How VCCP’s AI agency faith uses AI as a thinking partner not a productivity hack
Alex Dalman and Iva Johan unpack what happens when an agency is built around Gen AI from day one, not retrofitted afterwards
How VCCP’s AI agency faith uses AI as a thinking partner not a productivity hack
Alex Dalman and Iva Johan unpack what happens when an agency is built around Gen AI from day one, not retrofitted afterwards
‘Hype’ is still pitching against ‘meaningful transformation’ to win the business of the best AI-powered creative work in the industry. But there is a third kind of contender.
VCCP’s ‘faith’, an AI-native studio that is standing out as a rare example of what it looks like to build creativity around generative technology - rather than simply bolting it on.
Founded in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT’s world-altering arrival, faith was conceived not as a tech experiment but as a provocation: what work could a creative agency make if AI was treated as a foundational capability rather than a production, cost or efficiency shortcut? Alex Dalman, managing partner and head of social and innovation at faith, has helped carve this AI agency into an incubator for new forms of creativity, one that challenges both the complacency and the panic that often cloud conversations about AI in advertising.
Understanding the true impact of an AI-first model requires going beyond tools and workflows and demands clarity on where human creativity, strategic judgment and brand intuition still lead. That’s where Iva Johan, chief strategy officer at Bernadette - VCCP’s digital experience agency, brings crucial perspective.
We caught up with Dalman and Johan to pick apart what an AI-native agency really looks like in practice, how clients are navigating expectations and why curiosity - not efficiency - is becoming the new competitive advantage.
Together, their reflections paint a picture of an industry in transition, one where the most important shift may not be technological at all, but cultural.
Faith has been described as an AI-native agency. What does that actually mean in practice and how is it different from a traditional creative agency using AI?
Alex Dalman: When we started faith, we set out with a clear mission, and over two years on, it still rings true - we believe that Gen AI will be an accelerator of human creativity and imagination. We consistently ask ourselves, what could we make now using Gen AI, that just wasn’t possible before? And it is this steadfast mantra that means we have created ideas like our scambaiting granny Daisy for O2, as opposed to just using Gen AI to either recreate ads (like Coca-Cola’s Christmas ad again), or use it to create more bad and lazy ad slop - those were all possible before Gen AI too of course. As well as pushing ourselves to do more not less creativity with Gen AI, the inverse is also true.
We are never saying everything we make must be Gen AI, it is now simply a powerful option in the production toolbox and should be explored for the right ideas.
What was the original brief or strategic opportunity that led to Faith’s creation within VCCP?
Alex Dalman: faith was born six months after Chat-GPT slammed into the world, without a specific brief or opportunity, but instead with a strong feeling:
“This is really going to change everything; it’s certainly not a flash in the pan innovation, and if we don’t leap in, we will quickly get left behind.”
Even with a first mover advantage, a dedicated team and hundreds of hypotheses of use cases, it has been utterly remarkable to see just how fast things have changed in this short moment in history, so boy are we glad we started when we did. It is fascinating to be part of such a huge industry and world conversation, but equally fascinating to witness the real-time blockers and realities out there which mean there is far more industry talk than action at the moment.
Structurally, how is Faith organised? What kinds of roles or skillsets make up the team and how does that differ from a conventional agency model?
Alex Dalman: faith is a special group of people from across the VCCP network who are all passionate about creativity and technology, with a focus on embracing the latest and greatest technology. It is made up of AI developers and prompt engineers, creatives with masters in computer science, planners with degrees in cognitive science, innovation leads, data scientists and legal advisers with specialties in data and IP.
But Faith’s mission wouldn’t go that far, if knowledge and curiosity remained with just them.
Their other role in the agency is to bring everyone at VCCP and our clients on the AI journey with them, as this is where real progress and change will take place.
Earlier this year, we ran our first ‘Faith Film Fest’ challenging the entire VCCP network to make a short generative AI film. The final films were incredible, proving that when you put these tools in the hands of creative minds, only their imagination is the limit.
How do you decide when to build something entirely new with AI versus applying it to enhance existing creative or strategic work?
Alex Dalman: Original software development is time consuming and expensive to maintain with the pace of change, so as a nimble and technology-neutral team, we always look to what is already out there first, before we build from scratch. If we then realise the idea is not possible with existing technology, we will then custom build, especially when training AI diffusion models for core brand assets that need to be consistent time and time again.
What does a typical client engagement look like? How do brands usually approach faith and what kinds of problems are they asking you to solve?
Alex Dalman: Apart from ‘Can we have a Daisy?’ ;), the second most asked question is actually around education and training. Despite the seemingly infinite resources out there on the subject from all the AI ‘LinkedInfluencers’, the sense is one of overwhelm when I speak to clients, which is why our innovation lead, Peter Gasston’s talks and lectures are always so well received. Peter has a fantastic way of breaking everything down in a super easy way to understand with real and tangible examples of use, and he has even started taking his ‘AI Masterclass’ course to Staffordshire University who we are partnered with through our Challenger Academy in Stoke, to train the next generation of students and local businesses on the subject.
How do you handle client education and expectations - especially around timelines, cost and what AI can (and cannot) deliver?
Iva Johan: A lot of clients come to us with these very same questions. They want to know how and where to use AI creatively and strategically, right through to proving ROI. Let’s break it down:
On cost, there is a fallacy that AI is simply a cost-saving resource. The reality is that AI comes with different costs in different places from technology infrastructure, new capabilities to different types of expertise.
