Landing an internship was hard enough back in the days when tasks like conducting research and creating slide decks required a human brain. Now, artificial intelligence can—and sometimes does—handle it.
At least that’s the case at Codeword, a tech marketing agency that announced two AI “interns” as part of its winter 2023 internship class in January. The interns, named Aiko and Aiden, have since worked on all-hands decks, web copy, graphics, branding research, and the agency’s quarterly zine, according to Kyle Monson, a founding partner at Codeword.
A few months into Aiko and Aiden’s time at Codeword, Monson said the AI teammates are exceeding expectations and may even advance at the agency. Not to worry, though: there’s plenty they don’t do yet, including client-facing work.
“The most important thing to me is that we’re using humans to do human work and we’re using robots for what robots are best at,” Monson told Marketing Brew. “We’re not using humans to do what robots are good at or using robots to do what humans are good at, because that doesn’t make sense.”
Reverse uno
In November 2022, one of Codeword’s design leads approached agency leadership with a proposition: That the agency never use generative creative tools.
At first, Monson was all for it and committed to only “organic, human-made marketing,” he said. About a week later, he made a complete 180.
“Even in the one week where I was thinking about it, there were all these innovations made where it became quite clear [AI] was going to play a role in the future of marketing,” Monson said.
Experimenting with AI “at least puts us in control of our own future,” he said, since it gives the agency first-hand experience with generative AI tools in the event clients ask about their potential applications.
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Some Codeword creatives were concerned about how AI might affect their own jobs, Monson said, but he made it clear that he wasn’t looking to downsize at all and that he hoped learning to use AI tools would actually help advance the careers of his human employees.
“That’s a huge differentiator for a creative over the next couple of years, I think,” he said.
What they’re made of
Aiko and Aiden are in high demand inside the agency, according to Monson. Aiden—whose tech is a combination of ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot—reports to Codeword’s editorial team, and Aiko—made of tech from Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion—reports to the design team. With that said, all of the creatives have access to both, Monson said.
Codeword’s strategy team has asked for an AI intern of their own, and Monson approved. Why not? Aiko and Aiden are already saving the Codeword team time and their clients money. It can take the agency anywhere from two weeks to six months to put together research, mood boards, sample concepts, and other materials for a rebrand, while the interns could complete those tasks in about an hour, Monson said.
Since most of Codeword’s clients are tech companies, “almost all in the AI space in one way or another,” they’ve been on board, too, Monson said.
Given their success so far, Monson said “there is a chapter two coming” for Aiko and Aiden at the agency, which could include some sort of promotion. That is, if they’re interested.
“I will keep them on as long as they want to stay, but they’re ambitious,” he said. “I think they might be exploring some other opportunities. They have a lot of dentist appointments on their calendars for beings with no teeth.”