Client Value

A founder I work with spent most of last year building a serious AI capability inside her agency. Better briefing processes, AI-assisted research and drafts, workflow automation that genuinely worked. The team was good at it and the margins had improved noticeably.

When she took it to clients, it mostly didn't land.

It took her a while to work out why. The pitch had been built around efficiency, she was leaner, faster, more cost-effective. All true. But her clients weren't particularly worried about her efficiency. They were worried about what AI was doing to their own businesses, whether they were moving fast enough, what the risks were. That was the conversation they wanted to have, and it turned out to be one she was actually very well placed to lead, she just hadn't been framing it that way.

The efficiency gains from AI adoption are real and worth pursuing. But they're inward-facing, and clients right now are looking for something outward-facing. The agencies I'm seeing win the most interesting new work are almost always the ones that show up with a credible answer to what AI means for the client's business, rather than what it's done for the agency's delivery model.

The frameworks I shared with the audience at my Boston talk are at scaleatspeed.com/ai.