Is AI making pitching more stressful?

[Music] Hello and welcome to the campaign podcast. Pitching is what many call the lifeblood of agencies, but is also the cause of some of their biggest strains. Almost three-quarters of Adland employees have considered leaving the industry due to new business-related stress found research from the Great Pitch Poll 26 published this summer, which also revealed that client expectations and demands relating to AI have increased pressure. AI and LLMs are also impacting the search and selection process for pitches with clients using them to suggest agencies to shorelist. So in this episode we are discussing to what extent AI is impacting pitching and making it more stressful. So joining me today please welcome media editor Bo Jackson. Hi Lucy. Senior reporter Esther Gervitz. Hi Lucy. And editor Maisie McCabe. Hi Lucy. That's the first time I feel like you know you're a wedding and people introduce them and Mr and Mrs for the first time playing Go That's Does New Job title. I know. Yeah fantastic. Congratulations Esther. Much deserved. Honestly with everyone on holiday right now keeping us afloat literally. News is coming out of your ears anyway. I am your host tech and multimedia editor Lucy Shelley. Back to you Esther and other one of the stories. You were covering a couple of weeks ago now with research from the Great Pitch Poll which was it saying that pitching has become more stressful? Can you give us the headlines and what that was saying? Yeah so some of the key findings were that 73% of the respondents said they have considered leaving the industry due to new business-related stress and even higher number 80% seriously considered changing jobs because of this. Then the research also pointed out some specific issues around AI and pitching and how it might be increasing expectations and making the whole process more stressful. For example some of the findings were that 40% said they saw more questions in briefs and more content in pitches and 34% believed AI contributed to shorter turn around times. Okay so you're increasing the expectation people. I mean I think it was around about the same time we also published research which found that marketing and media professionals are less happy and engaged than the global workplace average. So at the end of this episode we are going to try and give some ideas about what we can do to change this so it's not all just doom and gloom but it's clearly causing some stress for the industry but is pitching becoming more stressful or is it just something that's always been stressful though? From the people I spoke to I got the sense that pitching's always been stressful. Some people thrive in that environment, some people don't but what has changed I guess is just what's happening in the industry generally the pressure there's a lot of different pressures on agency life broadly if you're thinking about in the networks especially there's job cuts and there's a lot of restructuring and a lot of changing and then on top of that you've also got AI so the kind of sense I got was that it's another thing on top of an already very full plate that pitching maybe hasn't got more stressful but there's a lot more that is stressful for a year in that in that workplace. The other thing was that Nick Wheatley who who's from notorious communications are saying how much agency life has changed in the past 15 years like when he started out doing pitches and stuff it was seen as a right of passage to stay up until like 4 a.m. it was a big pitch but now it's just not an acceptable way of working I mean I'm sure some people still do it very much so. That's interesting because I do feel like to your point Esther and what the research found the turn around times are getting much quicker you know the stories of people you can from brief to pitch it's only two weeks and things like that which sounds quite hard to do within 95 working hours. It's complicated though isn't it because people also I don't mean to be an apologist but people also use the time they're given so I've found like the counter argument be there was one agency who had a picture remember a few years ago where armed was a 24 hour or a 48 hour but it wasn't like an international brief international network it wasn't like they weren't working without sleep but they were collaborating with other people around the world to then deliver on this brief and actually found that quite a sort of smooth experience while undoubtedly it was probably quite stressful and also you know there might be questions of that's evidently not always how you're going to work although I guess sometimes agencies are required to deliver things quickly so is it a real test of what they're going to be like to work with? A lot of the frustration I've heard is actually about pitches taking too long it's on the media side anyway like if it drags on and on that's just the mental load that goes with you throughout like a whole year almost some of the time or like if you're like are we getting there yet as the decision been made people were frustrated about that and found that has a real impact on their mental well-being. I mean I've definitely spoken to people about media pitches in particular and how it can feel like that the deliverables change during the process and so if you are expecting to do a certain amount of tasks going to take a certain amount of time if additional work is added in that's not only you're already finding time to do the work you thought you were going to do then there's extra work to do as well and there's some questions from agencies about whether it's in the intermediaries if there's an intermediaries interest potentially I would always like to look at people you know in good faith as much as possible and you know I'm sure the vast majority of intermediaries are just trying to get the best partner from the client but if they're in a situation as we all know where they are paid per task and adding additional tasks you know I'm quite beneficial to them and I guess you know the thing with AI as well is it's moving at such a