, writing descriptions, and filling out forms takes time. Now, consumers are delegating that friction entirely to AI chatbots. Trustap Index allows marketplaces to capture this new behaviour. Watch Trustap CEO Conor Lyden break down the shift below #AgenticCommerce #TrustapIndex

What happens when you bring our new conversational AI agent to #CannesLions2026? You get real, unfiltered excitement from the publishers using it first! We caught up with partners and Googlers like Martin Clamart , Director at Délégué Digital, Lior Shenkar, Senior Product Manager, and Bethany Antuna, Google Marketing Specialist, in the Ask Ad Manager demo zone to hear how this technology will help save time and transform day-to-day operations. Check out their first impressions and see how we’re stepping into an agentic future for publishers 👇 https://goo.gle/4w3Sq9Y

More than half of the companies that replaced workers with AI already regret it. Half plan to rehire by 2027. So why are agencies still cutting their way to better margins? We pulled the 2026 data for our latest video. Across 186 agencies, only one approach had zero of them losing money: pairing AI with the team you already have. That is the idea behind Admove.ai. An AI agent that takes creative production off your team so they can stay on strategy. Full breakdown + a real example in the new video. Big thanks to Petrică Emanuel, who just makes these videos better and better. Link is in the comments. watch&subscribe 💜