Monks Named The One Show’s First-Ever ‘AI Pioneer Organization’

Today, The One Show has named S4 Capital’s Monks as its inaugural ‘AI Pioneer Organization’. The new category honours companies pushing boundaries and shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

In the announcement, The One Club CEO, Kevin Swanepoel, has said that Monks earned the recognition through building and redefining what’s possible with AI - going beyond the creative applications to generate a new commercial model, educate staff internally with the ‘School of AI’ programme, and set up operations like its Agentic Advisory team and Monks Foundry, which has 150 NVIDIA-certified engineers building custom gen-AI models.

“We’re absolutely thrilled,” Monks’ chief innovation officer Henry Cowling tells LBB. “Marketing has been going through something of an existential crisis that's been driven, or triggered, by AI. Our POV has always been to lean in; agencies need to understand that they serve value by helping their clients with this transition, and we made a commitment, pretty much on day zero, to be fast and first in this space.”

Henry says a defining moment for Monks’ AI pioneering occurred when the organisation rallied behind the idea that ‘AI changes the economics of advertising’, targeting a future of hyper personalised, “big concept” advertising, created by AI at scale and speed for any customer or cultural moment. The other breakthrough moment came when Monks packaged its AI ecosystem as a product – Monks.Flow. “If our mission is to unlock the value of AI for our clients, then we need to do the layer of productisation on top of the foundation models, for the marketing organisation,” says Henry.

“That was a big part of us winning this AI Pioneer award. We are one of the first companies in our weight class to say, ‘we're doing product now’, and give our clients the opportunity to work with us in a way that's mediated, enabled and improved by AI.”

LBB’s Ben Conway sat down with Henry to find out more.

LBB> You often hear people say they’d rather swoop in once others have tested the waters – but it sounds like being first in the AI space is important to Monks. Why is that?

Henry> Looking at what's happening in AI, our innovation mission at Monks is to help clients be six to 12 months ahead of the market at any one time. I think that's the right time frame to be looking into the future.

Our role is not to focus on the post-singularity world of AI, where no one can make predictions about what it's going to look like. So how far out is it useful for us to focus so that we can help our clients be profitable? It’s now! Part of our company positioning is ‘the value of now’. We understand the current cost pressures that the marketing organisation is under. There’s not that much value in looking two to three years out.

Yes, we're pioneering. But there's a value in being 12 months ahead of where everyone else is, so that we can help our clients make the strategic decisions they need to make to be able to unlock the value of AI today.

^{Above: Henry Cowling, Monks' chief innovation officer}

LBB> What else has set you apart to earn this award?

Henry> From day one, we asked ourselves, ‘if we were going to start a company that looks like Monks today, what would we do differently?’. The mission of the company would be to facilitate our clients adopting AI. For some, it might be as simple as buying some new software. For others, they’re going to wholesale re-architect how they go to market. Our mission was to not slow roll this change, or be beholden to legacy time-and-materials models. Our chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, was recently talking about how we are reinventing our commercial model because of AI. That's something that we leant into on day one, because we recognised that as our value.

We realised our job is not necessarily just to provide marketing services. Our job is to help our clients make money, create value and do their jobs better, faster and more efficiently. Then we thought about the partnerships, capabilities and services that we needed to bring to bear – so we have partnerships with Nvidia, Google, and every major AI organisation. We invested heavily in our technology services, our consulting services and our transformation services, becoming this ‘change agent’ for our clients, which is a really important role for us.

Another point of difference was this mindset shift, that for AI to truly change how we do marketing as an industry, it has to go beyond just automating rote tasks. It has to demonstrate that it can deliver strategic and creative insight, and we set that as the bar very early on. It’s not just, ‘how can we use AI to speed up creation or translation of assets?’ – it’s ‘how can we use AI to create the big idea, for every channel, for every audience?’. That mindset has resulted in our leadership in the space.

The last thing is that we understand we service the marketing organisation, and we understand the organisational dynamics and pressures... We help them entrepreneurially, and help them to bootstrap the innovation that needs to happen. I see that as a key part of our role – to not just show them what better looks like, but to help them on the sometimes scrappy, challenging journey of getting there, advising them on the changes they need to make and how they can make money along the way, so that they're building the case for AI transformation as they go.

