AI is a transformation tool for agencies. With agencies facing tighter margins, increasing client expectations, and faster turnaround, they’re often under pressure to deliver more value with fewer resources. With this being said, AI can be a game-changer for agencies. It has shifted from an experimental tool to a business necessity.
In this blog post, we’ll focus on practical examples of how agencies can use AI. This post applies to marketing agencies, creative agencies, and advertising agencies. We’ll also cover how AI supports scale, consistency, and smarter decision-making. Lastly, we’ll mention how B2B SaaS platforms make these outcomes happen.
The Current Challenges Facing Agencies Today
Agencies today face many challenges in operations, client expectations, talent and resourcing, and technology fragmentation.
To begin, agencies often have manual workflows that don’t scale, which can make it harder for them to expand across entities. Also, they face bottlenecks in content creation and approvals, as well as knowledge barriers across teams and accounts.
In addition to facing operational issues, client expectations are more demanding. Clients expect personalization at scale, quicker turnaround times, and increased accountability for performance and ROI. With clients having such high standards, it can be challenging for agencies to meet them on their own. In the face of this pressure, employees can experience burnout from repetitive tasks, challenges in hiring for specialized roles, and overreliance on senior talent for execution.
Last but not least, agencies have difficulty centralizing all of their data into one place. They often have too many disconnected tools and problems with turning insights into action.
AI directly addresses many of these structural problems when implemented intentionally.
What “AI in Agencies” Actually Means (and What It Doesn’t)
AI is an intelligent tool that can act autonomously according to given data. It can speed up certain tasks. It differs from automation in that it is the intelligence that processes data, not the automation itself. It also differs from traditional software in that it doesn’t require human input to function.
Some examples of AI in the workplace include machine learning that learns patterns from data, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and autonomous AI agents.
AI is not a replacement for creativity and strategy, nor is it a tool that does everything for the company. It’s also not a try-and-play solution without governance.
Rather, it’s a tool that supports human expertise and increases the speed, accuracy, and consistency of our work. Using AI enables teams to focus on higher-value work and less on tedious tasks.
How Marketing Agencies Use AI
Marketing agencies use AI in each step of their marketing plan. Take a look at some of the examples below:
Strategy & Planning
For strategy and planning, they use AI to perform market and competitive analysis at scale. For instance, they can analyze trend topics, competitor data, and search data to suggest content ideas that your audience would appreciate, according to Digital First.
Also, they use AI for segmenting audiences and creating buyer personas. According to Allsopp Media, data collection and pattern recognition play a crucial role in crafting audience profiles. In addition, advanced analytics can help with dividing audiences by demographics, psychographics, and behaviors to create accurate personas and audience segments. Lastly, agencies use predictive analytics in AI to predict campaign performance and model various scenarios.
Content & SEO
GenAI can be used for content ideation and preparing briefs.
AI can also be used for SEO optimization and topic clustering. At Psycray, we use AI/SEO, a built-in tool in WordPress, to analyze the scores of our blog posts and find out what we can change to improve our SEO scores. We also use Neuron.writer to find keywords that make us competitive with similar articles about our topics.
Lastly, AI can be used to make performance-driven content recommendations. An example of this is using Google Search Console to see our top-performing search terms and pages.
Marketing Operations & Automation
Not only can AI help with content and SEO, but it can also help with marketing operations and automation.
For instance, AI can help marketers set up campaigns. It can automate repetitive tasks by collecting large amounts of data in CRMs, social media, and website interactions. It can also use predictive analytics to estimate future consumer behavior and generate ideas for new campaigns.
It can also orchestrate workflows across channels using automation tools such as Followr, Prosp, or Zoho CRM.
Finally, it can automate reports and insights generation via predictive analytics tools. Business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Power BI, and Domo are great for this. Meanwhile, AI tools can help marketers check their work for brand consistency, grammar, and technical accuracy. General tools like ChatGPT and Copilot can help them check their work.
Performance & Optimization
AI can also be used to predict campaign outcomes. Tools like Smartly.io can provide budget allocation recommendations, and Google Analytics and Search Console can offer real-time optimization markers. Using these tools can lead to faster execution, better insights, and improved ROI for clients.
How Creative Agencies Use AI
Creative Ideation & Exploration
AI can help creative agencies with their ideation process. For instance, ChatGPT can generate concepts and variations. Tools like Canva’s Magic tool and other AI visualization technologies can help you create mood boards, prompts, and inspiration inputs. All of these brainstorming tools can accelerate creative thinking in the early stages of content creation.
