“Shall we play a game?” That chilling question came from one of the first modern movies to delve into AI — War Games.

GSD&M is taking a decidedly less dystopian approach to learning and adopting AI across the full-service agency, but it still involves games. The Omnicom-owned has for several months been working to upskill its employees across all divisions in AI by essentially gamifying the spread of its knowledge, replete with leaderboards showing who’s been the quickest or most effective to adopt AI strategies, tools or functionality.

(Some of the practices may get adopted across the parent company Omnicom, although nothing is yet confirmed on that level, since Omnicom is still busy trying to close its acquisition of IPG.)

GSD&M CEO Lee Newman explained that the approach organically developed when three of the agency’s executives — executive creative director Maria D’Amato, vp of technology and innovation David Forbert, and vp/group director of decision sciences David Zwickerhill — opted to comb through the company to find the best opportunities to apply AI knowledge and expertise.

According to Newman, the three audited hundreds of different workflows and identified where AI could impact across different departments and cross sections of the agency, Finding specific use cases, and then matched each with a set of tools, approaches and methodologies.

“In some cases, you have experts or people that are truly passionate and curious [who] oftentimes have a tendency to hoard the information or knowledge,” said Newman. “In this case, the three of them had the opposite inclination, and we’ve really benefited from that. They were inclined to figure out how they can get the agency to upskill and adapt AI technology across everything that we do, and the result has been really to engage a large number of people in using the tools.”

The agency then set up a series of workshops where every discipline talked about every task that they do, out of which thousands of use cases were identified. A set of office hours were earmarked each week to upskilling an AI tool or platform across the agency, and recorded for anyone who missed that set of hours.

As far as the gamification part of it, GSD&M borrowed from a SoulCycle-like leaderboard that tracked who at the agency was using AI the most, for text, for graphics, of video, for research. “It gives people a little bit of fame, a point of pride, and it engages more people to do it more,” said Newman.

Given that agencies are often in a competitive mindset, trying to beat other agencies to winning clients, GSD&M tapped into that with the leaderboard, explained Forbert. When the leaderboard is shown in staff gatherings, “oftentimes [staffers] see the people that operate beneath them — a lot of their junior level employees or their counterparts that are showing up on these boards,” he said. “It’s human instinct people are going to be motivated by that — they want to win.”

D’Amato said she and her two colleagues have worked together on problem-solving tech innovations in the past, but they’ve always felt empowered by a spirit of DIY innovation that permeates the agency. “This team is going to be tight on it,” she said. “This was just the next evolution of that spirit that’s alive and well — and a group of people who care a lot about technology and where it’s going and how it relates to our world of advertising.”

“We can all look at the same opportunities through different lenses,” added Forbert.

The results of the effort also led to cross-departmental innovation that was somewhat unexpected. For example, the three described two finance department employees who devised a data extraction and synthesis tool, along with a means to extract that data without having to manually do it.

Newman also described a tool helped the agency rank applicants’ resumes based on the job description. “The AI certainly doesn’t make any decisions, but it can help us prioritize a little bit. And I think that that’s the kind of thing where I’m sure if we scoured the landscape, we would find an off the shelf solution that maybe does that. But the fact that we have people that are able to build that sort of thing right here, and we can turn it over to our recruiters to help create some efficiency, is pretty amazing.”

Zwickerhill noted that the work across the agency has dispelled a lot of the gloom-and-doom feeling AI can conjure up in many industries. “For me, it’s been the complete opposite,” he said. “It’s been really empowering, and it’s just removed the barrier to entry for so many different things — the doers can really just get out there and get things done.”