At a time when the communications industry is increasingly looking for ways to integrate artificial intelligence into everyday processes without losing its creative focus, the Nordic group NoA – The North Alliance has decided to take a step further. After a successful pilot project at the Swedish agency NoA | Åkestam Holst, the group has signed a broader partnership with the AI platform Multiply.co, which will now be used by agencies across the Nordic region.
The collaboration includes several agencies within the network, among them NoA | Åkestam Holst in Sweden, NoA | &Co. in Denmark, NoA | Bob the Robot in Finland and NoA | Anorak in Norway. The goal is to introduce a shared platform that can support processes across insights, strategy, planning and new business development, particularly in situations where projects run across multiple agencies within the group.
The platform Multiply.co was developed with the aim of helping creative teams reach insights, ideas and strategic solutions faster, especially in the time-pressured environment typical of agency work. The company was founded in 2020 by tech entrepreneurs Rasmus Adler Wahlberg, Oskar Lissheim Boethius and Henrik Eneroth, focusing on building AI tools that support collaborative work among creative teams.
The first test of the platform within the NoA network took place at NoA | Åkestam Holst, where it was used in market insights, strategic planning and new business development. According to Erik Årnell, CEO of NoA | Åkestam Holst, the experience demonstrated how technology can help teams spend less time on operational tasks and more on creative work.
“One of the most important roles of a creative agency is helping great talent do more of what they do best. Thanks to new technology, we can now reduce time spent on operations and free up time for creativity. With Multiply, our goal is to give our team the gift of time – so they can focus on high-impact creative work that delivers greater value for our clients.”
The results of that pilot project ultimately led to the expansion of the partnership across the entire group.
Mikael Jørgensen, Group CEO of NoA, noted that the group already uses a range of AI tools, but that for a complex network such as NoA, it is particularly important to have a platform that enables better coordination between agencies.
“We’re using a range of AI tools today, and we’re developing our own too, because we want to remain at the forefront as our industry shifts. Multiply helps us bring structure to collaboration across NoA – streamlining workflows, improving the flow between agencies, and creating a shared way of working when client business runs across multiple companies. That gives our teams more time and headspace to focus on the work that creates real impact for our clients.”
From the Multiply side, the partnership with the Nordic group is seen as an example of how AI can support the collective intelligence of creative teams rather than just individual productivity.
As Rasmus Adler Wahlberg, Co-founder and CEO of Multiply.co, points out, the real potential of artificial intelligence in the creative industry is not in giving every individual their own AI assistant, but in enabling teams to collaborate more effectively.
“We are beyond excited to work with all the amazing creative talent at the NoA group to help them do even better work for their clients. In our opinion, the real potential of AI is not everyone getting an assistant, but AI helping us work together better at scale. Together with the NoA leadership, we are looking forward to unlocking the full collective intelligence of their agencies across the Nordics.”
The expanded partnership comes at a time when more and more creative networks are trying to integrate AI into strategy and idea development, while also finding the right balance between automation and the creative process. In that context, initiatives like this show how AI in agency environments is increasingly becoming a tool for collaboration and workflow organisation, rather than just content generation.
