The challenge: breaking the linear relationship between headcount and agency growth

The company wanted a better way to keep pace with ever-expanding client needs without continuously hiring more strategists. 

"The vision that I have for my operations teams—which span eight teams across a publisher tech stack and a buy-side tech stack—is to scale without adding headcount," said Anne Thiel, Senior Director of Advertising and Revenue Operations at Cox Automotive. "I know that's a big dream. But using agentic AI is going to allow us to have even more complex products without adding headcount."

The solution: integrating agentic capabilities across the advertising workflow

The Cox Automotive leadership team did not simply want a tool that executed work faster or cut labor costs. Instead, their north star was to completely decouple operational growth from headcount by tech-enabling their human workforce. 

"Advertising won’t just be banners and buttons anymore. We need people to be able to do different types of work so that we can meet the demand of what our OEMs and our dealers want,” said Thiel. “We don’t want them doing work that they’re too smart for.”

Their search led them to Fluency’s Digital Advertising Operating System (DAOS) to help them automate complex task execution across multiple channels and functions. The system’s unique two-layer architecture combines a predictable execution core with intelligent agentic layers to safely multiply human impact at scale. 

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Through their partnership with Fluency, Cox Automotive has scaled its operational footprint to support over $200 million in active ad spend annually. It also enabled the team to sync proprietary data into one system so they could use real-world market signals for autonomous hyper-local ad targeting. 

These four agentic workflows removed the most tedious execution tasks for Cox Automotive’s teams, freeing them to focus on high-impact work:  

1. Autonomous, localized campaign setup and optimizations via Blueprints

Before using Fluency, Cox Automotive strategists meticulously built and cloned campaigns. But the leadership team understood that human bandwidth is a finite resource: if these repetitive setups could be automated, strategists would have more time to drive high-impact strategies.

With Fluency, they codified their unique operational strategies into just 110 foundational campaign templates called Fluency Blueprints. Blueprints enable complex multi-channel architectures to be launched in bulk rather than built one by one, dramatically accelerating speed to market. 

These agentic automation workflows instantly execute and optimize adjustments across major ad networks based on real-world data signals, such as localized market conditions and unique client data feeds (e.g., live inventory fluctuations, updated pricing on specific VINs). As a result, lean ad teams can efficiently manage vastly larger budgets and campaign volumes on an ongoing basis. 

“We have had a ton of success in scaling and launching new campaigns through Fluency Blueprints,” said Thiel. “Blueprints set up anything that's repetitive, like selecting an audience or selecting creative. With Blueprints, we eliminated all of those repetitive tasks, and the team can launch many more campaigns than we could have in the past.”

Fluency’s deterministic rules engine guarantees that every ad is brand-compliant, accurate, and deeply relevant to individual auto shoppers. This gives Cox Automotive’s strategists confidence that each agentic workflow is making on-strategy changes without constantly intervening. 

“When a single strategist is setting 50 campaigns to launch one by one, you’re going to see some form of human error,” said Thiel. “Being able to use Fluency Blueprints, where the campaign structure is set, has cut down on errors we saw previously.”

Ultimately, Fluency’s automated systems handle ongoing, real-time optimizations at a speed and scale that would be physically impossible for any human team to match.

2. Automated client report builds and distribution

At a rate of 40 minutes per report, it took days to build performance reports for hundreds of clients every month. Report standardization was also a struggle. 

“Before Fluency, each strategist created their own reporting deck,” said Thiel. “Each one would have a different tone to it and look a little bit different. With Fluency, we’ve automated the creation and shipping of a deck that goes out to all dealerships.”

The team uses Muse, Fluency’s integrated AI, to fully automate monthly performance report builds and distribution. Best of all, every report automatically incorporates specific client branding elements and emphasizes the client’s most critical KPIs.

3. Context-aware strategy and media planning orchestration

To scale their complex campaigns without losing strategic depth, Cox Automotive leverages Fluency’s CoLab environment to streamline the setup, management, launch, and heavy lifting of initial media planning. 

Previously, executing regional media plans was a tedious, multi-step process. Strategists had to perform four separate rounds of manual data entry and QA before campaigns or updates could go live. CoLab bridges the gap between end advertisers and strategists so media planning needs only a swift, single QA round.

Cox Automotive’s regional partners upload media plans directly into CoLab. This data is fed straight to the database, guaranteeing compliance with both OEM and dealership guidelines. From there, one of Cox Automotive’s strategists performs a single QA check, clicks approve, and launches the on-brand campaign. The entire process is days faster than the previous manual workflow.

Because CoLab runs within Fluency’s wider system, the team can use Muse (Fluency’s AI) to automatically collect, analyze, and compile the critical business information and logic required to inform successful ad strategies for each client. 

By automating data mapping and context gathering, Fluency's agentic solutions remove administrative friction so human operators can become true strategic partners to their clients.

