How can agencies use AI to make better work?
Summary: Focusing on better work changes how agencies use AI. It gives them a reason to redesign workflows around what they could make possible ā from improving an existing service to creating new commercial opportunities and strengthening client relationships.
Author: Asta Vallis
Date: 14.10.2026
Read length: 4 minutes
Spark AI is the AI performance partner that builds organisation-wide AI capability for creative agencies and brand teams. We take ambitious teams from fragmented experimentation to AI embedded across their people, processes and systems ā so it delivers real commercial impact.
At AI for All in Bristol, run with aer studios and MotherBoard, Spark co-founder Emma Wharton joined Joyann Boyce and Ash Phillips on a panel. At the end, they were asked what people should do when they got back to work.
Emma shared how the objective with AI should be to make the work better.
She connected that to the possibilities in creative work ā exploring ideas teams wouldnāt previously have had time for and doing things they couldnāt do before.
What happens when speed is the objective?
You tend to keep the existing process and make individual tasks quicker.
Thatās how many teams start. They use AI to write a first draft or summarise a call. Itās useful, but the brief still turns up half-finished and the work still goes through the same rounds of amends.
Sometimes a task youāve made quicker for yourself takes the next person longer. Anyone familiar with receiving a long AI document where a short, clear note would have done? Youāve saved time producing it, but now someone else now has to work out what deserves their attention.
Shared expectations help make sure time saved with AI benefits the whole team. Our blog on setting expectations for AI-assisted work shares practical rules for keeping the work useful and the quality high.
How does aiming for better change the workflow?
Making better work the focus changes what you ask of AI. Where could it help you do something you couldnāt do before, or rarely had time for? Could that become a new service or improve an existing offer? How could it strengthen your client relationships?
Once you know what you want to make possible, you can design the way you work around it.
Take a pitch. You might develop a creative route, turn it into a deck and circulate it for feedback. AI helps you assemble the deck faster. The team still encounters unresolved questions once the route has taken shape.
Now imagine designing that process around a stronger pitch. As you develop the initial routes, you could use AI to examine them from different stakeholder perspectives, drawing on what you know about the client. A simulated finance director might question the commercial case, while marketing lead might need a clearer connection to their objectives.
Those perspectives become part of developing the idea. You can examine the questions while the direction is still easy to change.
Your judgement leads the work. You decide which concerns are relevant and where the simulation has made a poor assumption. You use that thinking to choose what to develop further.
When the work reaches your team, you can give them a clearer direction and more useful feedback. Their attention can go into strengthening the pitch, with fewer unresolved decisions passed through each handover. Youāve changed what gets produced and when people contribute.
Frequently asked questions
Is saving time with AI still a useful objective?
Yes. Look at whether the saving helps the wider team and what it makes possible. A quicker draft is useful when it gives people more room to improve the work.
Can synthetic stakeholders replace client feedback?
They provide simulated perspectives based on the context you give them. Use their responses to examine possible weaknesses and prepare questions. Direct conversations with the client still inform your decisions.
How can we make AI experimentation useful for the team?
Give people time to work on a specific piece of recurring work together. Agree what improvement youāre looking for, then examine whether the changed process helps the people involved. Read our blog on how to redesign a workflow.
Spark AI ā AI training, consultancy and agent building for agencies and brands. Your AI performance partner.
