The hype around ChatGPT and AI in general is huge. The use cases are stacking up but carving fact from fiction can be hard, especially whilst you’re trying to run an agency or work with agencies on client side.
Our MD, Tom, was lucky enough to be invited up to Manchester by the network for independent creative agency Founders, Agencynomics, to talk about our experience with using AI as a creative agency.
Learn more about the event and the 3 other speakers here.
At the brunch, we talked about our experience offering AI as a self-service photo-editing product, as well as using AI in our own artist workflows across our design, cgi and retouching teams.
Doused in inspiration but grounded in reality, we gave our perspective and opinion on the now and the future.
A few key points -
Self Service AI
For the simple stuff, AI is brilliant. It saves time for our clients because they don't need to wait for us to find the photo, download it, retouch it, upload it. Simply, clients upload photos to our portals - our AI does its magic - and it's returned in seconds....
We talked about all the advantages, issues, headaches and customer reactions to launching the AI service and what it might look like in the future.
Using AI in our own artist workflows as a 'hybrid'
We talked about how we use AI in our own workflows and the benefits this brings to our clients. Not only can this help us speed up a project, enabling us to be more competitive on pricing and helping our clients get on the market faster, but we also talked about how it helps us deliver a better quality 'end-product' which for 99% of our clients is the most important thing.
Take below for example. Traditionally we would have used a variation of photoshop 3D plugins and 2D assets to dress the new homes landscaping. Now, we still need to do the majority using traditional retouch methods but we can generate more realistic and better quality grass, plant and background assets using AI.
The end result is ultra-realistic and slightly faster than our traditional approach.
Using AI to maximise the impact of a marketing message
The challenge with property marketing vs. other industries is often the budget. We don't work with the same 'Hollywood' budgets as PepsiCo or Nestle, so we have to be thoughtful, nimble and in places, conservative in our approach.
With AI we think that's going to change.
We're using AI in all manor or ways that unleashes creativity, allowing us to reframe the way property can be marketed to consumers.
This is only going to grow and become more accessible as AI improves and DCTR will be at the forefront of the revolution.