Credit: Mahen Rin via Unsplash
Enero says AI is now driving measurable commercial results at the ASX-listed company with pitch win rates up 30%, time spent on processing complex briefs down by more than 90% and AI Lab revenue tripling.
CEO Ian Ball, briefing analysts on full year results, said AI has moved from pilot projects to embedded practice across BMF, Orchard and Hotwire.
Enero reported a 7% fall in revenue to $129.5 million for the year, alongside a 54% lift in net profit to $6.4 million, driven largely by cost discipline.
"Unlike some other businesses that really focus and measure their AI implementation on usage, that's not where we focus," Ball said.
"We are focused on AI as a means to an end, and the key areas that we focus on is how is AI improving our efficiency, and how is AI improving our effectiveness."
At Hotwire, the AI Lab unit generated three times more revenue in the fourth quarter than in the first.
And pitches built around AI Lab products such as Spark won 30% more often than those without.
"When we embed AI lab capability and the products like Spark into our pitches, then we have a 30% higher win rate in those pitches than in pitches that don't include the AI capability," Ball said.
He said the same tools were cutting research and reporting times, with AI-enabled work now delivered about 50% faster, and time spent on analytical drafting for quarterly client reports down about 45%.
BMF last week rolling out an agency-wide AI agent called Noggin, built with 30 skills at launch and designed to capture the agency's institutional knowledge for staff working across all clients.
"Noggin is our friendly agent for the whole of the BMS agency, available to all of our staff on all of our clients," Ball said.
Tools inside it include Cultural Radar, described as a "senior cultural intelligence analyst specialising in Australian global consumer culture," and Brains Trust, "a dynamic panel of domain relevant experts" that the agency uses to stress-test ideas.
Ball said an earlier AI transformation for one major BMF client had already cut image production time by 36%, reduced the time spent decoding complex client briefs by 93%, and lifted end-to-end retail production speed by 31%.
At Orchard, Ball pointed to a new code-writing agent running 43% faster on its first set of clients, and first-draft content delivery times down about 50%.
The agency also debuted Audience IQ, a synthetic audience research tool designed to replace costly, slow external market research with rapid, low-cost scenario testing.
"Traditionally, we would come up with creative treatments, and we had to go to external agencies to do in-depth in-person market research, which was very costly and very time-consuming," Ball said.
"Now, what we're able to do, having created this synthetic audience, is to run many, many different scenarios at much lower cost, at much faster speed."
Ball said the gains reported so far were early results rather than the ceiling.
"These are just early term initial pilot gains, and we expect these gains to continue to go up as we enter FY27," he said.
A slide from the presentation to analysts:
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