quick pace and going to the kind of mental load on agencies and knowing trying to keep up to date as an agency but also individual staff whether it's you know designers on tools or people you know on the more of the coding side it's trying to keep up with that pace of change and I've heard that as you're saying as to the kind of expectation in pitches some clients are going to agencies and expecting them to be able to immediately deploy their staff onto these AI tools and agencies saying well you know we need to train people and we're not completely ready to hit these kind of AI tools or capabilities that you're wanting straight away so there's a kind of management of expectations that needs to happen I think I've heard this is particularly prevalent in tech clients so this is where they've come and said well looking for a partner to do X with AI tools and more where they haven't been that specific and what tools they want so they've said okay this is the solution they want and then they expect the agencies to go straight onto the tools without saying initially these are the tools you want you to be able to use and then the agencies are caught off guard okay well we didn't have these tools prepared for our agencies to use and so this is a sort of question of whether agencies are added putling exhaust or I think it's going into the pitch where the clients have been up front with agencies about exactly what they're expecting and also being up front in terms of how far along the AI progress that clients are on and whether that's the same for agencies because especially tech forward clients they're going to be much more further along that journey than agencies will be so the agencies are they overselling what they can do or in the first place in terms of is it work that's inherently using AI that their source suggesting they can do and actually really can't yeah well I think there's also there's just using AI generally and then there's requiring to use specific tools and you know specific products that you know you might have to be trained on different products differently so I think that was different but there is a point about agencies over promising when it comes to AI because I think you know like I said you know there's this pace of change and there's this everyone wants to be competitive and it almost seems a bit like actors lying on their CV oh yeah I'll be able to do that by the time you know I need to be able to do it I mean that's a classic tech move as well isn't it so agencies are getting caught aren't either fake it do you make it think that tech companies do themselves probably yeah especially when the whole language around AI is it makes anything possible so you think is yeah I'm sure we'll be able to work it out eventually I've been hearing from some agencies they've lost out to other agencies and they've been a bit skeptical whether that agency could actually deliver what the clients said they have you know they've promised instead of the losing agency someone said to me that there's like a lot of great ideas being put out in terms of agencies and the AI products that they're putting out and stuff but then they're like yes does it actually work as well as you need it to for it to be really effective does it give what it promises it should and Amy Keane who is CEO and creative director of Good Shout who offers training specifically on the human element of agency life but she put a pitch on LinkedIn recently that kind of said the pressure around AI is real but it is overblown and it seems to resonate a lot with people where they were and like her whole point was like yeah the pressure is there there's a lot of being like oh you've got to be doing AI do it do it now do it good but actually she's like you actually don't need to because ultimately it is people still that are running these businesses and it's still getting a client is still a person coming to you for business and they're still connected with another person so was she sort of suggesting that people are getting distracted by the tools and not focusing on the on the people on the side of the yeah on the on that element of there is so much noise about AI I think if you can see how if you're not talking about it as an agency your network you see mold heart already. don't you know, even though yeah, like even the agencies that are talking about people, they're like, oh, but we also have AI, we also do tech. But that, I think, to an extent with certain agencies, it also becomes a massive leveler. The barrier is raised because of all these tools making it easier or faster to create certain things. So it will come down to, it might come down to people as the deciding factor whether or not to partner with someone. But Esther, it can also make it difficult to determine how to value work. Is that correct? And I expect some people on that. Yeah, so I was chatting to quite a few people about how AI has been impacting pitching. And someone was saying they can definitely see that there are more questions in the briefs. And especially about commercials, for example, they said like half of the questions they received could be about AI and how they use it and how it's driving down costs. And on one hand, it's understandable because the clients themselves have to know how the agencies, how they provide is use AI down the supply chain. However, the problem arises when they want to know sometimes down to the pound, like how much AI saving costs of production or how is it making the creative process more efficient. And it's really hard to put a number on creativity and actually tying into what you mentioned earlier. This can easily lead to all the promising because sometimes they themselves don't know the right answer. But they are asked to provide these answers. So obviously, they will feel these questions out and it might not be reflecting the full reality as much as they would like to. Just again, on the media side, this is not a point I know of promising, but it is on how they charge because there's been a lot of talk obviously about moving to more of an outcome as based model. And