Coming back from maternity leave in 2024, Wendy Owen, (Senior Account Manager Publicis Pro) says the biggest surprise wasn’t staffing changes. It was how casually AI had slipped into day-to-day agency operations, especially in client services, where ambiguity and speed are basically the job description.
In this telling, AI’s main impact isn’t “automation” so much as changing what a brief even is: more directional, more urgent, and increasingly shaped mid-flight with clients. The practical use case is unglamorous but real — using AI to distill briefs, spot contradictions, flag missing audiences or fuzzy success metrics, and generally expose weak thinking faster. With the not-small caveat that it does not actually fix the thinking.
The piece points to the rise of “client-specific AI agents” as part of the account toolkit: narrowly programmed helpers for competitor messaging analysis, trend scanning, tone-of-voice alignment, and category insight generation. It also name-checks AI-assisted audience building — creating early working personas and segment hypotheses from limited inputs, explicitly framed as a conversation starter rather than a replacement for research.
The emphasis is on defensibility: outputs that show sourcing and a logic trail, with client services acting as the credibility filter deciding what is robust enough to put in front of a client. Day to day, that looks like compressing sprawling feedback threads into a few decisions, turning meetings into action logs, and shifting senior-stakeholder updates away from narrative-heavy decks toward implications and direction.
Production, meanwhile, is where expectations get weird fast. AI-generated video, rapid visual exploration, and image generation can collapse the distance between idea and “something to show,” which clients “understandably value,” according to the piece — and then may start to assume everything else should move at the same tempo.
The recurring tension is that AI makes operational tasks easier and judgment more important. Account teams become translators between what is technically possible and what survives brand, legal, quality, and consistency checks. The closing reminder is almost old-fashioned: relationships still run on trust and judgment, not efficiency. Except now those human traits are what you’re left selling when the machine can draft the recap before you’ve left the room.
Read more at The Drum.