LBB> On the creative side of things, Monks has brought its AI ecosystem to brands like Headspace and Hatch – what are some of the campaigns that helped you earn this recognition?

Henry> The work with Headspace and Hatch has been really important in demonstrating the value of AI for growth, revenue generation and performance. Those campaigns really raised the bar, in terms of the impact they had for those marketers. Nothing helps a conversation about transforming a large company quite like demonstrating that it can have tangible business results. Those campaigns were seminal in terms of moving that conversation forwards.

^{Above: Monks'  personalised genAI work for Headspace}

We just put out some work with Nvidia and PUMA that shows how you can use agents to generate the creative concept and test it through rounds of agentic approval – so they’re responsible for developing the ad. It had a controversial reception in our industry, and that's only natural. I think we hold AI creativity to a higher standard than we hold human creativity, in the same way that we hold self-driving cars to higher safety standards than we hold human drivers. Naturally, we trust it less, and there's a natural reticence when AI is encroaching on spaces that have traditionally been human, and we want to hold on to that.

But for me, it's demonstrably clear that AI is able to do creativity – insofar as what we understand creativity to be in our space. Our job is not to create art – sometimes our industry creates art and it's wonderful, I admire it when it happens – but it's not why we're here. Our job is to do art in the service of commerce. Our job is to drive a result. Our job is to influence people.

The University of Zurich did a study – and we can debate the ethics of it – where they had AI agents in the ‘Change My View’ Reddit forum, and the AI scored in the 99th percentile. If AI is better than 98% of human beings at convincing people to change their mind on a topic, don't tell me that it can't do marketing! Don't tell me that it can't do strategy! Can it do art or elevated craft? That's what we were trying to do with the PUMA commercial… You can't look at that spot and say AI is not going to be capable of elevated, conceptual creative and true, strategic insight. We're getting there, and we have to prepare for a world where it's able to do that at a scale that human teams can't begin to match today.

LBB> If the industry is driving towards a future where AI is seen as capable of creativity, is there less incentive or room for human creativity? Is there valid pushback from people who want to protect the human side of craft?

Henry> We can debate the ethics of AI, and that's the right conversation to have. Where are the capabilities of AI coming from? What is the training data? Who has a stake in that training data? I'm here for that conversation.

We can debate the ethics of AI but I think the economics of it are irrefutable at this point. And we are an industry that's in the service of commerce, of growth and, ultimately, shareholder value. That is what we're here to do, and we have to be realistic about that. Our job, as partners to enterprises, is to create value for those enterprises. We need to do that in a way that's ethical, I completely agree. But I also think we can cope with this, as humans.

We feel intimidated by the fact that AI is encroaching on areas that previously were sacrosanct. But our industry has demonstrated it can reinvent itself. I've been in it long enough to see it shed its skin a dozen times… Creativity is changing. I don't like this line that people use: ‘AI is just another tool’. I don't think AI is just another tool. I don't think we've ever had a tool that can write a better joke than most people, or write a better poem than most people, or take a better photo than most people could without it. This is beyond ‘just another tool’.

But this is a new paradigm that we're in. However, I'm betting on team human. I'm betting on humans to get comfortable with this stuff and to find ways to break new ground in creativity with it. The opportunities in this space far outweigh the risks, and that should be a rallying cry to the creative people in our industry to not just push back – and the pushback is valid – but to lean in, shape it for the better, and invent new ways of expressing themselves, connecting with people and creating commercial value – all the things that we do so wonderfully in this industry. We just need to do it all over again!

LBB> How much has this approach to the risk-reward of AI, and seeing it as more than just a tool, contributed to Monks’ success as an AI pioneer?

Henry> We see it as our responsibility, to our clients and our people, to figure out this moment. I have to credit our leadership, like [co-founder and chief AI officer] Wesley ter Haar, Sir Martin and [co-founder, co-CEO] Bruno Lambertini. These folks understood the disruption that AI would mean for our space, and that became our internal rallying cry – to not shy away or pretend it's not happening. To lead! That's what leadership is. It ain't always easy, otherwise everyone would go into the difficult space and create value there. So yes, there's risk, but there's always risk. Our industry is highly competitive and always changing. But the reward, in this case, outweighs the risk.

The imperative to engage [with AI] and to rethink our value proposition, and rethink our commercial model, has so far led us through this moment very successfully.