How we're embracing AI at Adido - and why our clients stand to benefit.

Every week, there's a new platform, a new feature or another bold claim about how AI is going to revolutionise the way we work, I am sure for many it has, though currently it feels more evolution, than revolution. However, there's no denying that AI is changing the digital marketing industry at an incredible pace.

At Adido, we feel we have a responsibility to understand those changes. Not just because we want to keep up with the latest technology, but because we want to understand how it can genuinely improve the work we deliver for our clients. That's why, over the past year, we've introduced something internally at Adido that we've rather imaginatively named ‘AI Days’.

The concept is simple. We give everyone in the agency dedicated time, usually a full working day, to step away from their usual responsibilities (as long as all client work is complete, of course) and explore how AI could help us work smarter. Dedicated time to experiment, investigate and, occasionally, discover that something which sounded brilliant in theory doesn't actually work particularly well in practice. And that's absolutely fine. In fact, that's part of the point!

Making time for innovation, rather than just talking about it

One of the biggest challenges in agency life has always been finding the time to improve the way you work while you're busy doing the work itself. It's very easy for innovation to become something we'll get around to when things quieten down (it never does).

So rather than expecting our teams to investigate new technologies in whatever spare time they can find, we've made a conscious decision to create that time. During our AI Days, everyone across the agency is encouraged to be curious about new tools, explore features within existing platforms and challenge the way we currently do things.

That might mean our SEO team exploring ways to make technical analysis more focused, our paid media specialists investigating automation opportunities, or our client services team looking at how meeting notes and actions can be captured &and shared with clients more effectively. The important thing is that we're not approaching AI with a predetermined answer.

We're asking a much simpler question:

"What are we spending time doing today that technology could help us do better tomorrow?"

Sometimes the answer is something relatively small. Other times, it opens the door to a completely different way of working.

It's not about getting AI to do our jobs

Let's address the elephant in the room.

When businesses start talking about AI and efficiency, it's understandable that people might assume the objective is to automate as much as possible and reduce the amount of human involvement.

That's not our approach.

We have and always will pride ourselves on delivering expert work from our expert team. We're not interested in handing over our clients' digital marketing strategies to an AI platform and hoping for the best. We believe that the real value of AI comes from combining technology with the experience, knowledge and judgement of the people using it.

AI can process information quickly. It can identify patterns, organise data and help with repetitive tasks. What it can't do reliably, is understand every nuance of a client's business, their commercial objectives, their customers or the wider context behind a particular decision. And that's particularly important in the travel industry, where the customer journey is rarely straightforward.

A luxury travel operator, for example, isn't simply trying to generate as many enquiries as possible. They need to attract the right customers, at the right stage of their journey, with the right expectations. Understanding the difference between generating more leads and generating better leads requires experience, context and commercial understanding.

That's where our specialists come in. Our aim is to use AI to support those specialists, never to replace them.

So, what are we actually using AI for?

The reality is that some of the most valuable applications we've identified aren't necessarily the most exciting. We're not building an army of AI agents to take over the internet. At least, not yet.

Instead, we're looking at the everyday activities that take up valuable time across the team and asking whether there's a better way to approach them.

We're experimenting with a mixture of AI platforms, including ChatGPT and Claude, to understand where their individual strengths lie. Different tools are better suited to different tasks, and something that works particularly well on one platform might produce completely different results on another.

Part of our AI Days is about understanding those differences, testing different approaches and building up our knowledge of which tools are genuinely useful.

We're not interested in adopting technology simply because it's new. It needs to have a practical application and, more importantly, deliver a tangible benefit.

1. Meeting notes and actions

Client meetings are an essential part of agency life, but the administration that follows them can be surprisingly time-consuming. Capturing notes, identifying actions, assigning responsibilities and ensuring everything is recorded correctly all take time. We're exploring and using AI supported processes to make this more efficient. Rather than someone spending valuable time manually pulling together every detail, technology can help organise the information and identify potential actions. Those outputs are then reviewed by the team, checked for accuracy and refined before being used.

