We recently spent an afternoon with Spark AI to move past the hype and get hands-on with AI fundamentals.
At Coda we see our clients balancing their rich manufacturing heritage with rapid technological changes across industry. So, when it comes to technological advancement, the rise of AI is an area we have been tracking closely.
We’re already seeing AI unlocking new opportunities in manufacturing. For example, interpreting sensor data to enable predictive maintenance, and enhancing quality control and precision inspection. It’s helping to optimise supply chains, guiding robots in hazardous tasks and simulating new processes. In the same way, AI can help evolve the way Coda delivers for our clients and streamline the processes that support our creativity.
We invited Spark AI to host a workshop to get us thinking about its potential. Trusted by Oxford University and backed by Innovation UK, Spark AI delivers expert-led sessions for marketing agencies to show how AI can enhance creativity, streamline business processes and road-test new ways of working. We were keen to explore how it can fine-tune our work, so we keep delivering the best value for our clients.
We spent the session interrogating our chosen tools and getting hands-on with prompt engineering. It wasn’t just about what the tech can do. We ran exercises on planning, research, and creating content to see where the time-savers are (and where the errors can creep in). We also had a lively discussion about the risks to data privacy, how to reconcile AI with Coda’s sustainability commitments, and the ethics of AI’s training datasets.
During this workshop, we saw the potential and limitations of AI play out in real-world examples of our agency processes. We evaluated how subtle changes in prompts can generate widely varied, equally confident-sounding content that, blindly trusted and circulated, would bring in errors and destroy trust.
As with any emerging technology, we need to explore AI’s boundaries. There is already a widening gap between businesses using AI to cut corners and those who lean into it to support their operations. From design, to copy, to client relationships, AI could never replace the human thought, empathy and insight that go into shaping successful brands. Spark AI’s session helped us evaluate AI’s advantages alongside the risks of blindly trusting machine-synthesized, unsubstantiated ideas. It’s clear that thinking critically about how we use AI is essential; staying aware of those nuances that make sense to humans, but that machines will never decode.
