By Bryan Johnson, IT Director, 星空传媒

Whenever you start a new initiative, few things feel worse than having to guess your return on investment (ROI). Planning, designing and launching a program can be costly, which makes it essential to have key performance indicators (KPIs) in place before you go live. That advice goes double when it comes to AI pilot programs. As an emerging technology, it can be difficult with AI to know what you should even be tracking. We鈥檒l cover both topics in this blog. That way, when you鈥檙e ready to launch your program, you can feel confident that it has been well worth the effort.

Before you define your metrics, define your program

Before you define your metrics, ensure your AI pilot program itself is on solid ground. Begin by running it through the SMART goal test. Is it Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound? If not, assessing ROI will be tough if not impossible. A strong AI pilot must:  

• Improve a specific workflow
• Address the needs of a specific business unit
• Align with your larger business objectives
• Improve upon a defined baseline
• Have a definite start and end date
• Stand up to measurement and scrutiny

If you can鈥檛 honestly check these boxes, head back to the drawing board. If you can, then you鈥檙e ready to measure what matters and decide if your AI pilot has paid off.  

Quality over quantity

Once you are confident in your program鈥檚 fundamentals, the most important thing is to resist overmeasuring. If you try to track a million metrics, you can quickly lose the plot. A far superior approach is to adopt the old adage of quality over quantity鈥攖hat is, track only what is essential to determine whether your program improved a workflow without adding new risks.

Score your program with a three-prong approach

The best way to do this is to put together a simple scorecard that looks at three things:

1. What were the outcomes?
   These are the top results related to your program鈥檚 goal, which could be if the program:
   1. Improved turnaround times
   1. Increased closed files per person per week
   1. Reduced file reworks or changes

• What were the risks?
  It is just as important to score for drawbacks, as any good title agent knows errors. Examine any of the following if they are relevant to your overarching goal:
  • Did the program increase error rates?
  • How often did issues escalate?
  • How many fixes were needed? 聽
    
    
• What was the adoption rate? 聽
  Finally, look at how widely folks inside your organization adopted the program and its associated AI tools. You don鈥檛 want to skip this step. Even the best AI program in the world will fail long-term if people resist using it. Review:
  • Weekly active users
  • Task completions
  • Edit rates, that is, how often did the AI tool trigger human intervention

Once again, you don鈥檛 need to tackle every one of the sub-bullets I have included here. The point is simply to put your AI program through these three main criteria. Once you do, you鈥檒l have a strong view of whether it is a net positive or net negative for your organization.

Onward to AI success!

In a recent article, ALTA鈥檚 CEO wrote that 鈥渕ore than 90% of title and escrow professionals have adopted generative AI in at least one form.鈥�[i] This is a stunning statistic that suggests where the industry is headed. But adoption alone does not tell us anything particularly useful about the ROI of an AI pilot. Getting a clearer picture of AI鈥檚 value within your agency requires a more holistic view. Pair your AI tool with clear goals and a definite baseline, and deploy a simple scorecard to track outcomes, risks, and adoption rates. That鈥檚 the ticket for separating real business wins from white noise. And once you do that, AI becomes more than a shiny new tool. It turns into a driver of sustained success.

[i]

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The great American writer Ernest Hemingway once penned in The Sun Also Rises that 鈥淭hings change gradually, then suddenly.鈥� Although he wrote these words around 100 years ago, they have a startling applicability to the world of 2025. Although technological development always seems to be moving forward, the last few years have brought about an explosion of unprecedented development. Just take AI and automation. Once confined to the realm of science fiction, AI is now firmly entrenched as a normal part of everyday workflows.

Perhaps nowhere is it easier to see the influence of these emerging technologies than in the world of marketing. AI programs have made it much easier to do the work of creative professionals. While this has been a massive win for many businesses鈥� productivity and profitability, it is not without its drawbacks either. Lack of nuance and context. Brand distortions. Quality control problems. And customer fatigue. These are all risks a business takes when relying exclusively on AI for public-facing communication.

A far better approach is one where a business pairs human authenticity, empathy and judgement with AI鈥檚 powerful ability to generate massive amounts of content quickly. That way, companies such as title agencies can reap both quantitative and qualitative benefits in their marketing. Let鈥檚 go a little deeper to identify these opportunities for balancing human authenticity with AI-powered automation.

Building out the body of a writing piece

Whenever you are gearing up to put together a piece of marketing collateral and wonder how you should delineate the work between human and AI, think of the task like building a human body. AI is really good at providing the bones of a marketing asset. It can generate outlines and ideas for your writing like nobody鈥檚 business. Offloading this work to AI can save valuable time, especially since brainstorming and curating content are often time-intensive. Once the skeleton is in place, human marketers can step in to flesh out the material, imbuing the piece with emotion, humor and heart鈥攁ll essential to connecting with readers and bringing your marketing to life.

Establishing nuance and context

For as fast and efficient as AI is at generating creative material, it is still pretty crude when it is trying to establish the nuance and context of a piece all on its own. When humans and AI work together on these qualities of a marketing project, however, much more engaging storytelling becomes possible. Think of this as the difference between a Wikipedia article on a historical topic and a scholarly work of popular history from one of the genre鈥檚 masters like Simon Schama or Doris Kearns Goodwin. While the former is good for establishing the overarching frame of a subject and its associated dates and events, the latter fashions such data into a larger narrative that contains meaning, texture and resonance. By combining AI鈥檚 speed and efficiency with the depth of human insight, you can create content that not only informs but also resonates and engages your audience on a deeper level.

Protecting your brand image

Last but certainly not least, balancing human and AI inputs is of paramount importance whenever you are talking about your brand within a writing piece. An AI can do a great job of summarizing your service offerings at blazing speed and communicating publicly available details like when and where your business was formed. But it can鈥檛 capture the emotional roots of your brand鈥攐r the personal stories of how your offerings have made a difference in people鈥檚 lives. Therefore, you must weave together the talents of both AI and human capital if you want to speak about your business in a way that captures both its material and immaterial brand pillars.

Embracing the best of both worlds

In the epigraph of A Sun Also Rises, Hemingway quoted his mentor Gertrude Stein saying that 鈥淵ou are all a lost generation.鈥� This is another quote that drills down on the disorientating experience of existing during a period of rapid change. All of us are living through a similar period now, particularly given the rise of AI. But just because the old rules have changed doesn鈥檛 mean success is out of reach. It just necessitates a strategic approach. When it comes to marketing your agency, that means finding effective ways to combine the best of both human and artificial intelligence. By embracing both, you can execute your marketing goals without losing the human touch that鈥檚 essential to building trust.

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