Three must-have AI apps for agency creatives.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become such a prevalent topic. We’d be remiss as an ad agency not to learn more about AI to gain a better understanding of its business applications for us, and for our clients. And the best way to learn is to do. HAPI has been researching and experimenting with different AI platforms to learn how they work, and how they can help our business. We’ve discovered three apps we now subscribe to that create greater operational efficiencies. There are more out there, certainly, but for now we’re focused on the following three. These AI tools facilitate our process of creation and production, assisting us with labor-intensive tasks. While Adobe Firefly is a no-brainer AI tool that integrates naturally into the Adobe programs, we are searching for other AI platforms we can integrate into our systems to improve efficiencies across departments. Here are three AI apps we use and recommend to other creative teams looking for an edge.

Perplexity.ai: An incredible research assistant that cites source material.

Perplexity.ai is a robust research tool that “offers a more engaging, reliable, and intelligent way to search and discover information.” It works similarly to ChatGPT. The user types in a “prompt” on a topic and the bot writes a neatly formatted response with an introductory paragraph, support points and a conclusion. (It’s 7th Grade English all over again!) While Perplexity’s answer is somewhat “bot-sounding” and boilerplate, the power of the app lies in the footnotes it provides to support the text, with active hyperlinks to the human-written source material. In one response, Perplexity may provide multiple hyperlinked references to research papers and articles that would otherwise take hours or days to discover on your own. If you’re conducting market research, developing a brand strategy, or writing a thesis, specificity and references - obtained through human research and analysis - are key to establishing legitimacy. Perplexity.ai jump-starts the brainstorming process by instantly providing a breadth of knowledge on a topic with ideas you probably hadn’t considered before. More importantly, it connects you to the human-written origination of the content, allowing you to dive deeper and more substantially into a subject. Perplexity.ai is an awesome research tool for agency brand strategists, market and consumer researchers and creative writers. Instead of having research assistants, you have Perplexity.ai. See example below.

Midjourney: We use Midjourney to create storyboard art.

Midjourney is a popular generative AI program that allows users to create images from text prompts. The tech rarely produces the exact image you want and requires refinement and experimentation. But that’s part of the fun. Midjourney is a consumer product that turns anyone into an artist. We’ve discovered a wonderful business application for Midjourney: The creation of key frame art for storyboards. Back in the day, most Art Directors were great illustrators who could whip out TV storyboard renderings with markers. Today, most storyboard art is created in Adobe, and it can take Art Directors days to Photoshop images together in just the right way to communicate an idea. With Midjourney we can merge traditional storyboard art illustration with cutting-edge technology, allowing us to create scene-specific storyboard key frames. It's so easy to use, even copywriters can do it! What took days now takes hours. We type in the prompt and Midjourney generates the image. We iterate until we have the image we want. Art Directors place the JPEGs into a storyboard format. It saves time on the creation of professional-looking key frames.

Let’s Enhance: We use Let’s Enhance to create high-resolution images from low-res images.

As an agency, we are sometimes required to use client-provided images for campaigns. This artwork isn’t always suitable for professional-looking advertising or printing, especially in large scale formats where image detail is crucial. There are limitations to an Art Director’s wizardry. Even they can only do so much technically to improve the usability of an image. Our team fills this gap with Let’s Enhance, a powerful AI tool created specifically for improving images. With Let’s Enhance, we can fix pixelations, remove backgrounds, correct colors, and lighting, and remove JPEG artifacts. Let’s Enhance is easy, quick, and works incredibly well. Simply upload an image, select the size and resolution, and Let’s Enhance processes the image to the desired specifications, up to 2x, 4x, 8x and even 16x the size and resolution of the original picture. It’s not perfect, especially if we’re trying to exponentially increase an image’s size, but it’s a heck of a lot better than humans can do, and a heck of a lot faster.

We recently produced a coffee table book for a client filled with black and white images of animals. Not all the images were suitable for a glossy, professionally printed page. We used Let’s Enhance to enlarge and improve image resolution. We added more details and visual consistency from spread to spread, creating emotionally dynamic portraits that looked incredible in the final piece.

Happy creating.