Hahn’s AI Adoption Journey: Practical Applications for Us and Our Clients

AI has seen steady adoption in nearly every business function, but marketing is perhaps one of the industries that benefit most from the technology. Marketing is all about understanding customer needs and meaningfully connecting those needs with various products and services, something AI is well-suited for. At Hahn, we’ve been using AI tools for a while now, but over the past year, we’ve transitioned to a fully AI Native shop, having developed proprietary AI tools and new standards for their development and usage. From our AI tools portal for employees to our new custom bot HALL-E (Hahn’s Artificial Life Like Expert), we’ve already hit several milestones on our AI journey, and there’s more to come as we work towards AI mastery. 

A History of Tech Innovation 

In many ways, the transition to an AI Native shop has been a natural progression from our usual business approach. We’ve always been a tech-forward company, eager to leverage the best available tools for the task at hand. For instance, we already had a robust martech stack, which included many AI-powered solutions. Also, as a predictive marketing communications firm, almost everything we do is powered by AI or human-enabled tech services in some capacity. As such, it only made sense to go a step further into AI adoption. 

Building a Foundation of Responsibility

The first step to becoming an AI Native shop was aligning with the Marketing AI Institute, an organization that has taken great pains to provide agencies guidance on their AI journey. Looking at the materials they’ve released to the public, we developed a responsible AI manifesto, establishing firm ethical standards centered around transparency, privacy, and continuous learning. This has served as a foundation for our AI transformation going forward. From there, we developed our AI task force, which worked to determine the best tools to suit the agency’s needs. This led to the creation of the Hahn AI tool hub, which is continually upgraded based on employee and client feedback. 

AI Intelligence with a Human Touch

Continuous feedback has proven key to our AI development: roughly every six months, we survey our employees to understand how they’re using the AI tools at their disposal. We determine how often they use AI tools for work, how they use them, and whether or not they’ve seen noticeable improvements in productivity. Additionally, we surveyed our clients this past fall to get their perspective on how AI impacts their experience. The important thing to remember here is that no matter how AI is leveraged, there is always a human element as well, and by identifying how AI can enhance that human element, we deliver our finest work and the best possible campaigns for our clients. 

Introducing… HALL-E!

Another major factor in our shift to an AI Native shop has been the development of HALL-E, our custom bot. Rather than a tool, we view HALL-E as another employee who supports the rest of our team in many ways. HALL-E has her own channel and Slack and is responsible for a weekly event called Futuristic Friday, where she will ask a question or host a contest, challenging people to use various tools to solve the problem and rewarding them with points. More generally, HALL-E can vet solutions for RFP responses, dig for case studies, and perform other time-consuming tasks. While she’s currently only available to employees, we’re hoping to open her up to clients next year, where she can serve as an automated expert on all things Hahn. 

Getting Ready For An AI-Driven Future 

This is just the beginning of Hahn’s AI journey! For 2025, we plan on moving from simply being an AI Native shop to full-on AI mastery, ensuring that all our software engineers, creatives, and designers can comfortably use the best possible tools for their specialty. Though the transition has had its challenges—both in building technical skills and establishing best practices—it has ultimately enabled us to deliver a higher standard of quality and better meet our clients' needs. We’re looking forward to what the future holds, and we encourage others to embrace the transformative potential of AI just as we have.