Approach Marketing spent nine months building real AI infrastructure, training their employees on tools that changed how they work every day, and embedding AI into the agency's core workflows. Within six weeks of the company-wide rollout, platform usage grew by 43%, with engagement continuing to rise through the final reporting period. SoftSnow partnered with Approach to move AI from experimentation to operating discipline. This is what that work looked like.
Why PR Agencies Are Investing in AI Transformation
Approach Marketing is a Columbus-based PR and marketing agency serving clients in healthcare, food & beverage, and B2B. Led by President Megan Shroy and Managing Director Sarah Ann Harris, the agency has strong client relationships, experienced strategists, and an established service model.
Senior strategists were spending hours on manual work before every pitch. Pulling competitive intelligence, monitoring industry news, and assembling proposals from scattered SharePoint folders required significant preparation. Every hour spent assembling documents reduced the time available for the strategic thinking that helps win accounts.
Operational expertise remained siloed within individual staff members, lacking a structured, scalable framework to support agency-wide growth. Onboarding was inconsistent. Industry monitoring required constant manual effort. Their leadership team could see the gap between where they were and where a structured AI approach could take them.
Building an AI Strategy for a PR and Marketing Agency
Before any technology entered the conversation, SoftSnow ran sales process walkthroughs, distributed employee pain point questionnaires, and held one-on-one interviews with department heads, identifying distinct pain points across the agency.
Those findings fed into the AI Opportunity Matrix™, which ranked every identified use case by revenue impact and implementation complexity. Approach's leadership reviewed the output and aligned on four corporate objectives before implementation began:
- Enhance client acquisition, retention, and operational efficiency
- Automate proposal development
- Build an internal AI-first culture
- Offer AI capabilities to Approach's own clients
The platform connecting everything was Cassidy, an AI orchestration layer linking leading AI models to Approach's existing SharePoint infrastructure. Cassidy was selected for its enterprise governance controls, data privacy protections, and accessibility for non-technical users.
The AI Implementation Framework: From Discovery to Deployment
Agents were designed and built directly with the stakeholders who owned each process. The people doing the work validated every workflow before it went live.
The first wave of agents targeted the highest-friction areas, including:
- A Marketing Deck Writer to automate proposal content,
- A Lead Investigator for prospect research and enrichment,
- A Credibility Checker to validate sources in client work.
From there, the team built agents to summarize documents, generate Statements of Work, an SOP Builder that let employees document their processes through conversation, and an AEO Audit Agent that tracked how clients appeared across AI search platforms.
Training followed a structured change management model. A company-wide rollout brought their employees into the platform in a single session, covering live walkthroughs, data privacy governance, and hands-on piloting. Town halls and regular office hours kept momentum going after each agent launched. Power users emerged naturally and brought colleagues along.
AI Transformation Results: How Approach Marketing Became an AI-Ready Agency
- 8 agents fully deployed across core business functions
- 14+ employees trained in company-wide rollout
- More than 500 interactions recorded in a single month
- 43% growth in Cassidy usage within six weeks of rollout
- Zero inactive users at engagement close
- ~30 additional client-specific agents scoped for the next phase
"I feel like I got a PhD in AI integration over the last few months, so I really appreciate it." — Sarah Ann Harris, Managing Director, Approach Marketing
Nine months after committing to four corporate objectives, the results map directly to each one.
Proposal development shifted from a fully manual process to an automated workflow. The SOW Builder became the platform’s fastest-growing agent, allowing the team to edit polished drafts rather than assemble documents from zero.
New business preparation moved from a manual research process pulling from scattered sources to dedicated agents that provide the new business team with structured, AI-generated intelligence before each meeting.
AI adoption expanded across the agency. Cassidy usage grew 43% within six weeks of the company-wide rollout. The team completed more than 500 interactions in a single month, including 75 uses of one workflow. Usage continued to trend upward through the final reporting period, and no previously active user had dropped off the platform until the project wrapped up.
Approach is now delivering AI capabilities to its own clients. Client-specific agents are already live, approximately 30 more are scoped across its client portfolio, and the internal team can build and replicate new agents independently.
"We're seeing steady engagement and our power users are driving adoption through the organization. This is helping us compete more effectively while building capabilities that will serve us for years to come." — Jennifer Dingman, Head of Client Delivery, Approach Marketing
Ready to turn AI readiness into a competitive advantage? Let's talk.
