Webinar recording "AI Salon: implementing AI so it moves the numbers", IT-Agency (Запись вебинара «AI Salon: внедряем ИИ так, чтобы он влиял на цифры» IT-Agency)
B · Useful, limited Anton Rozhkov, head of internet marketing at the Russian agency IT-Agency, gives a candid first-hand account of an internal agent-building programme with budgets, participation and before-and-after times, all self-reported and unaudited.
Summary based on the full transcript·Original: about 60 minutes to watch
In short
A one-hour Russian webinar (2 November 2026) from the performance-marketing agency IT-Agency, about 130-150 people. A first attempt, a shared Markdown workspace of meeting transcripts, chats and media plans for people and agents, was used by only a couple of staff. What worked was one "free Thursday" a month, when seniors were released from client work to build their own automations with Claude Code, Cowork and Codex. About 90% of the results fixed long-standing irritants rather than planned use cases. The agency now hires fewer juniors and says it has no answer for that.
Key numbers
- 34 participants, 20 builds, 29 solutionsoutput of three monthly "free Thursdays" for senior staff
- 200,000 RUBstarting budget for the first three sessions, mostly $20 subscriptions
- 600-800k RUB a monthcurrent spend on agent subscriptions, plus about 300,000 RUB a month on tokens for client-side agents
- 17,000 RUB to 484 RUBclient cost of keyword clustering for 22 pages, junior work (8 hours) vs the OpenRouter pipeline
- 4 hours to 15 minutesmonthly allocation of Yandex ad revenue by client and department, before vs after a script
As reported by the source.
Russian·Video·opens youtube.com
What it reports
- First session drew 15-17 of 130-150 staff. Five allowed task types: speed up own work, help a client, improve marketing, prototype a new service, fix a long-standing irritant.
- Three sessions: 34 unique participants, 20 builds, 29 solutions. The captions say "8%" of solutions are still in use; the speaker's following remarks suggest a higher share, so the figure is uncertain.
- About 30 people a day add files to the shared Git workspace.
- Monthly client reports took 1.5-2 hours each; scripts built in 2-3 hours now produce them in 10 minutes. The agent caught his own VAT error (old 20% rate vs the new 22%).
- Yandex revenue allocation: 4 hours a month to 15 minutes, with no errors since (self-reported).
- An employee with no agent experience built a Cowork skill in one day that collects journalist requests into Google Sheets, saving 3-4 hours a week.
- A Codex agent learned the speaker's media-plan checks and now reviews all units' files weekly.
- Spend: 200,000 RUB for the first three sessions, now 600-800k RUB a month on subscriptions and about 300,000 RUB a month on client-side tokens. Claimed overall payback "three to four times".
- Data handling: mainly US models; the client's own model for banks; a separate restricted GitLab for strict-NDA work; personal data avoided and IDs pseudonymised.
- Speaker's estimate: self-hosting Qwen costs about $1,000 a month in server rent at best, while US subscriptions are heavily subsidised.
How they got it
A narrated internal case with screen demos, given by the person who ran the programme. Times and costs are his own measurements or estimates.
Limits
- All figures are self-reported by the agency; payback multiples are not broken down.
- Source is auto-captions; some numbers (notably the "8%" share still in use) may be garbled.
- The subsidy estimate is opinion; the session ends with event and community promotion.
Why it matters for companies
The failed first attempt is the useful lesson: a well-stocked shared knowledge base did not get used until people had protected time and a named person to ask for help. Letting staff choose their own irritants produced most of the value, which argues for bottom-up build time over a central use-case list. Two cost lines to plan for: subscriptions that grow from a pilot budget to a standing monthly bill, and a shrinking pool of junior work, which affects how future seniors are trained.
Key passages in translation
Russian original
Дело в том, что это невозможно повторить, если у вас нету человека, который, собственно, готов это всё прямо...
The thing is, this cannot be repeated if you do not have a person who is actually ready to [run] all of it...
Russian original
8 часов у джуниоров... для джуниора счёт для клиента будет в районе 17.000 руб. Сейчас у нас это обходится 484 рубля.
Eight hours for juniors... the client bill for a junior would be about 17,000 roubles. Now it costs us 484 roubles.
Russian original
Раньше если бы нанимали их очень много, сейчас это реже стало, потому просто потому что работы стало гораздо меньше именно для джуниоров. То есть это проблема, на самом деле, мы не знаем, как её решать.
Before, we would hire a lot of them; now it happens less often, simply because there is much less work for juniors. It is a problem, honestly, and we do not know how to solve it.
Summary based on the full transcript. Read the original for the full argument and data.Watch the original on youtube.com