Mod Op, an independent marketing agency with more than 500 employees, estimates it avoided roughly $3 million in licensing costs by building its own AI infrastructure instead of buying off-the-shelf tools. The figure is an estimate of what the agency would have spent giving everyone access to something like Microsoft Copilot or Figma Weave. What it built instead is Orion, an ecosystem of AI products that automates internal workflows and gives clients a shared workspace for performance data, AI search visibility and audience ad testing. “We needed to own our data, and we needed to own the experience that we enable for our clients,” said Tessa Burg, Mod Op’s chief technology officer.
Work started just before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and an internal version running on multiple LLMs followed shortly after. The client-facing layer launched at the end of 2025, with generative engine optimization planned for later in 2026. Orion operates as the layer connecting the APIs of major LLMs to internal teams and clients, generating reports and testing concepts. One of its most popular agents manages contractors and external creative resources. Another prioritizes an employee’s day from their inbox. Another makes PowerPoints. “We have an AI layer operating over secured owned data resources that serves a specific function and operates on a workflow,” Burg said. It combines licensed tools with proprietary software in a single platform; building everything from scratch, she said, “would be crazy.”
The cost pressure is not Mod Op’s alone. A McKinsey study in July 2026 found that about 93% of enterprise leaders exceeded their AI budgets, and one-fifth of respondents said their organizations had constrained AI use because of operating costs. Beyond the licensing savings, most of Orion’s return so far is productivity: client discovery, experiential and event resourcing, strategy development and scoping have gone from 20 to 30 days to one week, Burg said, and reporting and analytics that once took weeks now happen in real time.
Convincing clients of AI’s value has not been easy. At Cannes Lions 2026, the gap between what AI tools can do and what clients are ready for looked to be widening. Most of Orion’s usage is still internal, and no client has asked for their own login yet. “Clients want to talk to the data, so that’s where we’re at in this journey,” Burg said.
Read more at Digiday.