5 Workflows Every Marketing Agency Should Automate With AI

The five workflows worth automating first at a marketing agency are client reporting, content creation and repurposing, research and briefs, proposals, and lead research. Each one is repetitive, time-consuming and low on judgement, which is exactly what makes it a good candidate for AI. Start there, fix the process before you automate it, and you buy back hours every week.

This guide is for agency owners and operators who know AI should be doing more of the busywork but aren't sure where to point it first. We work with a lot of agencies, so the examples here aren't hypothetical: throughout, we use the real workflows of Humble&Brag, a YouTube agency we've trained, alongside the patterns we see across the field. If you're weighing up AI for marketing agencies in general, this is the practical, do-this-first version.

Agencies are one of the best-placed businesses to win with AI right now, precisely because so much of the work is repeatable: the same reports, the same research, the same proposal shape, over and over for different clients. The agencies pulling ahead aren't the ones with the fanciest tools. They're the ones who picked a few high-frequency jobs and handed them over properly.

Before the list: fix the process, then automate it

Two quick principles that save a lot of wasted effort.

First, optimise before you automate. If a process is a mess, automating it just makes the mess faster. Tidy the steps, cut what isn't needed, then hand the clean version to AI.

Second, know when not to use AI. Some jobs are cheaper and more reliable as a plain, non-AI automation, and some need a human. Reach for AI where it clearly wins, not everywhere. With that said, here are the five to start with.

1. Client reporting

Reporting is the ideal first automation: you do it constantly, it eats hours, and the steps rarely change. Every month you're pulling the same numbers from the same places, dropping them into the same deck, and writing the same "here's what it means" narrative for each client.

This is the one to start with because the risk is low and the time saving is immediate. With Claude Cowork connected to your data sources, you hand it the raw exports and a template, and it returns a formatted report with the commentary already drafted in your voice. You review, adjust the judgement calls, and send.

Humble&Brag do a version of this for their own growth: their SEO and traffic reporting runs off the same connectors they use for client work, so the numbers and the "what changed and why" arrive together rather than being rebuilt by hand each time. The job that used to be a dreaded Friday afternoon becomes a ten-minute review.

2. Content creation and repurposing

The bottleneck in agency content is almost never the idea. It's the production: turning a good line into a branded graphic, a carousel, a set of clips. Most operators aren't designers, so it stalls, and the channel that should be filling the pipeline goes quiet.

This is where a skill earns its keep. Humble&Brag's founder picked up exactly this workflow from one of our live sessions, where we showed how to spin up branded LinkedIn graphics in Cowork. The recipe is simple: drop in two or three example graphics so it learns the look, add your brand pack for the colours and fonts, write the line you want on the card, and it hands back something you can post. He started with simple quote cards, moved on to carousels, and turned the whole thing into a reusable skill. His words: the card he now posts each morning takes about ninety seconds from start to finish.

That's the pattern for all agency content, from short-form clips to first-draft campaign emails. Our best Claude skills for marketing round-up covers more of these end to end.

3. Research and briefs

Before anyone writes a script, an ad or a strategy, someone has to do the research, and at an agency that means getting up to speed on a different world every week. One client is in fintech, the next in healthcare, the next in music. It's useful work, and it's also a huge time sink of tab-switching.

A research workflow built in AI collapses this into a single pass. Humble&Brag run theirs in Claude Code with connectors to the data they trust: the platform APIs for what's actually performing, a keyword tool for search demand, and their analytics for the gaps. A research skill pulls all of it into a structured brief, and a branding skill drops it into their house style, ready to share with the client. What used to take two or three days now happens in one workflow, and the brief that comes out is more thorough than the hand-built version.

The lesson for any agency: research and briefing is repeatable enough to systematise, and it's where clients feel your expertise, so making it faster and deeper is a double win.

4. Proposals and pitches

New business is where automation quietly pays for itself. The proposal is a shape you repeat for every prospect: the discovery notes, the diagnosis, the recommended approach, the scope and the price. Rebuilding it from scratch each time is a tax on your most senior people.

The workflow we recommend starts at the discovery call. Record it, hand the transcript to AI, and have it draft the proposal against your template and your positioning, so a senior person is editing a strong first draft rather than staring at a blank page. This "sales call to proposal" pattern is one of the highest-value automations we see agencies build, because it shortens the gap between an interested prospect and a document they can say yes to. Keep a human on the pricing and the promises, always.

"Sales call to offer... it's tied to the money and it's spectacularly useful. It has all the great ingredients of a impeccably automisable process."

— Alex Kantjas, 9x co-founder

And the leap isn't only speed. The bar for how a proposal looks has moved too. You're no longer stuck sending a clunky slide deck or a PDF: with AI you can turn the same content into a polished, interactive web page, a proper experience the client clicks through from the first impression on. Humble&Brag now send proposals as branded web pages rather than decks, and building that page is a job AI handles in minutes. When the proposal itself feels like a better experience than your competitors', you've won something before the pricing conversation even starts.

5. Lead research and enrichment

The last one feeds the top of the funnel. Before you reach out to a prospect, you want the context: who they are, what they're running, where the opportunity is. Done by hand, it's slow, so it usually doesn't get done well.

AI is strong here. Point it at a company and it can pull together a working profile, enrich a list with the details that make outreach relevant, and flag the accounts worth your time. The agencies that do this well aren't sending more emails, they're sending better-researched ones to a shorter list. It's the difference between spraying and actually knowing who you're talking to before you hit send.

"The one that's underestimated by agencies, or by most companies, is the whole infrastructure... enrichment and call recording. How can you live without this? Make it work yesterday."

— Alex Kantjas, 9x co-founder

How to actually start

Don't try to automate all five this quarter. Pick the one you do most and dread most, usually reporting or content, and build that first. Do the task once with AI, by hand, using a real client and real assets, and get the output properly right. Only then save it as a skill, so the skill is a recording of a process that already worked rather than a guess. Use it a few times that week to make it stick, then move to the next.

If you want to understand where your team sits and what to hand over first, our guide to the three tiers of AI skills is a good map. And if reporting, research and proposals are all landing on one person, that's a sign you're growing the role that owns this: the Chief Automation Officer.

The bottom line

The five workflows to automate first at a marketing agency are reporting, content, research, proposals and lead research, roughly in that order. They're repetitive, they're everywhere, and they're the ones quietly eating your team's week. Fix each process, hand it over, and turn the good ones into skills you run on demand.

If you want your agency building these properly, around your own tools, clients and brand, our hands-on Claude Cowork training takes teams from their first task to a working set of skills that run the busywork for them.

Common questions

Which agency workflow should I automate first? Client reporting. It's frequent, low-risk and predictable, so it's the fastest way to prove the value and build the habit before you tackle messier work.

Do I need to be technical to automate these? No. Every workflow above is built by doing the task in plain language with Claude Cowork and saving it as a skill. Any code a workflow needs, the AI writes.

Won't automated work sound generic? It does if you hand AI a blank prompt. It doesn't when you build the workflow around your own research, templates and voice, and keep a person on the judgement calls, which is exactly how the examples above work.

Is this only for big agencies? No. Smaller agencies often gain the most, because one person can now run reporting, research and proposals that used to need a team.