Agency Principals Podcast | Ep07 | Candid Platform : Why We Stopped Buying Agencies for Scale

Thanks, Doc, and thanks for having me on the podcast.

Interestingly enough, we've actually gone full circle.

When Candid was founded 17, 18 years ago now, it was actually called Candid Platform and we're still called Candid Platform because the ambition was not to become yet another holding group or create something which was similar, but of a different scale, but really create something that is a platform that creates a foundation for an agency to grow, develop, and really scale itself, both in terms of clients, but also internationally.

And what's been very interesting over the last couple of years is that AI has actually enabled us to truly deliver on that promise, where maybe in the years in between, we have become, I would almost say, a mini holding group.

in the way we developed ourselves through acquisitions and by creating a full service portfolio.

What AI actually now does for us is to really bring that back to, I would say, the original roots of why we started the platform in the first place, is that is to enable an agency or multiple agencies to really develop itself in much more of a strategic partner for clients.

So in terms of what you've built in AI, Where are the particular applications for your AI operating system? What services and what areas does it particularly excel in? What we've

learned, at least throughout the way we've worked with it and applied it more, is that, and maybe that's an interesting point to start, what AI is not good at.

And what AI is not good at is being creative and being ingenuitive, coming up with new ideas.

And what we've found in working with it, what AI is incredibly powerful at is at consolidating and validating and producing.

And then where the human ingenuity comes back in, which is part of the way we position ourselves, we really talk about AI as that marriage between human ingenuity and machine learning.

And where the real power of AI comes in is to execute that skill and to bring things together in such a way where production times used to take weeks can now be done in days.

And also where execution and validation of concepts can now be done in a matter of hours as opposed to days.

That's where that application, because what AI is really, really good at is pattern recognition.

And that's logical because that's its foundation.

In the end, it's an algorithm and the algorithm is really good at much better, by the way, than human beings and quickly recognizing patterns, putting the A's and the B's together in such a way that it can compare nodes and all those kinds of things.

What we've found, and I think that that's the real stronghold of it, is that it doesn't replace some of the core components.

components that we are hired for by clients, which is to be creative.

Because if clients wanted in-the-box solutions, they can use an AI themselves.

They come to us to have out-of-the-box ideas, out-of-the-box concepts, really marriage the work we do from a marketing and a creative level with the results that come out at the bottom line.

And What we see is that AI is actually really, really powerful in that middle pit.

So when you have the ideas, when you have the rough concept of where you want to go, is to validate it, develop it, and grow it.

But then at the end, you really want to have the human being in place again to see, okay, but has this really been executed in the right direction? And has it really been done?