We've also invested in ClickUp as our central project management platform, bringing together client tasks, meeting notes and internal administration in one place. And importantly, our clients now have access to ClickUp too.

The benefit isn't just saving time. - it's also helping us maintain consistent records, improve accountability and ensure that important actions don't disappear into someone's notebook.

2. Task creation and project management

Similarly, we're investigating how AI can support the way we manage work internally.

Turning meeting discussions, project requirements and agreed actions into clearly defined tasks is another area where technology can help.

By reducing some of the manual administration involved, our teams can spend more time progressing the work rather than simply organising it.

For our clients, that means more efficient processes and greater consistency in how work is managed and delivered.

3. Automating repetitive weekly processes

Every agency has processes that need to happen regularly. From gathering information for internal updates, preparing data for analysis or completing recurring administrative tasks, these activities are important but can become time-consuming.

We're looking at where AI and automation can help streamline those processes without compromising the quality of the output. Saving ten minutes on one task might not sound particularly revolutionary. But saving ten minutes across multiple tasks, multiple team members and multiple clients, every single week - that starts to add up.

More importantly, it's time that can be redirected towards work that delivers greater value.

4. Supporting research and analysis

We're also exploring how AI can support our specialists when researching topics, reviewing information and identifying opportunities. This doesn't mean accepting whatever an AI platform tells us. Far from it.

It means using technology to help us investigate information more efficiently, while relying on our team's knowledge and experience to interpret what it means. For example, AI might help organise a large amount of research or highlight areas worth investigating further. But deciding whether those findings are relevant, accurate or commercially valuable is still very much a human responsibility.

And that's how we intend to keep it.

More efficiency means more time for the things that matter

For us at Adido, this is probably the most important part of the whole initiative. Digital marketing has become increasingly complex (certainly within the travel sector).

Between changing search behaviour, the rise of AI-powered search experiences, evolving advertising platforms, increasingly sophisticated tracking requirements and the constant pressure to demonstrate commercial returns, there's a huge amount for our specialists to stay on top of. And that's before you consider the individual challenges facing each client. Our clients don't employ Adido because they want someone to spend hours formatting meeting notes or manually moving information between platforms.

They work with us because they want access to experienced digital marketing professionals who can help their businesses grow. They want people who understand their industry, can identify opportunities, challenge existing approaches and make informed strategic recommendations.

Every hour we can remove from unnecessary administration is an hour we can potentially spend delivering more value.

That might mean more time investigating why a campaign isn't performing as expected. More time analysing customer behaviour and identifying opportunities to improve conversion rates. Or simply more time thinking strategically about what our clients should be doing next, rather than focusing exclusively on what's happening today.

Key takeaways

AI is undoubtedly changing the way digital marketing agencies operate, but we believe the biggest opportunity isn't replacing people with technology.

It's using technology to help talented people do their best work.

At Adido, our AI Days are helping us:

• Invest in continuous innovation: Giving our entire team dedicated time to explore new technologies and challenge existing ways of working.
• Improve efficiency without compromising quality: Streamlining repetitive tasks while maintaining human oversight, testing and accountability.
• Free up time for strategic thinking: Allowing our specialists to spend less time on administration and more time identifying opportunities for clients.
• Combine technology with industry expertise: Bringing together our experience in travel and tourism marketing with emerging tools and more efficient processes.
• Deliver greater value to our clients: Focusing our time and expertise on the work that has the greatest potential to improve commercial performance.

We're certainly not claiming to have AI completely figured out. I'm not sure anyone can make that claim given how quickly things are changing.

But we're committed to exploring it properly, challenging what works and making sure our clients benefit from what we learn.

Because ultimately, the objective isn't to become an AI agency.

It's to become an even better digital marketing agency by using AI intelligently.

And if you're looking for a digital marketing partner that combines genuine travel industry expertise with a forward-thinking approach to technology, we'd love to have a conversation.