AI has certainly taken plenty of mindshare as of late. 10Fold is one Bay Area PR firm which has been using it for more than 18 months to develop its own AI agents and other routines to make them more productive, provide more focused service to their mostly hi-tech clients, and analyze suggested approaches to acquire new clients. I recently spoke to Susan Thomas, their CEO.
“Our first AI app was developed out of sheet desperation.” They had an army of interns to sort through the “coverage” or press clips about their clients and competitors. “The bigger the companies we followed, the more people we needed,” she said. They did more than just count clips but go deeper to look at keywords, sentiment, and messaging used in the clips. They also examine the quality of the articles and measure their engagement. Their agent learned how to do all of this, and saved the time of three interns in total. It was developed by an outside firm that ended up costing $80,000. “Now we don’t have to hire this army of interns to do this analysis.”
They ultimately paid for licenses for ChatGPT. These, along with Gemini, proved their utility in what she calls the “discovery phase,” when they are approached by a prospective client. The manual process would take two or more hours; the chatbots took seconds. They would get all sorts of intel, such as venture funding, how many employees, where their offices were located, key analyst relationships and media coverage. “We also figured out how to find the prospect’s current PR agency, another long slog that was reduced to a few seconds,” she said.
When they first began using chatbots, they got some immediate benefit but it still took a series of eight or more separate prompts to do all of this research. Now they have an agent that consolidates this all together.
They wrote another AI agent that would research whether their ideas had been already used by the prospect. This has bled into having another AI agent analyze contributed article ideas to see if they are unique.
Thomas also uses AI to review her emails, catch typos and fix any style variations. She has uploaded their corporate handbook to make it easier to query about policies without having to read through the entire document.
The net result is that the majority of her staff now is AI fluent. “AI is making our media campaigns more successful, and making our reports more interesting. We aren’t writing the same materials over and over again, and our client retention is solid.”
What is most significant is that four of these agents Thomas wrote herself, with each one taking 10 or so minutes to code up. To me this demonstrates their power, and I recall when spreadsheets were first coming into corporations back in the early 1980s. AI agents are having a similar effect.