there's no doubt that AI and what they can do with that and like the cost of people and everything else is contributing to that discussion, which is when we had Cindy Rose at campaign house in Cannes, that was one of the things that she'd highlighted about the direction to BPPs going in rather than they're charging on time and people's and resource of people. Because I speak part of the Jaguar Land Rover. Yeah, the model that they've put together for Jaguar Land Rover, which covers media and creative and production, doesn't it? Yeah, I guess it'd be interesting to see how it all works out because whenever anyone talks about the desire to move to an outcomes based model, everyone still says, but it requires collaboration from both client and agencies and it's still being worked out. It doesn't feel like anyone's got an answer to it. And you can't measure it or still, still can't directly be like not in every media anyway. And also the things you can measure aren't, might not necessarily be showing you what they think they are doing either. So no, it's complicated. I mean, do you think it's interesting because what the conversation about moving away from a time materials model is often about is getting brands to pay more for their agency services and no brands to want to do that. So it's quite complicated, I think. Obviously, if you can demonstrally prove that you are delivering growth into hope that that will be compensated for. But to the point about, if you're saying that I can put your work, you know, in a world where a lot of creative agencies have sort of made a lot of money through the production side of things in the world where that gets cheaper, it's a hard task to then be like, oh, we've got this, yeah, undefinable creativity bit that we'd like you to pay a premium for. I think that's the challenge that they're all facing. They're having to make sure their fees aren't dropping, do more. Yeah, and describe something that is just by its nature really intangible, isn't it, an objective? There is some risk in it as well. I can't remember the Jaguar Land Rover deal, but as part of this often, the agency has to basically take a chance on not going any money or potentially even paying back things that they were supposed to have delivered for them. He's got to happen. And I think agencies are obviously should be compensated fairly, but it's complicated. If you say, oh, I just want to, I want to change our commercial arrangement and the reason is because you want more money. The other person's going to sort of see that and know what's happening. Well, I guess, you know, the discussion about how to make this all easier or simpler or fairer is about being more upfront with any kind of payment that you're expected. And I think that's, you know, historically been a slightly gray area, but, you know, trying to be transparent with agencies about what clients want to spend and how that can be achieved is one step forward. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I think, Kat Bird, see in the recipients and Andy Jackson's business is interesting. One of the things is they're potentially just doing the kind of platform idea and someone else can kind of activate it. The other is this idea of having a subscription kind of annual fee for their services. And when I've wrote in a column at the end of July, you know, when you've got the lure of recurring revenues, that's something that investors and people value very much. So I don't know, this has got much to do with AI. So in the research that you wrote about a couple of weeks ago, Esther, the study asked whether clients were becoming more demanding and unreasonable in their pitch requests. And again, nearly three quarters, 73% of the respondents agreed. So this obviously shows that these respondents think that clients are becoming too demanding. I mean, is pitch behaviour worsening? Are we seeing demands becoming more unreasonable? One of the things that came up during my conversations with people how there is a big stress during the pitch process comes from clients misunderstanding what AI can do. So someone was describing it as clients thinking that AI is this magic button that you can press and out the back of it comes the campaign, which is not very realistic. So they were saying how you almost need a new skill during pitching, which is educating clients about what AI is and where it should be used. And this also ties into something we've been talking about taste and how important taste is when it comes to creating work. For example, this person was saying that they met procurement people who thought that AI-generated humans were a great idea in ads because that would save costs and talent fees, etc. And then it's your role as an agency to educate them about why this could actually hurt your brand or let's say why not using AI in production might end up being quicker in that certain case. But obviously in the end clients are driven by cost and price and they were saying end of the day agencies who are not willing to compromise or want to maintain quality can suffer because there's always going to be someone who will be willing to do it cheaper and with more AI. Yeah, that is the kind of the balance is there but different brands do different things. I mean, I do tons of AI people in ads these days and different brands will have different objectives and styles. There's also this other point that AI itself is not free and for some reason there could be this idea that or every agency has it and it's just part of their tools but AI tools themselves are becoming more and more expensive and it's not just in advertising but across any industry we can read a lot about it. Basically the point is that having AI doesn't directly translate into cheaper work. Yeah, for sure. I mean it's a big thing now isn't it and enterprise solutions for AI, another the actual real cost of all these tokens is starting to become clear and I can see new providers and things like the Chinese operators and much cheaper and also you know upskilling stuff to be able to use them as well. Both in the media