Are you agent-ready?

SXSW London was more than a celebration of culture, tech and innovation, it set the scene for how we should be thinking about running and advising businesses in relation to AI into the future. The Austin event landed in Shoreditch (its first foray into Europe, tacos-and-all) and brought with it a new sense of enthusiasm around how AI will power up the workforce and has the potential to unlock new-found levels of productivity and growth. More than that, the week-long programming showed us that human effort, and the spirit we bring, will prevail.

While the industry continued to, rightly, unite behind the challenges around ethics, authorship, misinformation and AI as a geopolitical tool, the hive-mind was also on a positive plain, with senior leaders – from brand owners and developers alike – talking up the potential for humans to maintain (and control) a healthy and positive relationship with AI. More than that, we should expect to always need to deliver the soul of a message, or the essence of a recommendation, on top of anything AI can deliver for us.

Take the case of our relationship with tech, for example. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, one of the big questions for businesses is how customers will maintain their loyalty to those brands whose main interface is a machine or AI-enabled service. As customers move further away from brands and into the tech, brand-owners will need to work harder to build loyalty through emotional connections and great brand stories, told through marketing and, hurrah for us, strategic communications.

The same human spirit will also be needed to continue tackling the biggest problems of our age. For all the talk of AGI (artificial general intelligence) being a cure or saviour to nearly all the world’s challenges – from poverty, to climate, to illness – the expectation that machines will do all the solving is wrong. People – and brands – shouldn’t be off the hook from thinking about influencing or making change. We shouldn’t do less because we think the machines are doing more.

And then, thinking about how this translates to the business of running agencies, advances in AI in the workplace will require us to all master the AI-enabled agents that will make our jobs more efficient – and potentially prosperous. Personalised AI agents, running in the background like assistants, will know us better than anyone else and will free us up, more than now, to focus on maintaining human relationships, and delivering more at a higher quality. Of course new skills will be needed to master and control the technology and that will be a focus area for many years to come. Get it right and the expectation is we can be more productive and more profitable – an antidote to the negative refrain around AI costing jobs and potentially a key to powering up growth in our sector, in the UK and beyond.