How one agency uses AI to track and manage thousands of campaign assets — building its own library of 'collective knowledge'

• Saatchi & Saatchi struggled to find reusable assets in its vast backlog of marketing materials.
• The marketing agency started using an AI search engine called Lucy to simplify the process.

For "CXO AI Playbook," Business Insider takes a look at mini case studies about AI adoption across industries, company sizes, and technology DNA. We've asked each of the featured companies to tell us about the problems they're trying to solve with AI, who's making these decisions internally, and their vision for using AI in the future.

Saatchi & Saatchi is a global communications and marketing agency that works with major brands, including Toyota and Tide. The agency, which is headquartered in London, is part of Publicis Communications, a hub of Publicis Groupe.

Situation analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?

For each client and campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi creates a collection of assets, including images, videos, final presentations, strategic insights, and briefs. These items accumulate over the years as the agency continues working with clients, Jeremiah Knight, its chief operating officer, told Business Insider.

Often, teams need to review documents from past campaigns, such as when a company launches a product, he said, but the challenge is, "How do you find that stuff after you've created it?"

Sometimes, the people who worked on the original campaign can't remember where those documents are saved, or they might have left the agency, Knight added. Employees also don't always follow file-system hierarchies.

That can create a "needle in the haystack" situation to find necessary information, Knight said.

Key staff and partners

The agency realized that automation could help improve asset organization, Knight said, so he worked with the company's CEO and chief financial officer on a solution.

"Once you paint the picture of the problem and how valuable the solution might be, we all understood this would be a great thing for us to undertake," Knight added.

AI in action

About two years ago, Saatchi & Saatchi contracted with Lucy, an AI-powered search engine, to help find specific items in its system.

Lucy is integrated into the agency's Microsoft Teams chat function. Users can ask it questions through Teams, and Lucy searches the agency's files and sends results in Teams, Knight said.

To access the documents, users are directed to log in to the Lucy web interface. They can also search and find information directly through the web interface without going through Teams.

"It's sort of a library of everything of our collective knowledge," Knight said, including creative assets, campaign data, and other information.

To help train the artificial-intelligence model to produce the desired results, the agency hosted trainings on how to use Lucy and encouraged everyone to use it and provide feedback.

"The more you play with it, the more you use it, the better it gets," Knight said. "We had to get over that hurdle to make sure that they continuously use it and help us train the model."

Did it work, and how did leaders know?

Lucy has helped Saatchi & Saatchi index information, Knight said. So if someone forgets to use the correct filing structure or saves information in the wrong place, the tool can usually find it.

"Not only is that a time saver, it actually is helping direct people straight to the documents that are the most valuable to answer the question, 'How can we learn from what we've done before?'" he said.

The AI implementation is still a work in progress, Knight added: "This is one of the most exciting times to play and experiment and see what's possible, unlock so many things creatively and workflow-wise for different departments."

What's next?

Saatchi & Saatchi continues to leverage generative AI across its agency in multiple ways, such as creative conceptualizing, minimizing repetitive tasks, and analyzing data, Knight said.

He said the investment in the technology would continue as the agency sought to create efficiencies. In January, Publicis Groupe announced plans to invest $326 million in AI over the next three years, including a proprietary tool, CoreAI.

"AI helps with every single business problem," he said. "The less time you spend hunting for things, the faster you can create business value for your clients."

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