sign, are you finding our clients becoming too demanding? Do you think pitch pave is worsening? Generally it's not necessarily AI and it's not necessarily impacting pitching but there is some discontent I've heard of among the networks particularly about people essentially training the AI that will replace them eventually and when I spoke to Ed Couchman at Netflix he did talk about this idea of Netflix is going to have an agent that then speaks to an agent at a network and they're going to work out how much something should cost which is essentially part of a media bias job now. So they're going to automate the kind of negotiation. The negotiation to a certain so to certain degree I imagine that maybe that will get more and more prevalent eventually but you still got lots of things like legacy deals and stuff. I just wonder how and this is probably my understanding like how different that really is to like programmatic essentially. You know when you're like does it need to be an AI or can it just be an auction with separate armors of how much everyone's willing to pay? I mean I'm sure it's most sophisticated. I'm really intrigued by this. Well then negotiating power of each agent depends on how good that agent is. I don't know the ins and outs it was just a it was a small part of what we were talking about who knows and that is the other thing that I got. There's a future plan sorry this was yeah this is the other thing is that when I was speaking to people in media media agencies it's that they honestly just don't know everybody's saying that they kind of know the answer to certain things but it's still so so like young they're like we actually don't know what's going to happen and to just get our eyes done. It reflects to pitching as well though isn't it if you can imagine a world where I don't know if it was you Lucy made this way you've got a Markter getting an AI to write a brief and then you've got got an agency getting their AI to do a right response and you sort of, you know, there's a danger that there's not enough humanity in any of it and a lot of this gets missed. And it's like, if it is gonna be AI AI, is it still a pitch? Like, I mean, does it need to still be a pitch? Is there another kind of automated process like to answer the, I guess the question that happened? Could there be a world where, you know, no one's the impeter at three in the morning. Like, actually, oh, they could be, but after a night out, 'cause they're enjoying themselves. And like, the AI's doing the pitch between themselves and they come in on the morning and find out if they've won or not. You know, like, I don't know, it's that. Yeah, I mean, what is a pitch? Yeah, and then that, but then that goes back to, I think, your point, though, about people losing sight of the importance of relationships. Yeah, and now thinking about this future and being like, well, that sounds like there's gonna save a lot of people a lot of time. I think there's a lot of invested parties, though, that wouldn't want that to make money out of the pitching process. And the other thing that I have heard is that, yeah, mid-ridges were saying there are, areifiers now that ask for information in a way that then can be processed by LMS. But that's not necessarily creating more burden on them or more pressure. It's just a different way of doing it. Do you have a point about client and agency, AI, brief and responses, just kind of having their own conversation? Agents are saying that when they're receiving and a very obviously, kind of AI, written, brief, from a client, there's just too much detail that asked me to expect you to answer questions that they would never normally be expected to answer that early in the process. So that's something they're like, well, we'll just get AI to answer it then. Maybe it will do. Maybe it will do. Yeah, maybe it will do. So all that information, heavy stuff, but doing a pitch, actually, from what I've heard, is quite fun. Question mark? Quite fun. But if you're getting pitch theatre elements in and making like-- and then that becomes like a differentiator, doesn't it? It's like, actually, we know we can get all of this from you and that it's going to cost us this much for a while. But actually, show us as people what you offer and that you then get a sense of what your edge will be in the market based on the team that's working on it. Because that's a bit different and not something that you can easily put into a farm by being like, oh, this person's really friendly, so it's going to be great. Just in Ricketts, I've mentioned before, who's the chief transformation officer at WPP Production based in Australia, wrote a blog at the end of July, which was around abundance. And he was riffing off some of the stuff that Elon Musk had said. But essentially, you've got this world where all these agents are going to be talking to each other and no one needs any people. But then there's no one's going to have any money to buy any of the things that the agents and the machines are building. So probably beyond enough answer, pay grades, what the answer is. In terms of, you know, like it's a huge political societal broader issue, isn't it? We had Daniel Hume from WPP. He's the chief AI officer speaking maybe two years ago now, which in AI's grand scheme of things was quite a long time ago, talking about all the AI singularities and to this point where there will be no more money. To your point, on how a human element is so important in pitching, AI is doing the pitching, right? The brief comes from the AI, the agency AI response. How would it work then if the people are still the ones making the work? Because you never actually be an in touch with those who would be making your work. You don't even know the actual people in the team. And it's so important. And it's sometimes that differentiating factor. Yeah, I guess that's just quite similar to how a lot of pictures have worked anyway when they had their own image. In the pitch room. That's a big frustration as well as the current pitch processes is are the people in the room who's going to be ultimately