Dean Broadhead | CEO
How our bet on AI is helping us spend more time on the work that clients value most
A year ago, we looked generative AI in-the-eye and said, “We’re all in,” and it’s been a great decision that we’d make again and again. But let’s take a step back.
Few would disagree that marketing has been under pressure — to be more responsive; to do more with less; to work at the speed of opportunity. None of us are immune to the realities of building brands and engagement in a more fragmented marketplace. The riddle is, how do we do it?
Over the last year, we’ve found AI to be the answer to this riddle. When the opportunity to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into our daily work came along, we didn’t hesitate. But we didn’t stop there. We took things a step further and developed our very own GPT designed to make life a little easier (and a lot more productive) for our team.
Last summer, we launched “Butter,” our proprietary, OpenAI-powered tool, and it already shows promise of being the most consequential advancement to benefit our clients in a generation. But here’s the deal: This isn’t about jumping on the AI bandwagon just because it’s the new shiny object. We’re in this to help our people work smarter, not harder.
Why Butter?
The short answer? To be more extraordinary for clients, more quickly.
We operate in a market-in-motion that can pivot on a dime. To seize opportunity, you need to be opportunistic, and you need the agility to move. Not everything we do deserves the time it takes. With Butter, we now have an engine at our disposal to more quickly distill insights and automate repetitive functions, leaving more capacity to create, influence and engage.
Here are just a few examples of how our team has used Butter:
- Creating dynamic personas that can be visualized, chatted with and built on top of
- Building a bot that allows people to chat with our benchmarks database
- Automating InDesign code for repetitive design work
- Developing a suite of custom GPTs to aid in creating scopes, summarizing meetings, and managing multiple other daily time-consuming tasks
Making room for creativity
By using AI for repetitive and operational work, we’re not just working more efficiently — we’re making space for the kind of work that excites us and drives real impact. Butter helps streamline processes so our team can invest more time and energy in the magic — creative ideas, market analysis, growth strategies and innovation.
Time isn’t unlimited, and when talented people are bogged down by administrative or operational tasks, it drains energy and limits their ability to contribute in the ways that matter most. The ability to focus on creative, strategic and high-impact work isn’t just a luxury — it’s essential for innovation and engagement. Now, we get to spend more of our days doing the work we love and that delivers the most value to our clients.
All-in on AI
We saw the potential with ChatGPT, and the decision to go all-in was a no-brainer. AI couldn’t just be an experiment; it needed to become part of our culture.
We don’t believe in top-down mandates or siloed projects that just live within a small team of testers. From creative to media to PR to strategy and data science, every discipline is pushing Butter in their own way, learning how it can make their day-to-day lives easier and our work for clients better.
The future of AI at broadhead
Where do we go from here? Well, we’re just getting started. We’re committed to keeping leading-edge tech at the heart of what we do because it’s already proving to be a game-changer. But the real excitement comes from what’s next.
We’re all-in on AI, because ironically it enables us to slow down on the things that matter by accelerating the things that matter less. A year from now, we might be looking back at an even bigger transformation in how we work. But one thing’s for sure: AI is here to stay, and we’re leaning into it.
Stay tuned as we continue to share ways we’re tapping into our tech stack, with Butter at the center — including use cases around AI bias, agency operations, consumer personas and more.
Here’s to making work more fun, more creative, and a lot more efficient.