Guest: Sammy Mansourpour, AgencyUK
“AI is the democratisation of the whole landscape. Now, if you democratise the landscape and you want to exceed growth potential against a competitor set, then you have to differentiate. That doesn’t change.” says Sammy Mansourpour, who built AgencyUK’s dedicated AI team more than a year ago. The team’s work sits inside two tracks: process efficiency and service capability.
The efficiency track crunches audience data, competitor analysis and media selection in a fraction of the time it used to take. The capability track has opened new service lines, including how brands rank inside AI platforms alongside traditional search engines. It is, Sammy says, “...human to platform to human and that’s a big part of the lift and it’s a different audience member if you think about it like that.”
That speed comes at a cost. AI now compresses into hours the desk research that used to train junior strategists, and Sammy sees where the next training ground is heading. “Juniors will probably start their training ground learning how to prompt agents. Albeit, you know, that’s a relatively good place to start. But it’s a little bit of a catch-22 because to appropriately be able to prompt agents to do your bidding, you need the experience to know what to ask for.” he says.
Size, he thinks, works against the big networks. “I just think it’s quicker to introduce it into organisations with less people...” he says. A network spread across different currencies and languages moves slower by nature, and internal politics adds another layer on top of that.
Behind that shift sits an infrastructure bill someone has to cover. “With the capitalisation of all of these data centres, the costs and the investments into the infrastructure, the processing power required for what the tech sector believes the future of AI is going to consume, energy-wise, resource-wise, they’ve got to get their money back.” he says. That bill lands on agencies as tokens, subscriptions and licence fees.
Listen to the full conversation with Sammy Mansourpour on Aperture: Agency AI.
