Beyond “the AI show”: Operationalizing agents at the WRITER Chicago roadshow - WRITER
Beyond “the AI show”: Operationalizing agents at the WRITER Chicago roadshow
Lindsay Poirier, Area Vice President, Sales
May 22, 2026
Enterprise AI is facing a crisis of confidence.
According to the 2026 AI Adoption in the Enterprise survey, 73% of CEOs report that their company’s AI strategy is causing them stress or anxiety. Nearly half of executives (48%) admit that AI adoption at their organization has been a massive disappointment. Perhaps most concerning for marketing leaders, 75% of executives say their company’s AI strategy is more for show than for actual internal guidance.
The pressure from the board is real, the fear of falling behind is acute, and the tolerance for vaporware has vanished.
At the recent WRITER event, “The Agentic Enterprise: A GTM Executive Series” in Chicago, we tackled this anxiety head-on. We didn’t gather to discuss theoretical capabilities or look at slide decks about the future of work. We gathered to build. We put enterprise-grade AI agents in the hands of marketing and digital innovation leaders at global enterprise companies to show that it’s possible to bridge the gap between AI ambition and operational reality. And it’s not just a glimpse at the future — it’s happening right now.
Here are the strategic takeaways and concrete use cases from our breakout session on building AI agents.
1. Solving the CMO’s biggest fear: Brand fidelity and governance
For marketing leadership, the greatest barrier to AI adoption isn’t technical complexity; it’s brand safety. You cannot scale content creation if it dilutes t he brand identity you’ve spent years building.
In Chicago, we demonstrated how to solve this by turning static documents and processes into dynamic, enforceable “skills”. Instead of hoping an LLM guesses your company’s unique style, attendees learned how to upload their existing product messaging guidelines — a standard Word document or PDF — and instantly convert it into a skill. Any agent deployed across the organization can now be forced to adhere strictly to those guidelines, ensuring absolute consistency.
We also addressed the “black box” problem. WRITER provides a dual-pane view: on the left, you see the agent’s exact thought process and every step it takes to complete a task, and on the right, you see its virtual machine executing the work. This transparency is table stakes for any enterprise that needs to monitor, measure, and govern its AI systems.
2. Real-world business value: What leaders built in minutes
When you remove the friction of coding, the time-to-value accelerates dramatically. During the session, attendees built functional, business-critical agents in minutes:
- The Competitive Intelligence Dashboard: A digital innovation leader at a leading global pharmaceutical company built an interactive competitive intelligence dashboard on the fly. The agent pulled maturity scores and conversion lifts for key competitors, but more importantly, it customized the output using the company’s specific brand colors and a highly human, accessible style designed specifically for their internal marketing team.
- The Autonomous Marketing Digest: We built an agent tasked with reading every new industry blog, applying specific product messaging guidelines, and automatically delivering a formatted digest directly to the marketing team via Slack.
- Field Marketing Lookbook: A field marketer at a leading global digital brand used a WRITER agent to build a personalized executive lookbook ahead of a high-stakes CXO dinner — in real time, through a simple back-and-forth conversation. The agent automatically pulled each attendee’s LinkedIn photo, title, company background, and existing relationship with her company, even cross-referencing a live Google Sheet to enrich the output. The result was a polished, guest-ready lookbook delivered in minutes, with the entire workflow then saved as a reusable Playbook for the broader field marketing team.
These are repeatable processes that save hours of manual labor and drive immediate business value.
3. The talent shift: From knowledge worker to knowledge manager
The roadshow highlighted a major change in how marketing teams operate. We are witnessing professionals transition from being “knowledge workers” to “knowledge managers.”
Instead of executing repetitive tasks, your team’s new mandate is to create “playbooks” — repeatable plans that an agent follows every single time. And because building an agent in WRITER relies entirely on natural language, there is no technical barrier to entry. You simply describe what you want, “like an employee on their first day of the job”. If you aren’t sure how to structure the request, the agent will prompt you with clarifying questions to refine the output.
The mandate to lead
The data shows that 61% of executives fear they could lose their job if they fail to lead their organization through the AI transition. The Chicago roadshow proved that you don’t have to wait for IT or an external consultancy to solve your business problems. You have the tools to operationalize AI today.
It is time to move past the “show” strategy and start building.
Ready to roll up your sleeves and drive actual ROI for your business? Companies using WRITER see an average of 333% ROI with a payback period of just six months.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming NYC Roadshow on June 11 . We can’t wait to see what you build.