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Mod Op says it dodged a $3 million AI bill. Sort of.
The independent marketing agency estimates it avoided roughly $3 million in potential licensing costs by building its own AI infrastructure rather than licensing off-the-shelf tools. At least that’s what Tessa Burg, chief technology officer at Mod Op, estimates the agency could have racked up by giving its 500-plus employees access to Microsoft Copilot or Figma Weave.
Orion is the indie agency’s ecosystem of AI products. It’s pitched as a proprietary tool to help employees automate workflows, and give clients a shared AI workspace where they can find performance data, AI search visibility and audience ad testing.
For Mod Op, it’s as much about cost savings as it is about orchestration. “We needed to own our data, and we needed to own the experience that we enable for our clients,” Burg said.
How Orion works
Work on what would become Orion started just before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The agency rolled out its internal version built on multiple LLMs shortly after. Its client-facing layer launched at the end of last year with plans to expand its offering into generative engine optimization (GEO) later this year, Burg told Digiday.
Orion works by serving as the operational layer that connects the APIs of major LLMs to help clients and internal teams with things like generating reports or testing concepts. One of its most popular agents manages contractors and external creative resources. Another can prioritize an employee’s day based on their email inbox. Another agent creates power points.
“We have an AI layer operating over secured owned data resources that serves a specific function and operates on a workflow. It is automating workflows, and it is doing so through engineered agent prompts,” Burg said.
Call it a managed program — “combination of licensed tools and proprietary software into a single platform,” as Burg puts it. Or call it an interface that Mod Op owns where the agency has more control over data and the user experience.
The business case for proprietary
AI is becoming part of agency infrastructure. Mod Op is betting that owning more of that operational infrastructure will benefit it in the long run.
“We believe that having our own platform that powers our own experience is really going to be a big differentiating factor,” Burg said. She added, “But that doesn’t mean as an agency, we’re going to build everything from scratch, because that would be crazy.”
That bet comes at a time where agencies are trying to square the costs of building against potential business gains. Just last month, a McKinsey study found that about 93% of enterprise leaders exceeded their AI budgets. Meanwhile, one-fifth of survey respondents reported their organizations have constrained their use of AI due to AI-related operating costs.
Aside from licensing fee savings, most of Orion’s ROI so far lives in productivity gains.
“Client discovery, experiential and event resourcing, strategy development and scoping, all have been condensed from 20 to 30 days to 1 week,” she said in a follow up email to Digiday. Reporting and analytics tasks used to take weeks, she added. Now, those tasks happen in real time.
Early days of adoption
Internally, Mod Op is tracking adoption, how long it takes to produce an insight, effective hourly rate, output per deliverable, and adoption.
While most of Orion’s usage is internal, the team is helping clients understand the use and outputs, Burg told Digiday. No client has asked for their own login yet.
It hasn’t been easy convincing clients of AI’s value. Conversations at this year’s Cannes Lions proved that. Digiday reported the gap between what AI tools can do and what clients are ready for is only widening.
Still, it’s early days. “Clients want to talk to the data, so that’s where we’re at in this journey,” Burg said.
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