How an agentic AI course changed my mind about AI adoption
Rather than seeing artificial intelligence as a threat to her job, FIN Studios Head of Studio, Tabitha Onofri, chose to understand it. Now, she believes it can be a huge benefit to the role she - and others - have; you just have to know where to start.
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I recently completed a course on agentic AI for organisational transformation.
Reading that sentence might have made your eyes glaze over but, in truth, the two-month course revealed more than a few key insights that upended how I, as the Head of Studio for a production company, think about AI as an advancing technology today.
Agentic AI can be the thread connecting pre-existing systems.
Some colleagues believe that anyone in my shoes should be shivering over the thought of AI replacing our output. I see it another way: agentic AI won’t take my job, or the job of any of my talented directors, editors and artists, but will instead automate repetitive work that doesn’t fall within their remit in the first place.
Agentic AI can be the thread connecting pre-existing systems and give my creative teams more time to focus on the craft that truly requires human judgment.
Above: Some skepticism about AI is healthy, but make sure any skepticism isn't rooted in stubbornness to adapt.
What should we stop doing?
Examine the workloads of your creative teams compared to the jobs they’re best suited for and most likely hired to do. Identify the filler: what are they spending their time doing that takes away time from their best work? In the same way that I wouldn’t expect handwritten letters from my team instead of emails, I wouldn’t want them to spend their billable hours recreating the same contracts and decks, tracking the same approvals and logs, and other project management documents that take too much time to do manually. Not when they could be spending the majority of their time on their specific craft.
If your skepticism roots in stubbornness, make it your first directive to learn more.
To pull in agentic AI, teams need to identify the legacy systems they have in place — pre-existing programs and hardware — and find the solutions that best integrate them, with an AI agent as the go-between for them all. Over time, teams may choose to add new systems, but not before attempting to connect what they have in place.
Be a skeptic
I’m not throwing caution to the wind. Some skepticism about any new technology or process is healthy. The goal isn’t to eliminate resistance, but to use it to make better implementation decisions. We need scrutiny because transformation, at its core, should be human-centred and human-chosen. Skepticism means scrutiny, and scrutiny benefits your company overall. Careful assessment exposes biases, blind spots and information gaps. Someone questioning whether an automated process actually produces better work can prevent an organisation from scaling a bad idea. If the foundation was poor, AI automation won’t magically make it better.
That said, some resistance comes from a lack of knowledge. If your skepticism roots in stubbornness, make it your first directive to learn more. Experiment — push agentic AI to the limits you think it has. Try to make it achieve the impossible. Once you find its ceiling and learn what it can and cannot do — and the risks it actually imposes — then your assessment can have more impact.
Above: Picking the correct AI agent is important; don't just choose the most popular.
Crawl, walk, run
Don’t end your discovery by adopting as many AI agents as possible; start with one process. Until you perfect one agent, you won’t be able to ascertain where future processes break down if many AI agents are working together. Starting small and then scaling also helps everyone get familiar with agentic AI, from technology enthusiasts to the most squeamish skeptic.
Don’t follow a standard business approach and adopt the most popular tool. Pick what works best for your specific organisation.
Also, don’t follow a standard business approach and adopt the most popular tool. Pick what works best for your specific organisation. Go back to square one: what are your smartest people spending time on that they shouldn’t have to do? Solve those problems first. Our team might look for ways to log and track our various creative treatments, for example, before we adopt a standard agentic tool, like a CRM.
The end goal is to carve time for your creatives to do that: create. Agentic AI doesn’t replace any one digital tool, but rather connects all of them, like a neural network, in ways we probably wish they had when we first got them. If onboarded in considered ways, AI can be the grey matter that fortifies your entire creative business rather than rendering it obsolete.
