Everyone’s still talking about AI. Not a lot of people are talking about how often it fails.

MIT’s did some research that says 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver zero measurable ROI. Not because the models are broken, but because the inputs are. Bad processes. Blurry strategies. Poor data. Garbage in, garbage out. That can happen in the creative agency world too.

A lot of marketing people think about AI as a cost- or time savings tool. That may have some truth to it but the real win in the AI era centers around the way we harness it to accelerate our teams—creating better work, more thoughtfully, and more efficiently. Good stuff in, better stuff out.

How we Leverage AI

At Targa, the AI + HI mission inspires us. We dig deep, researching relentlessly, constantly testing new ways to grow our business, our team, and our clients. We bring our creative brainpower, strategic research, and broad cross-industry experience to shape our AI conversations with one irreplaceable input: our Human Intelligence (HI).

But it’s not just about fun — it’s about results:

• • Experience. We’ve studied our clients, their business, their brand, and we know their objectives like the back of our hand. But—and this is important—we’re viewing everything with a fresh lens to keep focus not just on what the brand wants to say but what the customer needs to hear.
  • Perspective. We work across clients, industries, and markets—building context and nuance that AI on its own just can’t replicate. We capture a depth of learning through trial and error across industries and apply that successfully to each client’s specific challenge.
  • Care. We feed AI with clarity, creativity, and strategic insights. Our natural creative problem-solving skills help us sharpen our conversations with AI so they actually make sense. Much like a designer will tweak spacing or futz with a shade of blue to get it “just right”, our strategic guidance for AI has the same thought and nuance.

From spin-to-win games to quizzes, challenges, contests, and skill competitions, gamification offers marketers a new kind of toolkit for engagement.

Why It Matters for Our Clients

Some clients worry about whether agencies “use AI” in their process. They do. We all do. The real question is how.

Targa’s goal around our AI + process is to consistently deliver:

• • Smarter inputs:  Real strategic direction, not just prompts.
  • Cross-industry insights: insights drawn from years of hands-on client work.
  • Human creativity + AI efficiency: faster outputs, more impactful results.
  • A personal touch: AI doesn’t care about your business. We do.

At Targa, we don’t buy into AI just because “everyone’s doing it.” For us it’s about integrating AI with HI to accelerate the right ideas, not the wrong ones. That’s the hype we love to hype.

Final Thought

AI alone is not the answer to every challenge. But with the right HI, it can help propel your business to the future. That’s where the Targa magic happens.