Melbourne creative agency Kill Boring Dead has offered to pay employees their full salary for two years if they can successfully automate themselves out of a job through the use of artificial intelligence.
The offer, open to the agency’s entire workforce, requires employees to demonstrate that AI can genuinely perform their entire role before they can claim two years of paid leave.
The challenge has prompted a flood of suggestions, with co-founder and CEO Marcus Willis claiming he received more ideas for AI adoption in the first four days than in the previous year.
The influx of ideas has also led the agency to pause new business until the end of the year to focus on developing its own AI-powered software.
Speaking to Mumbrella, Willis said the experiment had exposed an unexpected problem with how productivity gains were being shared across the agency.
“What I learned was that people are already using AI, they just weren’t telling me about it,” Willis said.
“The incentive to make yourself more productive just kind of meant you probably got to work less. So there was no information sharing.”
One of the first ideas came from the agency’s traffic manager, who developed a predictive tool to forecast staff capacity and utilisation against prospective projects.
While no employee has yet successfully automated their entire role and claimed the two-year payout, Willis confirmed he intended to honour the offer if the traffic manager succeeded.
The tool convinced Willis to invest further in developing proprietary software, including custom project management systems.
The experience has also exposed the extent of administrative work and duplicated processes within the agency, leading Willis to reconsider how employees spend their time.
“I’ve just become super allergic to doing anything manual, to do anything double handling,” he said.
“Now that we look across the whole business, we do a sickening amount of admin.”
Willis said the initiative was ultimately about freeing staff from administrative work and repetitive tasks, allowing them to spend more time developing creative ideas and producing work for clients.
“If we’re a creative agency, we should be spending as close to 100% of our time as possible thinking of silly creative ideas. We’re trying to eliminate the administrative work and distractions so we can focus on what clients actually notice – the quality of our work,” he said.
One example is a tool developed by the agency that combines live campaign performance data with historical client feedback to guide the creative process.
The system can flag concepts that conflict with a client’s previous instructions, allowing creatives to identify potential problems before presenting their work.
Willis said the experiment had also reinforced the importance of psychological safety, arguing that employees needed to feel secure before suggesting ideas that could threaten their jobs.
“If I’m like, ‘Hey, go ahead, we’re going to use AI, and also it might replace you’ – why the heck would anyone ever want it? Why would they be incentivised to do that?” he said.
“So now just like creating psychological safety, I’ve also created financial safety.”
Willis said the agency was now testing some new AI ideas on the same day they were suggested.
However, the influx of ideas has also created problems, with Willis admitting the agency now has “about 400% more dashboards” than it needs.
Willis said the challenge was now narrowing the proposals to a handful of projects that could be completed and integrated into the agency’s operations.
“There’s a lot of things floating around, which is awesome, but I’m trying not to let that distract everyone, which I do think is a potential downfall,” he said.
Willis argued the experiment had given KBD a competitive advantage over larger agency groups.
“As a founder-led business who isn’t in holding company hell, it means that I can just deploy things quickly,” he said.
“This for me is like, ‘Oh cool, this is the number one thing that my agency competitors named after dead people can’t do.’”