We Sponsored AI Impacts – and Here’s What Stuck With Me

On 7th May, Agitate was one of the sponsors at the Growth Leaders AI Impacts event at the Hilton Bournemouth. I also got to sit on the panel, which made for an interesting day on both sides of the room.

The event brought together agency and tech leaders to talk honestly about what AI is actually doing to our industry. Not the hype version, the operational version. It was a half-day that moved quickly and covered a lot of ground.

Jules Love stood out.

His keynote opened the day and it was the best talk I saw. Jules co-founded Spark AI and wrote Shift: AI for Agencies, and he walked through how agencies should be thinking about AI. Not as a cost-cutting exercise, but as a way to strengthen the things that actually make agencies worth hiring: creativity, relationships, and long-term client value. He covered practical AI agent setups and the applications were concrete and genuinely useful. If you haven’t read the book, it’s worth your time.

Peter Czapp of The Wow Company followed with findings from the Benchpress Report, covering research with over 800 agencies on how AI is actually landing in real businesses, what’s improving profitability and what’s noise. The data was grounding in a good way.

The Panel

I joined Andrew Radcliffe (Spyrosoft) and Tia Collard (fiftyminds) on the panel. We talked about how we’re using AI right now, in real workflows. Not what we’re planning to do, but what’s actually changed. One example I shared: I connected Claude to QuickBooks. What used to take hours of manual cross-referencing (the kind of admin that quietly eats your week) now takes minutes. But the more interesting outcome wasn’t the time saved, it was what we did with it. We’re doing more analysis, better planning, and higher-quality technical work because we’re not buried in the grunt work. That’s the shift worth talking about.

The second panel, hosted by Jessica Morgan and covering the HR and legal side, was a useful counter-balance. Debbie Cohen and Edward Adamson made a strong case for being deliberate rather than reactive: think through the impact on your team before the problem lands, not after.

The Room

The room was full of people navigating the same tension: excited about AI, not naive about it. That’s a better starting point than most events I’ve been to on this subject.

Thanks to Anthony Story, Paul Tansey, and Emmalene Churcher at Growth Leaders for putting it together and for including us as sponsors. Good event. Already thinking about what next year looks like.