Overcoming barriers to AI adoption

Our research highlights three main barriers to AI adoption in creative agencies:

1. Lack of Understanding of AI Capabilities: Many agencies are not fully aware of what AI can do for their business. This often leads to missed opportunities and underutilization of AI tools.

2. Overwhelm and Uncertainty: The sheer volume of AI-related information can be overwhelming. Many leaders are unsure where to start, leading to paralysis by analysis.

3. Time Constraints: With tight deadlines and ongoing projects, finding time to learn and experiment with AI can be challenging.

Sound familiar? If so, what can you do about it?

Overcoming those barriers

First - upskill yourself and your team.

Even with all the hype around AI it can be hard to know what to actually use it for in the creative process. You’ve probably seen some bad copy and bad artwork, and think it’s not ready for prime time yet. But that’s because you’d be looking in the wrong place. While it’s not ready for final outputs in most cases, it most definitely is ready to help speed up your processes, improve your concepts and rapidly iterate your designs.

One way to do that is take our Spark Activate workshop – that spells out how you can use GenAI tools throughout your creative process. It’s had brilliant feedback.

Keep abreast of what’s going on out there.

There’s a lot of noise out there and it’s hard to know what’s relevant. How can you improve the signal to noise ratio? Here are some of the sources we find helpful:

• The Neuron – best for day to day updates of what’s going on

• One Useful Thing – best for the big picture

• Heather Murray – best for ChatGPT prompting strategies

• There’s an AI for That – best for AI tools

We’re in the process of creating our own newsletter, Spark Intelligence, which you can sign up for here. This will tailor information to the creative world and ensure you only receive what’s actually useful to know.

Why not give it a try? You can also join our Spark Live WhatsApp community where you can ask questions from your peers. Contact us to join.

Finally, none of this will happen on its own.

Ring-fence time for yourself and your team to learn and experiment.

What we’ve seen work best?

Give your Head of AI (you’ve appointed one, right?) some dedicated time each week to research, test and plan how you’ll use AI in your agency. Next, block out an hour of everyone’s diary once a week. Each week someone talks about how they’ve recently used AI, shares useful training material they’ve found, or experiments with how AI can assist them with one of their common tasks.

Wrapping up

Integrating AI into your creative team is as much about change management as it is about technology. Get these basics in place and you’ll start making progress.

At Spark, we’re here to guide you through every step of this journey.