Articles on AI in agencies: governance, shadow AI, data leakage, contracts, margins, hiring and what an AI-native agency looks like.
Someone in Boston asked how to tell an agency that really operates differently with AI from one that mostly posts about it. The answer: look at what they've built. One agency turned itself around in three months.
Icons that label AI content clearly and give people a way to identify human content. They are silly, they involve a really bad pun, and you are welcome to use them freely.
From a coffee app built on a rainy Saturday to Scale at Speed AI, distilled from the book, a 160,000-word course and terabytes of workshop video.
His agency got 35 per cent faster with AI and clients asked for lower prices. He repriced around outcomes instead. Margins went from 22 to 34 per cent.
An agency lost a pitch to a rival offering half the timeline for the same scope. The rival had rebuilt around AI. The founder had not known the gap existed.
AI automated the research and first drafts that used to teach juniors how to think. A creative director rebuilt junior roles around judgment instead of output.
AI made the team 40 per cent faster, so they said yes to everything and margins dropped eleven points. Faster is only more profitable if you take back the time.
Asked how she knew AI was working, a founder said she could feel it. Eight weeks of before-and-after tracking on three workflows turned that into evidence.
One founder rebuilt everything around AI: forty-two people to twenty-eight, same revenue, margins roughly doubled. AI as infrastructure rather than a tool.
A new Head of AI spent three months on training sessions nobody used. Sitting with teams and fixing what took too long that week got them coming to him instead.
A client sent an AI addendum and two weeks to sign it. A procurement exercise, not a confrontation, and it forced the governance work that was overdue anyway.
Eleven people, four AI tools, three teams, and nobody knew where client data went. Regulated-client data sat in a free-tier tool. Fixing it took two weeks.
She built a serious AI capability and pitched it as efficiency. Clients wanted to know what AI meant for their own business. The outward-facing answer wins.
Three agency AI rollouts quietly failed as people drifted back to old habits. The problem was ownership, not resistance. People implement what they design.
Founders say their agency is at Level 2 or 3 on AI maturity. Ask about a legally reviewed policy, contract cover and data flows, and the answer is not yet.
An eight-year financial services client was lost because a strategist used free ChatGPT under a 2019 NDA. Nobody had told her not to. No policy existed.
She thought her agency was at Governed on the AI maturity model. No written policy, no data map, 2022 contracts. Governed is where you can safely accelerate.
If you’re serious about building significant value, preparing for an exit, or executing a roll-up strategy, get in touch below. I’ll respond personally.
