AI should be easier for marketers

By Tobias Cummins, Chief Operating Officer, Pencil

Marketers hear the word agentic a lot these days, but the truth is that agentic AI hasn’t yet become a reality in the day job. In my conversations with CMOs I’m finding that AI is being used disparately – separate GenAI tools for separate tasks, operating ad hoc and independently.

This is mostly because marketers are not technologists, nor should they be expected to be. Keeping up with the latest versions and capabilities of AI models is not something many have time to read about, let alone learn to use and practice.

That reality is a big reason why we made Scribble. It’s our new ‘master agent’, which means you can brief it in plain language like a colleague. It picks the right agents and models for the job, sequences the steps, and runs the work in the background. We’ve designed it so that its actions are understandable, not opaque, and a human approves it every step of the way.

We’re proud to offer clients fully agentic capability. It takes the best AI tools for marketers and makes them accessible, and we developed it alongside our brand clients like Unilever and L’Oréal, to ensure it works smoothly in real-life scenarios. Those teams reported a notable reduction in the time spent on repetitive tasks such as resizing images for common ad placements or completing product swaps in images.

You don’t need to know which model to use, which agent to pick or which prompt will get the best result – just give Scribble a brief and it works out what needs to happen next. It identifies the steps, tools and AI capabilities needed to get the job done, bringing them together to handle the time-consuming tasks marketers deal with every day – from resizing and adapting assets to remixing video.

Scribble then coordinates the work, from the initial brief through to media-ready assets, and once the work is produced, it’s editable inside Pencil’s own suite. It also works within each brand’s own rules, pulling from Pencil’s Brand Library and any custom agents a team has already built. Each individual customer’s data is stored in isolation and never used to train models without their consent.

We briefed it on a dataset of more than 500,000 marketing briefs, giving it a deep understanding of how real marketing work is structured, from the initial brief through to delivery. Scribble also works from a single workspace, remembering brand and project context across jobs rather than starting fresh each time.

We designed it this way so that it fulfils the tasks which traditionally took marketers away from higher-value work. Resizes, adaptations, copy swaps, catalogue work where the answer’s already known? Hand it to Scribble. Approve the plan. Move on.

For jobs like variation and localisation, where the detail matters, the process can be opened in our ‘Workflows’ environment. This is a full canvas view of every step, so you can edit the logic and not just the output. Specificity and nuance, built in by a person.

All of this is still supported by the central Pencil ethos that AI should be a tool – another paint in the palette. That’s why the platform has always featured our Editor, which allows marketers to get hand on and edit directly.

Got a feeling that you can’t put into a prompt? Do it yourself and let AI do the rest. We know that sometimes the craft just can’t be replaced.

We want our platform to suit how marketers actually work. So go check out Scribble, brief it, and let us know what you think.