How Cairns Oneil built an agentic AI suite and kept human creativity
Devon MacDonald is President & Co-Owner of Cairns Oneil. Cairns Oneil is a full-service independent media agency that crafts media strategies to help leading brands create a lasting impact. This interview explains how the agency rebuilt internal processes into an agentic AI suite, where AI is used for tasks like headline generation but avoided for visuals, and how that affects client work.
Apply AI to specific, repeatable media and workflow tasks to speed delivery, keep humans in control of visuals and strategic judgment, and use the freed time to do deeper client work. Do not assume AI implementation will reduce headcount in service businesses.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
The company started as a media buying agency 15 years ago. The world of media has changed dramatically since then, and does so seemingly every week. Our offering now also includes Strategy, Planning, Content, Analytics and AI. Having started my career in the technology world, I moved to media and became president of the company 5 years ago. The strong reputation and values of the business made it a very strong basis on which to build media-focused tech products, including AI-powered ones.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
In our industry, most new business comes via competitive RFPs. In these processes we compete against much larger, global organizations, but still have a 50% win rate. This track record is due to the strategic investments we make in technology like AI. We know how our competitors and clients think and make sure we design solutions that can be put into market and start delivering for clients on day 1.
We get a good amount of business through organic growth too. This can be from expanding the scope of existing products, or through the introduction of new services.
We get some clients through referrals, and I wish there were more. However, it’s always important for prospective clients to do their homework and make sure that they pick the partner that has the right capabilities and ambition for them.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We have re-designed the full stream of our in house processes into an agentic suite, which has been great. We use generative AI for headline creation in ads, but have shied away from visuals, particularly if they need to include people. The technology just isn’t there yet and we want to have the best quality output in the content we put out for clients, regardless of its source. It’s still important to us that all content feels human and resonates with real people, so we take great care to ensure that visuals strengthen messaging rather than distracting from it.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
We had one prospective client find us by asking ChatGPT, which we were thrilled by. We’re very conscious about producing meaningful content and staying relevant in the industry. We do this through producing our own podcasts, being active on social media, submitting (and winning) for awards, being quoted in news publications and more.
We do however see lots of clients become “experts” and come to meetings with a strong bias or pre-existing answer to the question they’re going to ask us. I’ve seen studies that track similar patterns in fields like medicine, where 90% of the information that patients self-diagnose with is incorrect. At times, clients aren’t using the right prompts or being objective in their questions to AI, so they are getting incorrect information back. It’s important to us to build up this AI literacy both with clients and among our own team.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I would tell them that they just need to start. The possibilities are endless, which can be overwhelming, but there are ways to isolate instances and mitigate risks to create immediate opportunities within your company.
However, I would ignore the idea that implementing AI can reduce headcount. In service-based businesses technology is an accelerant, not a replacement. While more work can be done faster, we use the time that we free up to allow team members to get deeper into problems and to answer those questions and issues that always seem to fall off the priority list.
Thank you to Devon MacDonald and the team at Carins Oneil for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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