The Works Unveil Industry-First Data-Optimisation For Brands

Based out of Sydney, The Works isn’t just any old advertising agency – and their latest offerings prove that.

Though they have always had a “bend” towards the digital, the evolution of AI technology has created an opportunity for advertisers that The Works has jumped on. As their niche expands, customer experience and human-centred design remain tantamount to The Works.

To this end, Mike Jones, The Works’ head of digital experience, says AI is “a great enabling tool,” for brands and advertising agencies.

When The Works unveiled their industry-first data-optimisation products for brands last month, Damian Pincus, the agency’s founder and creative partner, said that we’re, “on the brink of a transformative era in digital engagement.”

The hype around new AI technologies is such that it feels every other article feels like an AI thinkpeice; some kind of futuristic optimism, fearmongering naysaying, or a mixture of both. But if you have a chat with the team at The Works, they’ll tell you something a little different: that the AI landscape is about to become an essential part of how brands do business.

Currently, The Works offer two products in the AI sphere. The first, Accelerated AI Answers (AAA), is a ChatGPT-style, conversational interface completely trained on the content of your website.

Mike Jones describes it as being a bit like using a search engine – but better.

“You can ask questions to get the answers,” he says. “So, it enables a brand to provide an answer engine that is trained on the publicly available information on their outward facing site. From the moment you arrive on a site and ask a question, a visitor is given a concierge-like experience.”

If it sounds like a chatbot, that’s because it is … sort of. The Works have worked on a lot of chatbots, but Mike says this one is more like a search engine – or “Answer-Engine”.

“These are answer engines, where you're getting contextually relevant information using generative AI technology. The answers are contextually relevant, because they understand nuance.”

This means that when a customer comes to a website, possibly not even knowing the language with which to frame their question, they still find the answer they're after. 

“At the moment we’re helping a university offer a digital concierge to high-school leavers. Now, we can provide a contextual conversation layer over the top of all their existing publicly available information and help people get to exactly what they're looking for.”

Their second product has been dubbed ‘the new SEO’.

“A brand that might have lots of value in what they deliver, but an AI bot can't natively read and see that information – it could be contained in PDF documents for instance. What our second product allows us to do is evaluate that content is, and to transform it and make it available to an AI engine.”

The two products work together with each other, optimising the nascent value a brand already has and enhancing the user experience of their website.

Julie Dormand, MD, at The Works sees the technology as the next big step in branded experiences.

“At The Works, we talk about brand journeys worthy of attention,” she says. “You might hear a lot of companies talk about customer journeys; we talk about how you can take that brand all the way through that customer journey, and optimise it.”

Mike and Julie believe we are about to see a major paradigm shift in the way that brands create their website experiences. 

“Look at chat GPT – it came out of nowhere in November last year and picked up a million users in a few days,” Mike says. “We're witnessing this whole new paradigm, a new way that people want to ask questions, get answers, and be able to find the exact thing they’re after.”

While The Works are keeping their AI partnerships to themselves, they are sure to stress that their ongoing collaborations with AI companies are centred around customer experience and security.

“There's no doubt that data privacy and data security is a paramount concern, as is regulation around how artificial intelligence is used,” Mike said.

“I’ll keep going back to the fact that when we make these programs, we train the answer engine, not a bot, on how it's going to respond. That way, we only use publicly available information and nothing else.”

Whether this specific offering from The Works takes off, it’s fair to say that the AI hype train is no longer on the way. It has well and truly left the station.