How AI Is Truly Changing Our Day-to-Day Lives in Client Service
Management Summary
Sahra’s Perspective
Everyone’s talking about superintelligence. My Wednesday morning was different. And I think that’s exactly where the real revolution is happening.
In a recent episode of OMR featuring Leopold Aschenbrenner (a German AI prodigy who manages a fund worth billions), it’s emphasized once again how AI is set to turn everything upside down in just a few years —from chatbots to agents that no longer just respond, but take action. And here I am, sitting in front of my screen, rewriting a prompt for what feels like the tenth time because my homemade tool had other plans. 😅
The way AI works in day-to-day agency life isn’t magic, it isn’t sorcery, and it’s not as glamorous as you might think. It’s about more efficient reporting, fewer clicks in campaign management, and data protection. Sometimes it feels like the “Cringe Mountain” they talked about on Baby Got Business: that slightly uncomfortable feeling of showing that you’re still right in the thick of it and don’t have everything perfectly figured out yet. But maybe that’s exactly the most honest part. We don’t build the future in one big day. We build it over many small, unspectacular afternoons. And that’s exactly where our blog series “Client Service of the Future” comes in.
But first, who exactly are “we”? I’m Sahra, this is Nina, and we’ve both been working in Client Service & Consulting at e-dialog for about five years. That means: Whenever our clients have something coming up—a question about a campaign, a report, or a strategy—we’re often the first ones to step in. So we’re right at the intersection where the most changes are happening right now. And instead of just theorizing about it, in this series we’ll simply take you along on our day-to-day—with everything that works and everything that’s (still) a bit of a challenge.
Photo, from left to right: Nina Huber & Sahra Marquardt from the e-dialog Client Service & Consulting team
Nina’s Perspective
When I think back to the time when all the AI hype first broke out, I remember a lot of tinkering, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of prompts. At first, we didn’t think too much about it—we just saw what worked and what it could do. After a while, though, skepticism set in: What’s the deal with the data, anyway? How do we manage to use the right, consent-based data and make it useful for us? And above all: Once we’ve managed that—will we then be phased out?
A great many questions arose, but at the same time, things became clear very quickly: We won’t be working the way we do now for much longer. After all, if a machine can suddenly churn out market analyses, produce draft texts, and visualize data in a matter of seconds—what, exactly, will our job still be?
In any case, it helped me to take a step back and look at history. During industrialization, people also thought that machines would replace humans. And, to be honest, they actually did—entire job categories disappeared. At the same time, new ones emerged for which there wasn’t even a word before. That’s exactly what’s happening right now in our Client Service & Consulting division.
That’s why I’m also very confident that we’ll make it through this time as well. But of course, that also means we need to start thinking now about what our work might look like in the future. What will our customers need in the future, and how can we help them with that? How do we break out of the routines we’ve been going through on autopilot for years and clear our minds to focus on what really matters?
When I look back five years in my calendar, I see many Friday evenings when I was still working late on reporting—compiling numbers by hand, typing up minutes after client calls, and organizing to-do lists. Important work, no question, but rarely the kind of work I actually took this job for.
Don’t get me wrong: We’re still sitting in front of screens and fine-tuning presentations. But the administrative burden is shrinking, and it’s precisely this breathing room that allows us to better understand our clients’ goals while fully leveraging our strategic expertise—and, as a bonus, it frees up space to nurture genuine relationships. After all, we’re often the first point of contact for our clients—a lot comes together with us. When AI creates this breathing room for us, it also means less silo thinking and more genuine answers from a single source.
AI makes us faster and more efficient. However, it doesn’t replace “reading between the lines” in a meeting, sharing a laugh over coffee, or that subtle sense of what a client really needs at that moment. We don’t want to become robots—on the contrary: technology gives us back the capacity to be truly human, advisory, and creative again. It creates more space for what’s fun and for the very reasons we chose this job in the first place. :)
Who knows—maybe in ten years we’ll be sitting there, grinning, and saying to each other, “Do you remember back then? We actually used to do all that ourselves!”
Our conclusion: The mindset is in place—the real-world application follows in Part 2
“Do you remember back then?”—that exact phrase from Nina really sums it up for me. We’ve both ended up in the same place: The fear we felt at the beginning has turned into curiosity, and that curiosity has led to the question that’s really on our minds right now—how do we actually change this ourselves?
And because “AI is changing our everyday lives” is so easy to say but says so little, we won’t end this with a clever closing line. We’ll get specific. In the next part, we’ll take you through a typical workday in Client Service—one in 2021 and one in 2026, from the first coffee in the morning to the final report in the afternoon. With real-world use cases, real tools, and honest answers about what has actually gotten faster—and what, thankfully, is still done by hand.
