A creative agency should hire a Head of AI when one person needs to leave several changes across the company and has the authority to alter workflows, products, pricing, and behaviour.
Start with a 90-day audit.
The job title can come later.
Head of AI is becoming the agency world's newest decorative role.
Someone goes to SXSW.
They see an astonishing demo.
They return home feeling six months behind and start drawing a new box on the org chart.
Three months later, the new hire is running lunchtime prompt sessions for twelve mildly interested people while the agency continues working exactly as it did before.
Useful AI leadership needs a proper job to do.
Find the expensive repetition
Take ten common pieces of work.
A pitch.
A strategy report.
A competitor review.
A social content plan.
A production estimate.
A client status report.
A piece of qualitative research.
A market map.
A case study.
An internal resource plan.
Write down how many people touch each one, how long it takes and where the work slows down.
You'll quickly find the expensive repetition.
Four people manually turning meeting notes into a client update.
A strategist spending two days assembling information that already exists across six internal documents.
Teams rebuilding similar pitch slides every fortnight.
Producers creating estimates from scratch despite having five years of comporable projects.
Start there.
Run three proper tests
Choose three workflows with enough volume to matter.
Record the current time, cost and quality.
Give a small team six weeks to redesign each workflow using AI.
Then measure the result.
How many hours disappeared?
Did the quality improve?
Did the team actually use it?
Did the client notice?
Could the agency charge differently?
This gives you a real brief for AI leadership.
You might need a senior person to roll the changes across the company.
You might need a product lead to turn one of the ideas into something clients can buy.
You might discover that an existing operations or strategy leader can own it perfectly well.
All three are useful answers.
Hire an operator who can translate
The person leading AI has to move between very different rooms.
They need to explain a creative opportunity to the CCO.
A margin improvement to finance.
A rights issue to the lawyers.
A process change to a team that already feels overworked.
And a credible new service to a client who has heard enough AI waffle to last a lifetime.
Technical knowledge matters.
Curiosity matters.
The ability to change how humans behave matters even more.
Look for someone who has implemented new ways of working and can show the results.
Hours removed.
Margin improved.
New revenue created.
Better work produced.
People trained.
Risk reduced.
The number of AI tools they can name gives you considerably less useful information.
Give them somewhere to go
The role needs:
- Access to the leadership team.
- A budget.
- Clear measures.
- Permission to change processes.
- Support from creative, commercial, and operational leaders.
- Responsibility for adoption across the company.
One person can create direction and pressure.
The rest of the leadership team still has to take part.
Creative needs to set the quality bar.
Finance needs to understand the value created.
Operations needs to make the new workflow stick.
Commercial teams need to turn new capabilities into something clients will buy.
The best outcome may be that AI gradually disappears from the job titles because it has become part of how everyone works.
Very few agencies need an enormous AI department.
They need a small number of capable people changing valuable parts of the business.
UNKNOWN helps creative companies design leadership roles and find the people capable of doing them. If AI is changing your work, pricing or offer, we can help you define the human required.
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