doing your account? Which some agencies have been working to change. I spoke to PhD about this, but how they're trying to widen pitching skills across the agency so that people can, lots of people can join it. And even though they had an AS team that were doing it, I was just smiling because some of them have moved on anyway. But I'm sure they had a deep bench. BCCP are quite good at that. Just because they're CQ, as an agency, they do have, I think, multiple pitching teams. And I think generally, from talking when I did a column about their new business efforts, beginning the year. And talking to me does seem like that they have, because they've got broad shoulders. So they, I don't know how involved this senior team on the pitch would be, but they're definitely still around, if that makes sense. Because it's not like they've all got to move on to the next one, because they've got the big machine behind them. Well, it seems to work. I also mentioned in the intro the way that LLM's are actually changing the process of agency search and selections. This was something that we covered earlier in the summer, based on crowds' own findings when they get inbound leads. They ask the client to fill out where they came across crowd or why they're coming to crowd. And 90% of those inbound leads said that they were recommended crowd by an LLM. So again, changing the process and it was James Wilde, their chief growth officer, was saying that it's completely shifted the playing field. Because I mean, crowd is a performance marketing agency. So I'm showing up on LLM's and SEO is very performance focused. But if they type in, I want a UK performance agency to do this, they would find themselves crowd, appearing against a startup agency that's maybe only two years old with 15 employees. So, and they were saying, you know, it's obviously changing the way that these very different size of agencies are getting the same amount of LLM real estate, despite having not the same. Because crowd is what? 500 people. Yes, a crowd is over 600 people and is turning 15 this year. So, as a comparison. Yeah, that could be quite interesting. And quite fun for the pitching phase if you're getting more. A different names. Yeah, just different names saved up into that. And some that you might not have heard of necessarily that don't do as much PR or something as some other ones. I did a little experiment just before this. It was like really, really basic. You would like to invest in journalists as well. I didn't do any. Like, there wasn't a detailed brief or anything. I was just like, look, I'm a food and drink client. I work in the UK. And I'm with a network. Who should I shot this? I want to do a media review, who should I shot this? And it gave me different categories named them. So, it was like the heavyweight independence of Seven Stars and Media Lab, which are the two biggest UK media agencies. And then digital social specialists for if it was a challenger brand, which were agencies that hadn't heard of actually. And then it actually gave an agency evaluation matrix, which seems quite smart. They were like sliders that you could slide up based on what you valued the most. Gemini delivered just short. Gemini was like, okay, so is transparency really important? What would you give that a score out of in terms of your process? You want to put that at a 10. And then it changed who it recommended based on what you put in. What's fading that? Did you see the sources for that? I didn't see that. I was just. It was just interesting, I thought, as an experiment. And then the next prompts were like, do you want to know how to run a media pitch? Do you want to know what's asking chemistry sessions? I'm like, for how to run a media pitch, it just detailed the pitch positive pledge. Very good. But actually people I spoke to were like, that's a myth. It's not your fights and not following. It's Google Gemini, the only person recommended the pitch positive pledge. So it was really interesting. If you were doing fat finding or if you were just thinking, or like, I guess if it was short this thing's age and you were like, "I'm down to these two." And what do you reckon? And then you've got some little side of things. It's making something, it at least seems smart. Did you get to a decision? Feed and drink, brand both. I didn't know why I was doing a pitch when I went to the. I'm too jealous. Not the only time. I didn't know why, so I couldn't. And I didn't know what was important to me. So I couldn't make an informed decision. That's fantastic, well done, though. Yeah, it's just fun. I would recommend anybody, just give it a shot. But the agencies I spoke to as well were certainly, even though you, like you said, like crowds of performance agencies are doing this thing. It makes sense that that's happened for crowd. Media agencies haven't necessarily found that from other ones I spoke to anyway. It hadn't found that they'd got inbound clients from there. But they are thinking about what it says about them. And so I like what it says about us. I think it's what the LLM say about us. That's interesting. Because I like big faceless culture. That's all very good. I didn't ask big pieces. Never seen it, never saw the pitch. To you, never again. When I followed up with that stat from crowd and I spoke to create agencies as well, and they said, "Yeah, well, we're not really that. We're looking into being surfaced in the LLMs, but obviously we're not chosen as our reputation and the previous work we've done." Which is also how LLMs surface things through online reputation, what's been spoken about in Reddit or YouTube or just other pieces of the internet. But I guess being able to be surfaced on an LLM is either depending on how good your reputation is as a brand or how good your reputation is as a brand. good you are making yourself be surfaced? It's difficult to say because I'd be interested to know if they can get into fishbowl, if the LLM's I'm assuming they can. But of course it's made up of a lot of complaints about where people work and when you're looking at them as a person it's