Generative AI: The Revolution Is in the Impact

If you work in the world of tech or digital then you already know that we’re living in — as the old saying goes — interesting times. The rapid adoption and democratisation of Generative AI (GenAI) has had a meteoric impact on digital marketing and commerce, speeding up the competition to engage customers (more than 71 per cent of whom have been expecting personalised experiences for a while).

As such, it’s not a surprise that agencies have rapidly incorporated GenAI into their operations. Forrester recently reported 91 per cent of U.S. creative shops already use the technology or are exploring use cases for it. More importantly, companies that take creative risks by applying their technology and talent in new contexts during uncertain times are 32 per cent more likely to achieve higher levels of revenue growth and 29 per cent more likely to achieve the highest levels of speed-to-market.

The Impact Revolution

There is no doubt that the AI revolution is here. There is widespread agreement -- from brands to makers to consumers -- that we may need to stop being completely dazzled by the technical aspect of it, but the impressive new capabilities that are announced week after week attract our focus on something different: how to create impact with these impressive new features. As personalized, human-directed design interfaces become table stakes rather than a premium, brands expect nothing less than a revolution in the impact they can drive.

And to do this, for creative agencies to have an edge in this impact revolution, they need to excel at three things: having greater impact at speed; designing agile, multi-hyphenate teams; and being more imaginative in the applications of the technology.

Breaking Through the Noise with Intelligent Experiences

You might have heard of the “paradox of personalisation,” a concept that has been used in a few contexts before, in connection with content strategy (the challenge of creating personalized content at scale) and also regarding privacy concerns.

We see a “paradox of personalisation” in a common challenge we solve for our clients: when every one of your competitors can achieve basic personalisation at a low cost, your personalisation experience easily becomes generic. The same applies to more sophisticated digital experiences that seamlessly complete sophisticated tasks, such as helping you plan a trip or fill a complex grocery shopping list that’s not only based on your previous purchases but can incorporate more contextual information; the season of the year or larger shopping patterns that define the consumer’s intent.

The revolution is in the impact, in other words, an experience that feels so unique to the human and the brand that it drives higher satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Clients are realising that customers are now expecting an elevated level of experience, and when crafted beautifully it can drive growth and differentiation. That is why we are doubling down and investing in “Intelligent Experiences.” We remain focused on our core competencies that we have perfected over the past 25 years: conceptualising and designing end-to-end digital experiences. The difference is that now we’re leveraging GenAI to understand the context of the user’s intent, generating the right experience for each user, when they need it.

Our ambition is to lead the way in this new era of experiences that are more human-directed, more conversational, and more contextual - and therefore, more impactful.

Defining Impact

The range of applications of Intelligent Experiences is wide. At one end of the spectrum, some applications drive efficiency in internal processes for organisations of all sizes—summarising content for your workers, powering knowledge management systems, and saving thousands of work hours previously devoted to repeated tasks. There are also Intelligent Experiences that can be deployed as features and enhancements for consumers, radically transforming their brand experiences by incorporating GenAI into product discovery or community engagement. Finally, at the most ambitious end of the impact spectrum, there are Intelligent Experiences that have the power to transform the business by creating human-directed experiences that unlock new business opportunities, new audiences, and interactions that become a synonym with the brand.

We’re already building Intelligent experiences across this spectrum at our agency. We have increased efficiency of internal processes by building an interface that detects unnecessary jargon in a client’s content to streamline communications based on desired tone of voice, and developed a digital production pilot that will save hundreds of work hours per month by automatically adjusting images for all standard ad units. We have helped create automated solutions for content consumption that include text-to-speech delivery and AI-generated summaries. We have imagined ways to empower a subculture of car owners using GenAI in a way that feels human and playful. And we have helped develop a personalised virtual trainer that meets gym users wherever they are in their fitness journey.

Intelligent Experiences in action: The Paris Olympic Games

Our most visible Intelligent Experience right now is OLI, which we developed in partnership with NBCU, owners of the U.S. media rights for the Paris Summer Olympics.

The problem they came to us with was straightforward but complex: design a tool that could help U.S. viewers figure out how to best watch the Summer Olympics—39 sports disciplines and 329 medal events generating more than 5,000 hours of coverage—regardless of their time zone.

The real challenge was not just matching data points to create a usable output—in other words, a chatbot. It was to make the outputs of the tool meaningful and intelligent, incorporating (without needing to ask) information such as the time zone of the user, and eventually being able to synthesize personalised best viewing options for the user covering specific athletes, teams, and countries depending on the time of the day, time zone, or event schedule. (Add to that real-time changes to the schedule done by a TV producer in Paris while the experience is live.)

OLI is our Intelligent Experiences answer not only to the Olympic Games and the millions of U.S. viewers that will be watching them but potentially to solve the “What to watch?” problem that we experience daily when faced with large offerings of content. In terms of impact, it is both a feature for users, and a solution that can transform the business of TV watching.

The Time Is Now

This is a very special moment in time. GenAI is not a trend but a real inflection point from a technology, social, and business perspective.

The time to get started diving in and experimenting is now. We are running a marathon and a sprint at the same time: often we start with small experiences, testing, learning and iterating continuously, and grow from there. It’s a process that demands a true partnership between agencies and clients to lay the foundations for a more sustainable approach to leveraging and deploying these new capabilities.

And that’s the beauty of a business like ours where we are makers first and foremost but have over the years learned how to advise our clients how to build up their own capabilities. In other words, we teach our clients how to fish by fishing with them—show them how it's done and then we tackle the next change and challenge, as history repeats itself.

Lisa De Bonis is the chief executive of Huge