4. Hands-off budgeting and pacing workflows

Cox Automotive also completely automated multichannel budgeting workflows for thousands of dealer campaigns. Fluency’s autonomous pacing solutions eliminated costly overspends and campaign errors, all while letting the team step back from daily spend management.

“We don't have to cap out at a certain number of dealers because we know that our budgets and our pacing are automated within the platform for us,” said Thiel. 

Fluency’s agentic budgeting workflows continuously monitor daily caps, adjust daily distributions to adhere to strict overspend limits without underspending, and keep budgets on track for every account. Best of all, it means their human workforce isn’t babysitting budgets for every client as month-end approaches. 

The results: 59,000+ campaigns orchestrated agentically, faster service, and decoupling operational scale from headcount

By replacing manual cross-platform configurations with an intelligent agentic operating system, Cox Automotive achieved four outcomes that compound on each other: their advertising performs better, their team delivers more sophisticated client strategy, their service quality has measurably improved, and the business can scale revenue without scaling headcount.

1. Localized campaign management at scale

Over the course of one year, Fluency's agentic workflows helped Cox Automotive's team support more than 59,000 localized automotive campaigns comprising 1.2 million distinct ads and execute 357 million updates via Fluency Blueprints. Agentic execution enabled them to achieve a level of speed, scale, and precision that would be impossible with manual effort alone.

The scale of that execution would otherwise require a proportionally larger team. Instead, Fluency absorbs the operational load entirely. Cox Automotive's strategists remain readily available for the bespoke, high-judgment client work that actually drives growth. 

2. Seamless, customized reporting for thousands of clients 

Cox Automotive’s sophisticated client reports are now generated agentically and automatically delivered to dealerships 66% faster than before. Every standardized report includes AI analyses, real-world outputs and recommendations, and is customized with each dealer’s brand guidelines and KPIs.

“Every report goes out at the same time,” said Thiel. “Each one is fully generated within Fluency and uses Muse, Fluency’s AI agent, to bring valuable insights to the forefront.”

Using Fluency's agentic reporting workflows, each multi-channel performance report now takes 15 minutes to build, not 40. Across hundreds of clients every month, that's 83 working days of reporting labor returned to the team. Plus, clients receive faster, more sophisticated analysis that strengthens retention and deepens trust.

3. Instantly-generated, compliant ad strategies built on deep market context

Client plans feed directly into Fluency via custom forms, where agentic workflows automatically apply Cox Automotive’s strategic guardrails. This democratizes expert media planning across the organization, enabling teams to deploy localized, multichannel campaigns instantly.

"Fluency acts like a media planner, giving our sales team talking points for dealership conversations so they sound like trained digital strategists," Thiel notes. "The agent tells them specifically where they're advertising, what their creative looks like, and what incrementality they would get."

This capability directly supports upsell conversations, giving account teams the data-backed confidence to recommend budget increases and expanded campaign strategies.

4. Automated budget allocation and agentic upsell proposals drive revenue growth

Cox Automotive has virtually eliminated overspend and underspend after using Fluency’s automated budgeting tools for years. Plus, they can dynamically funnel every ad dollar toward the most performant strategies—all at scale.

Now, they’re piloting agentic workflows to present robust budget proposals to clients. Account teams use Fluency’s AI to develop meaningful upsell opportunities—catered to each client’s goals and current strategies—and can immediately push any approved budget updates live.

“Fluency helps us understand exactly what a budget increase or decrease would do for any given dealer within Fluency,” said Thiel. “Ideally, our dealer clients will spend more money with us because we’ll drive more people to their dealerships.” 

For Cox Automotive, this is the direct line between agentic execution and top-line growth.

The future: continuously building an “agentic-smart” advertising operation

Looking ahead, the team is focusing on scaling their agentic capabilities through their Fluency partnership. Right now, they’re looking to:

• Replace manual campaign workflows with agent-to-agent execution across thousands of dealer locations
• Pilot agent-to-agent execution across defined campaign types
• Build governance infrastructure and agent decision boundaries
• Evolve team roles toward agent design and orchestration ownership
• Scale activation across the full Dealer.com dealer base

Thiel sees agentic automation as more than a way to cut execution costs, improve client performance, and improve profitability. Agentic solutions also play a critical role in helping her team “be the best of the best.”

“My vision is for our team to be leaders in this industry,” she continued. “I want our workforce to be agentic-smart, constantly learning new technology and new skills.”

By letting software handle the execution button-pushing, the team’s strategists are now in more elevated roles. Thiel believes that having the team “stretch into new roles” is critical to both Cox’s growth strategy and the career paths of the team members.

“We never could have grown and scaled like we are now without Fluency,” confirms Thiel. “Fluency’s technology is going to take us to the next level in terms of agentic support.”