Will agencies become AI factories?

The future agency will be very different from what exists today, the CEO of tech company Nvidia believes, and, inevitably, it’s AI that is driving the changes.

In conversation with WPP CEO Mark Read at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Jensen Huang told the head of the holding company that “WPP is going to unquestionably become an AI company … you’ll create an AI factory where the input is creativity, thoughts, prompts, and what comes out of it is content.”

Supercharging the creative process 

• “We won’t democratise content generation, we won’t democratise creativity,” said Huang. “Creators are going to be supercharged, the creative process is going to be supercharged.” Having an idea is the crucial part of the creative process, and that has to be expressed in some way: AI becomes the latest tool for enabling that expression, with the user’s prompts directing the ultimate outcome.

New jobs created

• AI technology needs researchers, engineers, operators “to do things like prompt engineering, like tuning, like alignment,” said Huang. It’s about augmentation so that agencies can create content that matches the brand voice and brand integrity of clients. 

The ad agency role 

• Agencies will play a crucial role in understanding the technology and ensuring safety is designed into it, supplying an essential human understanding of “how to align and guardrail”. Part of that process is also about being respectful of content owners and training AI platforms on properly licensed content.
  Moreover, agencies will have to address what a brand means in different markets, where they may have different competitive sets and histories. “I think there’s an amazing amount of codification of things that people know intuitively that they’re going to have to build into the system,” noted Read. While the AI headlines are all about ChatGPT and Bard, “clients aren’t going to want a Meta-created version of their brand or a Google-created version of their brand,” Read added. “They’ll want to own that IP themselves.” 

Key quote

“You can do content generation at scale. But infinite content doesn’t imply infinite creativity. You still have to do that job” – Jensen Huang, President and CEO at Nvidia.

BEC