FOUNDER FOCUSWe speak with AI founders and executives about AI, startups, and whatever else is on their minds. In this edition, Tech in Asia sits down with Chrissy Lim, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Protaigé, an autonomous AI marketing platform. Its AI account director, Maia, can take a campaign from brief to strategy and multichannel production. But Lim says the aim isn't to replace the creative spark - it's to remove the "80% perspiration" that follows. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.  What was breaking in the traditional agency model before generative AI came along? The economics have always been upside down. The hard part is cracking the brief: finding the insight, coming up with the big idea, and understanding the customer. But perhaps 20% of a project fee goes toward that thinking. Most of it gets absorbed by production, where the costs and headcount are. At the same time, customers are spread across more channels and touchpoints, while attention spans are shrinking. Agencies are also far removed from the customer. There is the creative agency, the media agency, the marketer, the performance market, and client servicing. By the time a signal gets back to the creative team, it may be two or three weeks later, with little time or budget left to respond. We all want to be agile, but traditional processes make that very difficult. The business of creativity is what kills creativity. What happens when a marketer briefs Maia? Everything begins with context. When a client comes on board, Protaigé learns about the brand, the market it operates in, and the customer it serves. We call that Brand DNA. Then the marketer gives Maia a brief: what they need to launch, sell, or fix, and the outcome they want. Maia combines the brand's internal context with external signals, such as what is happening in the market or what competitors are doing. She turns that into a strategic and communications brief, then orchestrates the production of assets for different channels, markets, and customer segments. Nothing is published without the user approving it. Human oversight matters most at the start of a campaign, when the core story and creative direction are being set. Once the strategic, conceptual, and design guardrails are in place, Maia can be trusted with more of the adaptation work. Why build an end-to-end platform instead of a tool that specializes in copy, images, or videos? It's like choosing between opening a chicken rice stall and a food court. One satisfies a craving, the other fulfills a broader need. Marketing is a coherent, continuous conversation with a customer. Point solutions create another layer of fragmentation: someone has to take a copy from one tool, paste it into a design tool, reload the brand context, and then move everything into a publishing tool. The insights from one campaign need to feed back into the next so the system gets better over time. That doesn't mean Protaigé has to build every underlying model. A specialist such as Runway may be better for producing a two-minute brand film scene by scene. Our role is to take that hero asset, adapt it, and distribute it across channels and markets. We don't replace the 20% that is inspiration - we replace the 80% that is perspiration. What parts of creative work still need humans then? Coming up with the idea is still really hard. There is instinct and intuition involved in knowing whether an idea is novel, relevant, or simply not good enough. It is taste, empathy, and feeling. AI can generate a million options, but a person still has to know which one is right. Technology is based on patterns from the past. Humans can invent something completely new. We shouldn't expect AI to get everything right all the time. Even in an agency, we never get it right on the first try. It's still a collaborative process, except now you are working with a partner that is very fast, very bright, and improves the more you use it. How does adopting Protaigé change a marketing team's day-to-day work? Marketers spend a lot of time reviewing creatives, socializing them internally, giving feedback, and briefing and rebriefing. When the system already has the brand context, those review cycles can compress from weeks to minutes. The time and budget saved can go toward getting closer to customers: doing more market research, holding events, creating more face-to-face contact, or testing new ways to reach people. We have onboarded about 1,000 brands globally, including B2B software companies and agencies. Some agencies use Protaigé as a mini production studio, while others set up a campaign and let clients create adaptations themselves. I built Protaigé for the agency I wanted to run: one where people get to do the fun part - the big idea, the first design, the first film - without the soul-destroying thousands of changes that follow. What does AI ultimately replace in the agency business? It's not about who the technology replaces but which part of the process it replaces. A digital campaign can require 50 or 60 banner sizes. Traditionally, someone has to adjust every one whenever there is a change. A system can now do that almost instantly. That doesn't have to eliminate creative jobs. When computers entered studios, manual typesetting disappeared, but people became typographers and font designers. Generative AI creates a similar opportunity for agencies to build new experiences and learn new skills. What will change is how the work is priced. Agency retainers were built around billable hours, and then the industry shifted toward projects and deliverables. If AI can continuously produce and optimize work toward a result, clients may pay for outcomes instead. Retainers can survive. The question is: What are they retaining? |
