AI-Enhanced Agencies: Unveiling the Essential Tools by Marie Robin (Fleet Forward)

With AI, it’s very easy to accumulate subscriptions. A tool tested for a pitch, another recommended by a creative, a third taken for a feature that the first one added in the meantime… And at the end of the quarter, no one knows anymore who is paying for what, or why. Not to mention the underused features.

At Fleet Forward, as part of our AI transformation consulting for communication agencies ranging from 10 to 200 people, we try to be tool agnostic, but we have a mental checklist of those that seem indispensable for working well with AI agents.

My criterion for keeping a tool is simple: either it feeds the agency’s memory, or an AI agent can connect to it to act in place of someone who has better things to do. Here is the top 10!

1. Claude, ChatGPT, Dust: The Agency’s AI Suite

Here, I provide three options because the right choice depends on the agency. Claude Team or ChatGPT, depending on use, accompanied by the office suite already in place.

Dust is a good option when a client requests prioritizing a French editor, as it allows users to switch between models and offers interesting native options to frame the use by each team, and to circulate good information from one team to another.

What matters is having a single shared AI suite that people actually use rather than ten unsecured personal accounts, with projects by client, instructions by business expertise, and connectors to other tools on this list.

Without the context specific to your agency, the best suite on the market will produce generic answers: constantly chasing the latest model is counterproductive.

2. Notion: Where the Agency Stores What It Knows

To-dos, project information, monitoring bases, list of service providers… Notion serves as the team’s knowledge management tool and has a decisive advantage in 2026: its databases are consulted and updated directly from ChatGPT or Claude.

It’s the first level of what we call at Fleet Forward, the ‘Intelligence Factory,’ the living memory of the agency.

Discover Notion

3. Fireflies: Meetings That Leave a Mark

A client brief, feedback on a recommendation, a decision taken in a team meeting: in an agency, the essentials are spoken and lost within the week. Fireflies records and transcribes meetings, and these transcriptions become the material that the AI suite can later query (e.g., “What did the client say about the budget in September?”). They have cool AI functions and just unveiled a voice dictation option outside of meetings: goodbye Wispr Flow!

Learn more about Fireflies

4. Slack: Because WhatsApp Is a Puzzle!

Many agencies still manage their projects in WhatsApp groups alongside the chat where they gossip about their boss or talk with their friends! Information then remains on personal phones, and it’s tricky to connect an AI (not impossible, just hard to accept for all employees who have a say).

Slack, with a channel per client or project, easily connects to the AI suite and automations. A meeting report can arrive by itself, an alert to check a certain render too.

Discover Slack

5. Folk: The CRM for Tracking Prospecting Efforts

For new business, I use Folk: a lightweight, pleasant CRM that suits a small sales team and tracking follow-ups well. The Chrome extension is handy for feeding it from LinkedIn, and it allows sending messages to a contact list without using an external tool. Its API remains limited, but they have a brand new MCP.

Agencies looking to go further in this area can look at HubSpot or Attio for comparison. A small automation, like “after each prospecting meeting, update my CRM with what was said during the call,” becomes easy if a transcription tool was present!

Learn more about Folk

6. Make: Simple Automations

A filled form that creates a file in Notion and alerts the team in Slack: this kind of scenario is set up in Make without a developer. Since it can be connected to Claude, it’s even the AI that prepares much of the scenario. Zapier does the same job if you’re already there.

Discover Make

7. Tally: Collecting Context and Feedback

AI agents need context, and that context is in people’s heads. Tally helps me collect it neatly, and it is GDPR compliant: I use it to obtain feedback after a project or training, conduct a light diagnosis within a team at a client’s, get their employees talking… Simple, quick to format, and the responses insert wherever you want thanks to a Make automation.

Learn more about Tally

8. Brevo: The Agency’s Newsletter

Brevo manages the agency’s newsletter, and its free offer is enough to get started well. I keep it because an agency that regularly shares its beliefs and news works its presence in the mind and arranges opportunities for contact. It can also be used to automate sending emails following the download of a resource, participation in a webinar…

Discover Brevo

9. Magnific: The Creative Hub

You might opt for a single creative subscription rather than five. Magnific provides access to multiple models and brings together the features a studio needs: image generation, video and sound production, upscaling, inpainting, reference images, style training, moodboard, nodal workflows. I also keep it for its terms of use, a point too many teams look at after the fact.

Some useful functions are missing, like the ability to track expenses in tokens by client project.

Beware, while the tool offers multiple features, it does not replace the eye of an art director nor a good brief. And for brands looking to equip themselves: the best result comes when you produce with your agency, on shared brand rules.

Learn more about Magnific

10. Canva or Figma: Producing to the Charter

Once templates are set to the charter, everyone can adapt without revisiting the studio: Canva for teams that are not designers, Figma when the studio wants to keep control over the system.

The Canva MCP is not perfect, editing documents from Claude or ChatGPT is still cumbersome at this stage.

I know we said only 10 tools, but if a brand is reading this, also look at what Pletor offers: their ready-to-use templates and workflows that will connect to external data (e.g., Meta Ads) will be useful for your simple variations that require volume!

The Subscription I Don’t Pay For

I don’t have a dedicated editing application, only doing simple edits. Cutting, assembling, subtitling a short video: Claude and ChatGPT now handle it properly. I keep a human editor for anything requiring rhythm and taste.

And I use my Tella subscription to produce small explanatory videos with screen sharing (in content or to collaborate asynchronously), their MCP is handy.

I also don’t have a subscription for generating AI slides: by properly briefing Claude or ChatGPT, possibly with Figma if you have a specific template to follow, you have everything you need!

Key Takeaways

Ten tools is already a lot, and I had a hard time sticking to it. Those I kept have one thing in common: each feeds or uses what the agency knows about its clients, its projects, and its way of working.

As long as this knowledge isn’t written down somewhere, subscriptions pile up and the results remain mediocre.

The day it is structured, your tools find their place in your Agency OS: a suite of business agents that read and write in your tools and communicate among themselves. Always keep in the loop a demanding human, capable of validating or challenging a direction. Their feedback feeds your ‘Intelligence Factory,’ the living memory of the agency, unique and uncopyable.