easy to take poor comments with a pinch of salt but if it's sort of something that an LLM is then surfacing to you it kind of seems more like fat it gives some more kind of credibility to it even though you're like oh this is going from fishbowl and people go on their journey to complain. Oh like glass door. You have to fill out a review of your employer to even look at glass door. I'm sure there'd be an intermediary here who would say and that is why you need that. A trusted expert. Yeah well I mean it does have access to fishbowl I just asked Gemini which you can use as a first workplace culture or a quench fishbowl you can have look yourselves. Okay. I'm not going to start libling myself. Okay well so after all that very quickly then do we think the process still works and how can pitching be made less stressful what changes could be made to make this process better? Just a through back to media 360 I had three marketers on my panel basically voting what they would automate kill and currently keep keep. So this is the return of snog barrier void. Just a through back to media 360 I had three marketers on a panel deciding what they would automate, keep and kill about their jobs and one of the things that I put to them was the pitch process. So this is Harry Dromi from Domino's, Jerry Deakin from B.I which is Burger King, Lee Spiles from Giff Gaff and even though their answers for answers very slightly all of them were like something does have to change about pitching because it isn't fit for purpose these days. What do they vote? There was some kills at least I remember on the pitch process they're like not to get rid of it completely but they were arguing there needs to be something instead of it in a better way of reaching a decision. I think a lot of people say that it would be nice if pitches follow the pitch positive pledge but I think a key part of that is the first bit of it which is knowing do you even need a pitch and what are you doing it for? I mean that's what a lot of intermediaries say they spend a lot of time on. Yeah and then sometimes intermediaries then go into working with them on just that and being like actually we don't need a pitch and what can we change within our businesses and then become more like a consultant for the business I guess just in terms of how it's structured or how they're doing marketing and then just getting the length of the process right. Some of the new businesses launched it obviously they don't not going to pitch so feral I guess being one of them and I think that's interesting. I think it's quite hard when you're a so unilever or a co-cola or something there's evidently you know requirement for source a level of accountability about the expectations of what's needed and being clear about whether you actually need the ask that you're asking for and that's possible to whether it's possible to get them in that time frame and you just wonder like you know whether if some much of it is actually going to come down to the commercials then maybe you don't need to ask that many you know ideas and strap questions up front. I'd ask someone as well who'd worked on the UK government's pictures before and one of the things that they'd flagged about what was quite good about the process is that they have to clearly put this is what we're looking for and this is how we're marking it. This is how 30% will come from this, x will come from whatever else. That kind of is a level playing field as well because it'd be like well everybody's got the same stuff and they're all going to be marked on this in the same way. In a couple of cases like we didn't actually sort of ride it by in the end but Nat West Group did an integrated pitch which obviously IPG won in the nine days of it existing as a business and so that business, the advertising side of it obviously initiative already had the media and they retained that. When it ended up going into Adam and Eve whereas Adam and Eve hadn't been involved in the pitch because obviously it was an IPG team so FCP leaders have got into and be instead and so you had the situation where you had run a massive pitch but it's not Nat West Group's fault but you've run this big competitive process with other people involved including like Densu and then you end up giving a bit of business to a team who yeah then aren't working on it at all because of something else but it's not necessarily anyone's fault really but you could see how if you've been pitching for that business. Esther what changes do you think need to be made to the pitching process or the anyways that it could be made less stressful to an improvement. Well one thing that came up was defining what's reasonable during the pitch because we mentioned how there are a lot of questions but there are also a lot of things you have to deliver sometimes and I was talking to someone who said they actually declined quite a few pitches that asked for a lot of things to be delivered in like a very short time frame so almost like there needs to be a new norm of like what's reasonable but then multiple people also said what would make pitching less stressful is to do one day pitch exercises almost like when they go and client gives them a task and they can deliver it so they're saying that actually honors the thing that you're ultimately trying to buy which is the partnership and the way people think because if you want to judge us on the work there's so much you can already look at but it's actually the people and they're thinking that you're buying essentially. We've come to the end so as always let's ask our title question in three words is AI making pitching more stressful bird you want to kick off big client in the room over there this food and drink client no it's competition extra in some ways okay okay yeah yeah I'm gonna say sounds like it does isn't it well I hope that wasn't the most horrible episode for people to listen to and that there might be you know some hope for the future but we've discussed about how things are changing and what people are grappling with thank you all for joining me today goodbye [Music]