Interviewer: Welcome to The AI Summit London. We're delighted to be joined by Jules Love, Co Founder and Chief AI Guru at Spark AI. For those who may not know much about Spark AI and your own journey, could you give us some colour on your background and how you came to found the company?

Jules: I started out as a management consultant at Accenture, working in the marketing practice with brands and marketing teams to build customer strategies. I then became an advertising photographer for fifteen years, still working with marketing teams and agencies but in a more creative capacity. When Covid arrived I had time to study, so I completed Applied Generative AI at MIT. Things took off from there. I founded Spark about two and a half years ago to help creative and marketing teams adopt AI, and it has been a busy ride since.

Interviewer: Why are creative agencies feeling the disruption from generative AI, and where is the real opportunity for them to leverage it?

Jules: Creative agencies are at the eye of the storm because AI can write words and create pictures, which are core services agencies provide. It can feel very challenging because it touches the heart of the business model. The real opportunity is to reimagine brand and customer experiences. Agencies that help clients do that will be the ones that win over the next few years.

Interviewer: For agencies using an automation to innovation framework, how do they move beyond faster and cheaper to genuine innovation?

Jules: The natural reaction of any founder or chief executive is to ask how this makes the business more cost effective. In a business to business services environment that can become a race to the bottom. Clients start to expect faster and cheaper, and the margin you save gets handed back. The opportunity is to put yourself in your client’s shoes. Too many agencies define themselves by outputs, saying they are a web development agency, a copywriting agency, a social agency or a branding agency. That is not why clients come to you. They come because they want a closer connection with their customers.

So stop looking only at internal savings and start looking at how you deliver a better service to your client. Rethink the commercial model to capture that value, because AI compresses delivery timelines. Agencies have long been trapped in input based pricing, where everything is billed by hours and seniority. You invest in training and new processes and then the client expects lower fees, so you get caught.

Have a different conversation with clients about the value you are bringing and move beyond hourly pricing. It may be hard with existing clients, but new clients give you a chance to reset. Productise your services and package them around the outcomes you deliver rather than the hours involved. If you have proprietary IP or methodologies, that gives you pricing power and shifts the conversation from hours to knowledge and experience. Everyone talks about outcome based or value based pricing. It is great in theory and difficult in practice because many external factors influence success, but moving towards productised and output based pricing is the right direction.

Interviewer: If models are handling more entry level work, how should agencies develop junior talent? Should training and career progression change?

Jules: Training and career progression definitely have to change. Some of the work juniors used to cut their teeth on is work that AI now handles well, such as research or assembling mood boards. Many leaders assume new careers will look like theirs, but they will not. Skills are evolving quickly and there is not yet a shared language for them. Recruiters in the creative sector are trying to find frameworks to calibrate AI fluency, skills and openness to new ways of working. We are helping define how to measure AI capability and make that transparent to employers.

Creative agencies are not going away. There is no single correct answer in marketing, advertising and creativity. Judgement, taste, experience and knowledge will still matter and are hard for AI to replicate. The path to developing those capabilities will be different, and that means rethinking how juniors build craft and context in an AI enabled environment.

Interviewer: Spark is growing at a strong pace. What trends are you focused on over the next twelve months, specifically for your company?

Jules: We're working much more closely with organisations after our initial three month transformation programme, where we upskill teams and equip leadership to navigate the path. We are returning to clients to help them build AI enabled workflows, evolve pricing models, and scan the horizon for what is coming and what is relevant to them. A big focus is mobilising the cultural change needed to adapt to this new era.

Interviewer: You delivered a masterclass here at The AI Summit London. What do you hope people took away, and what did you take away?

Jules: I focused on what it really takes to build an AI strategy. There is a top down component where leadership places some big bets and sets direction. That is where many people assume AI sits. There is also a bottom up component where you equip teams with the skills to use these tools for more complex tasks, identify opportunities in workflows, and let teams build AI assistants to support how they work and share them. The goal is to move from AI as an individual skill to AI as a team capability. That is where transformation happens.