AI Hacks for New Business

Written by Scott Leighton , Director of Growth

Embracing the AI revolution is a must if your agency will thrive in 2025 and beyond. Fortunately for me and all other Kettlers, we’ve implemented AI tools and processes in all aspects of the business. As the head of new business, I’ve been working hard to inject AI as an important tool in our process for growing Kettle while at the same time not overdoing our reliance on AI to carefully find the balance with the personal element of the business that makes Kettle uniquely special.

Here are some tips and tricks from my current AI toolkit.

• Perplexity AI allows us to thoroughly and quickly research companies we are pitching to. This level of specificity allows us to get up to speed quicker and get to the solutions within our proposals easier than ever before.
• ChatGPT helps expand our presentation outlines and tailor copy details like brainstorming alternative copy headlines. It also helps us build out the foundations of our project case studies which traditionally take a long time to build manually.
• Midjourney and Firefly allow us to quickly ideate unique imagery for proposals and serve as a starting point for further customization our design team leads manually.
• Claude can input new client RFI questions that are primarily focused on agency policy & process details and then output responses based on information that we previously provided to the model. We save time on the time-consuming data entry and use that saved time to proactively ideate on solutions.
• Utilizing the depth of research provided through AI tools, I can see a wide-range of different aspects of a brand's background to identify if we are the right fit.

I was thankful last month to participate in the Next Dimension leadership program conducted by our parent company Stagwell. I was inspired at how adept the other agencies in our network were utilizing AI across all aspects of their business and I learned so much on what's working for them and what's not.

All these tools are the starting point for scaling how we prospect, pitch, and collaborate smarter. Everything we receive from AI is not the final destination. We take a large effort to customize and provide the Kettle DNA that we expect from every output from the agency. But using these new AI tools is an important aspect of the overall process which layers above and below the customization we bring to every opportunity.

I hope these tips on how we're utilizing AI for our growth efforts are helpful .....as long as you don't use them to win business over us. Then I want my money back.

P.S. Check out how Kettle’s creative and technology teams have been leading the agency’s AI efforts over the past year from research utilizing GPTs to leveraging AI for concepting.