When your agency says AI has made reporting faster, what do they mean exactly? How has their reporting become more useful to you in your day to day?
An earlier warning about a missed goal is helpful. So is an explanation of whether new leads are likely to become customers, or a recommendation that sets out what your agency’s team knows and what it still needs to check. Each helps you judge where the next dollar should go.
Your agency should direct the capacity AI frees up toward those judgments, teach its teams to make them and check with you whether they help. Start with one recurring report and agree on the decision it needs to support.
Agree on what the saved time should improve
In Shifting Work Patterns with Generative AI, a randomized field experiment covered 66 firms and 7,137 knowledge workers. Researchers found individual time savings among workers given access to a generative AI tool, including less time spent on email. They did not detect changes in the quantity or mix of tasks from providing AI access to individual workers.
The study points to a simple question you can ask your agency: Which parts of your report will get more attention when AI frees up time: the warning, the forecast or the recommendation?
In September, Level reviewed a year of its own client reports. Tanya Halkyard True, a Senior Account Manager at Level, compared current client reporting decks with decks from a year earlier and found three practices our client service teams now use:
- Raising goal misses and risks proactively
- Explaining results against client goals and pacing
- Checking apparent wins against lead quality
In reports for 39 randomly selected clients, Tanya found no case where a team withheld or spun bad news. You can ask your own agency for all three practices. The sections below show what each one looks like in a report.
Get the warning before the spending decision
Consider a hypothetical campaign where form submissions are rising and cost per inquiry is falling. Your agency proposes increasing the budget. Yet your sales team accepts fewer of those inquiries as worth pursuing.
The report should bring that concern to your attention before you approve more spending. It should explain what your agency’s team has observed, why it matters and what remains uncertain. You need to know whether the recommendation accounts for the decline in sales acceptance.
If the cause is unclear, ask what your agency is investigating, who owns the answer and when you will have it. Agree on which developments warrant an update between reporting meetings. A warning that arrives after the budget has been committed leaves you with fewer choices.
Judge process against the goal and the time available
For this campaign, judge the increase in inquiries against the outcome you agreed to pursue. If that goal is qualified sales opportunities, the report needs to show how the campaign is progressing toward it.
Ask to see the target, the current position and the expected pace. Results can improve from the previous month while remaining behind plan. Where buying journeys are long, the forecast should explain how much time leads need to progress and which assumptions support the expected outcome.
AMEC’s Barcelona Principles 4.0 offer a relevant measurement discipline: set measurable objectives and evaluate outputs, outcomes and impact. The principles were written for communication measurement. Use them as a checklist for your own report. They do not prove that any agency’s rubric works.
If the goal or the way it is measured changes, ask your agency to make that visible before comparing periods. You should be able to understand what counts as progress and what would justify revising the plan.
Check lead quality before expanding spend
The next question in the hypothetical is whether the decline in sales acceptance reflects poorer inquiries, a delay in follow-up or a change in qualification. Each possibility calls for a different response.
Ask whether the comparison covers similar groups of leads with enough time to reach the same stage. Your agency should explain the definition it is using. Google Ads distinguishes qualified and converted leads: qualification happens outside Google Ads, while a converted lead has completed a chosen step in the process. That step need not be a sale.
If comparable inquiries are failing the same qualification criteria, ask your agency to investigate the audience and message before expanding spend. If recent leads are still awaiting follow-up, the immediate need may be to resolve that delay and assess the results. Where downstream data is missing, ask for a recommendation that acknowledges the gap and identifies the evidence needed to revisit it.
The report should leave you with a proposed action and a reason for it. The next report should return to that decision: what happened, what your agency’s team learned and how the finding changes the next campaign or test. That follow-through is one specific task your agency could prioritize with the time AI saves.
Ask how your agency makes good judgement repeatable
These practices need a shared standard that teams can learn and apply. According to Tanya, our next step is to turn these practices into a formal rubric and train every client service team to use it.
Ask your agency how it teaches people to explain a miss, evaluate a promising result and recommend an action under uncertainty. Your agency could have two colleagues review the same report independently, then compare the goal, risk and decision each identifies. In the hypothetical campaign, both should name the fall in sales acceptance as the risk. If only one does, the criteria are unclear or the recommendation rests on thin evidence. Judge this proposed approach by whether subsequent reports and client conversations make the next action clearer.
A rubric also needs room for challenge. A team can complete every section of a template and leave you unsure what to do. Review reporting quality alongside campaign performance: were expectations clear, did concerns reach you in time, and could you understand the choices? Hitting a target leaves those service questions open.
If reporting takes more effort without making decisions clearer, ask your agency to revise the standard.
Put the question to your next report
Choose one recurring report and review it with your agency. Agree on the decision it should support, then work through these questions:
- Are we on track against the agreed goal, and what assumptions shape the forecast?
- What does the spending tell us about efficiency and the next investment decision?
- How much do we know about the quality and commercial value of the results?
- What is the agency’s recommendation, and what evidence could change it?
- Which risk needs attention before the next meeting?
- What remains unclear enough to prevent action?
Use the answers to agree on one improvement to the next report and who will make it. When your agency claims time savings, ask how the available capacity will help deliver that improvement. At the next review, you should have the warning, the forecast and the recommendation in time to decide where your next dollar goes.
