Published May 27Edited May 28
With all the fervor over agentic AI, it can be hard to distinguish when it’s being used as a buzzword versus having a tangible impact on a brand or agency’s bottom line.
Agencies are still setting the foundation of how AI agents will change their futures — despite all the go, go, go messaging found at advertising conferences.
Even though those processes are still being ironed out, brands want results now. Kris Tait, chief business officer of independent agency Croud, told Chris Brooklier that brands are already asking for ROI on agentic AI.
Tait also shared how building brand loyalty changes in the age of chatbots and why he’s ultimately optimistic about the future of AI.
Agencies are shifting from a billable model to a subscription model. What does that mean for the future?
The market has been really clear in how it's spoken. The market really wants outcomes, not billable hours, not listed-out deliverables.
Whichever way you package that, in terms of a subscription or retainer, we really need to package up the things that we do really strategically—whether that’s AI consultancy or the outcome from media or measurement.
The subscription model could be an interesting way that we make that change.
Agencies are getting squeezed as AI takes out some of the work, but you need more skills to navigate the AI future. How do you see that split?
The actual manual labor of it is going to get eroded away into this AI execution layer.
But I also think that the people that know these crafts are the best people to control and hand-hold the AI. The job of a marketer becomes even more important if you are really tuned in to not just an optimization task, but how to grow a brand. And then you have AI as your companion to do that, it’s going to be incredibly powerful.
That’s the shift I think the industry needs to make. It's obviously going to be a disruptive shift in terms of commercial models and the way that we get paid, but also very exciting because then you get to be a marketer, not a button-pusher.
Are you excited or scared about AI?
I’m definitely optimistic. The opportunity is massive. The scariness of how quickly this is developing is a little bit unnerving and crazy.
Are brands already asking for ROI on agentic AI?
Unfortunately, yes.
I do think it’s a slightly premature ask from the sense of, where’s the time savings, where’s the money back?
We’re still so early in it that we should be investing in the people who are making this industry and framework for the future of what this is going to be, versus taking money from them to optimize return.
There are brands that I think do really get that.
You’ve written a number of op-eds for The Current about the future of brand loyalty. We’re at a tipping point where brands are figuring out how to create loyalty when someone’s searching through a chatbot. How do you see that?
In two buckets. The first is that we need to make the brand discoverable to robots in a structured data, text-based way. But that is also moving pretty quickly into the LLMs and models really valuing social, creative and creators in terms of what they’re saying about brands.
The Gemini Google models have pretty much read all of the text on the internet, so where’s all the new content coming from? It’s YouTube, it’s creators. And I think that is going to influence those models a lot.
So you’ve got that as how do we train the model to learn about the brand? But I do still think there is a social-first, brand-building element to growing brands over time that is not just about what the LLMs say about us.
