Experimentation evolves into a structured approach

For Adrienn Major's post-production agency POD LDN, AI adoption began as a controlled experiment. Today it has now become central to POD’s identity and client offering. They've transformed both their internal team structure and recruitment methods to build AI capabilities that bridge creative and technical expertise.

“We started two years ago with a very small team,” explains Adrienn. “We had a couple of producers and a couple of artists starting to play with AI back then, supported by our IT team.”

What began as experimentation has evolved into a structured approach to AI integration, revealing important insights about the skills needed in today's content production landscape.

A dual approach to upskilling

The agency has committed to transforming its existing talent alongside recruiting new specialists. Their retraining effort spans both technical and creative roles.

When asked about POD’s approach to training, Adrienn describes a blend of formal and informal learning, as well as internal and external training. Equally important has been fostering self-motivation. “A lot of our team have been self-starters,” she notes. This combination of structured support and solo exploration has accelerated their capability building.

We're retraining our internal artists to be more AI native.

Creating space for experimentation

Rather than immediately pushing for client deliverables, the agency made a strategic investment in experimentation. For some time, the dedicated team didn't do any client work, focusing instead on testing and exploring AI capabilities.

This protected space allowed the team to learn without pressure, though market demand soon followed.

The prompt engineering paradox

When it comes to skills, the agency has witnessed the emergence of entirely new roles. “Prompt engineering is a big one,” Adrienn explains. She emphasises the importance of understanding AI's current limitations: “We need people who understand how to translate things to AI while understanding the limitations of AI,” she explains. “That's a really crucial skill. For example, sport doesn't really translate through AI because it can't calculate certain things.”

Our AI film competition let us judge candidates purely on output, not background.

Revolutionary recruitment:
The AI film competition

The agency has pioneered innovative approaches to recruitment. When faced with hiring specialised AI talent, rather than relying on traditional methods, POD organised a competition in collaboration with its sister company.

“How do you recruit for AI skills? How do you judge that? For our field, it made sense to do an AI film competition. There were lots of really good applicants, and we could hire them straight away or have them in our pool.”

The approach provided an unexpectedly fair evaluation method. “It's very unbiased because you can’t judge them based on their age, their gender. Literally, you're judging them based on the output.”

AI-powered recruitment processes

Beyond hiring AI talent specifically, Adrienn has transformed how POD evaluates all candidates by using AI to streamline recruitment. 

I trained a GPT to analyse CVs when my HR team sends applications. Who's going to read hundreds of CVs?

The system provides more than just filtering. “It really helps to shortlist and prepare questions against the role,” she continues. “You can take it to the next level and upload the transcript of the interview and get GPT to analyse that as well. It's just an extra tool in recruitment. I think that's really useful.”

The unexpected IT advantage

A surprising competitive advantage has emerged from their IT department. “I feel like very often we miss the IT team out,” Adrienn notes, “and they are absolutely crucial when we are talking about AI infrastructure, how different teams work together. You need people that can build APIs, help systems speak to each other.”

Their success has been driven by technical curiosity. “Our IT team wants to build things, they want to test things.” The Head of AI has focused on sophisticated challenges like “understanding how you can use AI engines without compromising client data, and how you can build offline processing in-house.”

The agency now expects basic AI literacy from everyone. “Whatever skill we are hiring for now, some level of AI literacy is a requirement,”Adrienn explains.

Even client services should know how to use ChatGPT, they should know how to use Gemini, they should know how to use a notetaker.

As AI continues to transform content production, POD LDN demonstrates how embracing both technical exploration and reimagined recruitment can position companies at the forefront of industry change.

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