How AI Can Help Agencies Seize Opportunities in Real Time

Translating cultural shifts and industry signals

Running a creative agency means living inside revenue volatility. As much as creative leaders would love to focus on the big ideas—and trust me, you still must—you’re also responsible for covering operating expenses month to month, planning quarters that rarely behave as expected and making long-term decisions with incomplete information. In that environment, every signal matters. A client move. A cultural shift. A brand announcement that should have triggered a conversation—but didn’t.

The hardest part isn’t effort. It’s focus.

Finding money has always been a hard reality for growing agencies—especially small and mid-sized shops. In 2025, tightening budgets and intensified competition have increased pressure, squeezing some agencies between nimble indies and global networks, leaving leaders to chase growth without clear signals of where the next opportunity truly lives. So, for talent creativity to flourish, focus becomes that much more important.

To solve my own focus issue, I built a custom GPT—not a newsletter, not a trend report and not an “in-the-know” scroll. It’s a weekly need-to-know opportunity generator designed to keep leadership oriented and surface leads based on what’s happening in the world as it directly relates to clients and creative capabilities.

The goal is simple: See creative opportunity sooner. Act with confidence. Stop leaving revenue on the table because the signal got lost in the noise.

What follows is a practical 101 on how to build something similar for yourself and your own creative teams.

Decide what you’re actually building. Before touching AI, get clear on this distinction: This is not a newsletter. It’s not trendspotting for vanity. It’s not about being culturally fluent for its own sake. This system exists to keep leadership focused on what matters this week. The resource needs to translate external movement into internal opportunity, then generate contextual reasons to reach out to clients and partners. If the resource you design doesn’t serve revenue, strategy or relationship-building, it doesn’t belong in your creative process.

Start with your own information. I built our system directly in ChatGPT. The first step was inputting my own information, following a clear structure encompassing: our client roster (current and aspirational); our creative capabilities and services; the industries, audiences and cultural spaces we track; and the trade publications, platforms and sources we trust. This becomes the foundation the GPT works from. I wasn’t asking the tech to guess what mattered to us. I was teaching it how to think like our leadership team—and you can do the same. Once that context is in place, your resource stops acting like a generalist and starts functioning like an informed strategist.

Define the output. This is where discipline really matters, because the power of this system isn’t volume. It’s precision. Each week, I prompt our system to generate a short, structured opportunity forecast filtered through specific criteria:

• Relevance: Does this affect a current or prospective client?
• Cultural Weight: Does it reflect a real shift in behavior, sentiment or creative language?
• Strategic Utility: Could this spark a conversation, pitch or expansion in the next 30–90 days?

If it doesn’t meet all three, it doesn’t make the cut. This keeps the output useful, readable and actionable.

Pull on it weekly. One of the most surprising benefits emerged over time. Because I only “pull” on this system once a week, ChatGPT has learned—through consistent, repeated prompting—to prioritize what is current. That means: The forecast changes meaningfully week to week. Even reports generated within 24 hours of each other surface different insights. Older or stale narratives fall away. The result is a pulse on the moment vs. a recycled trend deck. This cadence matters. It trains the system to behave less like an archive and more like an editorial desk.

Organize the forecast for action. Each weekly output follows the same structure to ensure consistency and clarity:

• Client and Industry Signals: Moves tied to clients, competitors or adjacent industries are distilled into what happened, why it matters and where opportunities exist.
• Cultural Shifts That Matter Now: Only shifts that affect how brands communicate, partner or show up in the world (not trendspotting).
• Creative, PR and Partnership Momentum: Notable brand activations, creator collaborations and earned media moments that signal where attention and investment are flowing.
• Leadership Takeaways: Two or three clear insights answering who we should talk to, what we should be proactive about and where focus should sit next week. This is where warm leads emerge naturally—without forcing the sell.

Treat it as leadership infrastructure, not a report. Finally, the real value of this system isn’t the document; it’s what it enables: sharper outreach, more timely pitches, aligned leadership conversations. Most importantly, it reduces the mental load of wondering whether something important is being missed.

AI didn’t replace intuition. It added context, timing and leverage.

In an industry defined by volatility, clarity is not a luxury. It’s infrastructure. And when you build a GPT with intention and train it by using your own information, it becomes less about knowing everything and more about understanding exactly what to do next.