The question of cost shouldn’t be “how much cheaper?” but instead, "what drives value?”
Sometimes that’s efficiency, but sometimes it’s entirely new revenue streams.
When it comes to timelines, we flag that AI can help make the production and delivery cycles shorter and more efficient - however it’s important to know that building robust systems takes time. There’s often a gap between a quick prototype and something that works reliably at scale.
As for what AI can and can’t do: the answer is dependent on what the client is looking for. AI is great at pattern recognition, personalisation at scale and generating variation. It’s not so good at genuine strategic and creative thinking, nuanced content or knowing if something should even exist. That’s still human work. The biggest shift is that AI, like any technology implementation, demands clarity on success criteria upfront. Clients need to define what good looks like before they build. Focus on the outcomes at the start.
How do you measure success for AI-led work? Is it about efficiency, creativity, business impact or all of the above?
Iva Johan: It depends what you are asking AI to do. Success isn’t a single metric and it will vary from organisation to organisation. I tend to think about AI’s impact on three levels: efficiency is where AI can be used to handle repetitive or data-heavy tasks to unlock time or resources; effectiveness is about improving quality or accuracy at scale, for example personalisation that responds to audience signals in a way that humans can’t at scale; and expansion where AI enables new forms of creativity, experience or business models.
Measurement follows from there. For efficiency we’d be measuring productivity and time-saved, very much focusing on operational metrics. For effectiveness we would look at things like output quality, relevance or conversion. For me personally, expansion is where it gets really interesting, impact could be new revenue streams, new service models, experiences that weren’t viable before. That's where we see the strongest alignment.
What have you learned about integrating AI into creative ideation without losing the human spark or brand intuition?
Alex Dalman: AI creative automation without any human spark or brand intuition is just going to create at best very average advertising (by the very nature of how the models work) or at worst more and more AI slop - and not just from an output perspective but increasingly in the steps leading up to that output, now coined as ‘work slop’.
AI can help us visualise quicker and elaborate on thoughts, but true originality and ideation is still needed to give the tools instructions on what to do.
The real power and focus should be in getting the best creatives in the world, to use the tools, and see how much their creativity can be accelerated.
What’s been the biggest cultural shift in running or working within an AI-first agency?
Iva Johan: The biggest shift has been getting comfortable operating in the unknown. faith launched when none of us truly knew what Gen AI could do, the technology was evolving weekly. But we launched with a clear mission, as Alex described, to explore what is possible.
It’s in the spirit of our challenger ethos, we were already wired to move fast and question convention, but this took it further. We had to adopt a real ‘startup’ mentality: experiment with clients, learn together and venture off the conventional path, let go of frameworks, process and methodologies, just to keep pace with what the technology could do.
Curiosity became our competitive advantage.
Not everyone shared our optimism about AI, but staying genuinely curious about what is possible, rather than defensive about what might change, has served us well and allowed us to move at pace.
How does faith collaborate with the wider VCCP group? Do you act as a specialist partner, incubator or integrated part of larger teams?
Alex Dalman: All of the above! We are first and foremost an incubator team, but
VCCP’s core ethos is ‘It only works if it all works’, and that now includes ensuring AI works in the right ways for brands.
One of the ways we have been partnering with all the integrated teams across the VCCP network this year is by doing ‘AI Impact Assessments’ on clients’ businesses - what are the major threats but also major opportunities in how brands will show up and be interacted with in the future. This has enabled everyone to have the big-but-needed conversations with their clients about the future impact of AI on their business, and suggest tangible solutions or testing plans to address the changes coming.
What are some of the most promising or suprising AI tools or workflows you have discovered recently?
Iva Johan: My biggest learning from AI didn’t start at work, I’ve been running almost a year-long experiment living with AI as my daily decision-making partner, and the biggest discovery wasn’t a specific tool or workflow, it was how completely my behaviour changed.
With all the usual caveats that AI can hallucinate and produce an awful lot of slop, and that we have to be very aware of the pitfalls when using it, I still found a profound shift, from searching for bits and pieces of information to starting having conversations instead. Planning a trip became a back and forth dialogue with iterations. I approach problems differently now, rather than breaking things down myself, I’ll test ideas ‘out loud’: “here is what I am thinking, what am I missing?”
The shift was subtle but profound. I ask different questions now, more contextual, more personal. The AI already knows my patterns, so I expect a new level of specificity.
So for me the promising shift isn’t AI as a tool, it’s the behaviour change I experienced that’s made me more productive - AI as a thinking partner, rather than a productivity hack.
Finally, what advice would you give to agency leaders who want to build their own “AI-ready” creative model? Where should they start?
Alex Dalman: Don’t underestimate the importance of tool mastery. The tools have just levelled things, every agency and client has access to them now. So it’s not good enough to just say you can use them, what are you using them for that is next level brilliance?
And please stop focusing on efficiency alone, you still need a good idea - more efficient bad advertising is not helpful for anyone or any business. Let’s actually use the tools to accelerate, not diminish creativity.
Finally, what advice would you give to agency leaders who want to build their own “AI-ready” creative model? Where should they start?
Alex Dalman: Don’t underestimate the importance of tool mastery. The tools have just levelled things, every agency and client has access to them now. So it’s not good enough to just say you can use them, what are you using them for that is next level brilliance?
And please stop focusing on efficiency alone, you still need a good idea - more efficient bad advertising is not helpful for anyone or any business. Let’s actually use the tools to accelerate, not diminish creativity.
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