This explains why agencies continue to make AI smarter. This is as a way to help clients navigate the quagmire of knowledge, strategy, and technology to implement generational AI.

In the latest example, Boston-based independent general agency Boathouse has hired Sonia Chan as its first chief strategy officer, Digiday has learned. His role is to bring together AI and data expertise, and where they overlap, both internally and with customers. Chong started work in early February.

Chung has worked at Google and Salesforce, and most recently served as vice president of digital marketing at Delaware North, a Boston-based hospitality and entertainment company, while also teaching digital marketing at Boston University. She has also looked at the challenges and opportunities of modern digital marketing from a client-side, agency and martech perspective.

“The strengths that Boathouse already has – a very strong brand, paid media – overlap with my areas of passion and interest, like martech, adtech, the data piece on the measurement side, and AI that can scale and build on the foundation that’s already been built,” Chung said.

As Chung and Boathouse CEO John Connors explained, the agency aims to build a more rigorous way to connect pay, ownership, and acquisition to better identify where incremental growth is coming from and help clients act on it.

“What Sonia can do, and we’ve already seen it in the first month, is get back on track. [asking]What is behind Salesforce? What’s behind Google? What’s the math behind the algorithms?” Connors said she calls her a unicorn because of her exposure to all sides of the marketing and media equation. “The goal now is to really see what the data and platform opportunities are for using AI to drive revenue for our clients, and then work downstream from there very quickly.”

For Chung, it’s about planning broader applications to get clients where they want to be. “The whole point of getting data was to drive insights. The whole point of insights was to drive action. The whole point of action was to drive results, right?” said Chong. “How close are we to getting there? … Does it need to be through an AI agent? Is it pushing towards the actions we need to take? That’s where I’m trying to go.”

And that’s exactly what Zach Bricker, principal solutions engineer at Supermetrics, said the company’s research is trying to get to the bottom of. Because as it stands, there’s still a lot of confusion and downward pressure on marketing teams from the corner office to sort it out. But there is a gap in the kind of strategic guidance Chung provides to Boathouse clients.

A global survey of marketers at major brands and agencies by Supermetrics found that 80% of their teams feel pressure to implement AI, and 89% say that pressure is coming directly from the C-suite or board of directors. The problem is that teams are being held back by limited access to clean, reliable data. More than half say external teams define their data strategy, and only 7% receive real-time data support, Despite nearly 40% still struggling to prove ROI across channels.

“It creates a kind of… credibility debt or strategic gap where you say, ‘Oh, just use this tool.’ [teams] “Companies aren’t learning how to use AI effectively, and they don’t have a strategy from their organizations on exactly how to use AI to really maximize outcomes and understand the benefits that AI can deliver,” Bricker said.

Bricker said agencies can help narrow the gap between executives and marketing teams. “If you [the agency] Being able to contextualize the results and prove the results, and leveraging AI to do that, gives you the credibility to go from, “Maybe I don’t trust a new tool,” to “I know the experts here are using it at my agency, they’re working with a strong data foundation, the results are proven, and I can trust that they’re using it effectively.” ”