Production & Execution
Generative text tools can also draft copy variations. What’s more, GenAI can create images, videos, and audio, and version assets across formats and platforms.
Operations
Furthermore, AI can manage assets and tagging by using machine learning to instantly analyze digital files, or computer vision, NLP, and OCR to analyze meta description tags. It can also conduct feedback synthesis and iteration through machine learning, which gives feedback loops for enhanced performance. Lastly, it can help maintain consistency across large-scale campaigns. AI can learn a brand’s voice and style and apply that learning to each new piece of work.
Creative Integrity
Finally, it’s important to maintain creative integrity. In every task that AI assists with, humans should be in the loop to make sure AI is being fair and accurate. Also, humans need to monitor what AI suggests for comment copy and content copy. They should check the material for brand, tone, and quality. Lastly, employees should consider ethical and intellectual property (IP) guidelines. This includes being transparent, fair, and claiming authorship over what you create and not what AI creates.
All in all, incorporating AI into your workflow will allow your team more creative exploration without extending deadlines or burning out.
How Advertising Agencies Use AI
When advertising agencies use AI, they can benefit from performance, media, and scale advantages.
Media Planning & Buying
For instance, they can use AI to model and target audiences, predict reach, and allocate budgets wisely. As mentioned earlier in the “marketing” section, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are great tools for predictive analysis, and Smartly.io is a great option for budget allocation.
Ad Creation & Testing
GenAI tools for both image and text can help you create multiple versions of ads, run multivariate testing at scale, and receive performance feedback loops.
Campaign Management
Moreover, AI offers real-time monitoring and signals, automated optimizations, and cross-channel analysis for each of your campaigns. This can expedite the performance-tracking process.
Measurement & Attribution
Finally, AI can contribute to improved attribution modeling, quicker insights for clients, and data-backed recommendations you can feel confident giving.
By embracing AI, you can optimize your company’s performance and deliver higher-quality client service.
The Business Benefits of AI for Agencies
AI delivers enormous benefits for business’ ROI.
For starters, AI can help you scale without linear headcount growth. This is because AI’s rapid generation abilities allow you to have a huge impact before your costs or number of employees go up.
AI can also lead to improved margins and operational efficiency. According to Rep Order Management, using AI for sales solutions can cut customer acquisition costs by 25%.
Furthermore, AI can lead to improved client retention and upsell opportunities. Rep Order Management reports that companies who use AI show 30% greater customer retention. In addition, AI’s predictive abilities mean that AI can send additional offers to customers at the right time, such as right after they added an item to a shopping cart, right before they make a purchase, or just after a purchase.
AI’s efficiency also means that clients can receive the value they’re looking for faster, whether that value is in the form of a personalized recommendation, automated service, or a thoughtful reply to an email.
Finally, AI gives companies a competitive edge when they pitch. According to Superhuman’s “The State of Productivity &AI Report in 2025”, a whooping 87% of investors believe AI is necessary for a competitive advantage in today’s market.
Implementing AI in an Agency: Best Practices & Considerations
To implement AI in your agency, start by identifying high-friction workflows that need the most work in terms of which parts could be automated with AI, replaced by AI, etc. Prioritize measurable outcomes in these areas rather than fixating on individual AI tools.
Also, be sure to prioritize data privacy, security, and brand compliance. Customers care about privacy now more than ever. According to HubSpot, 81% of consumers have become more concerned with how companies are using their data. This reflects the need for companies to keep privacy top of mind.
In addition, educate your team on AI. Address any questions and concerns they have, and give them time to train with the new tools. Building adoption over time will help your team ease into the new workflow.
Last but not least, choose the right tools for your business needs. Be flexible when considering your options, and think about how you can integrate AI with your existing tools.
The Future of AI in Agencies
Looking forward, companies are no longer using just individual AI tools; they’re starting to build AI-powered systems. With the rise of AI agents and orchestration layers, we’re beginning to see AI act as an independent manager of team workflows that is run by human oversight.
Early adopters will shape new agency models because their willingness to experiment early will give them a head start in the AI implementation process. The more experience they acquire, the better equipped they will be to lead the industry in adopting these tools.
Concluding Thoughts
AI can be a great tool for agencies looking to upscale and make their processes more efficient.
Agencies that embrace AI early will enjoy improved scalability, better value for their clients, and greater creativity.
If this appeals to you, please contact us. We look forward to learning about how we can help you achieve your goals.