# The tell is what they've built

Source: https://felixvelarde.com/articles/the-tell-is-what-theyve-built
Author: Felix Velarde
Published: 2026-11-06

Someone in Boston asked how I tell the difference between an agency that's genuinely operating differently with AI and one that's mostly posting about it. The honest answer is that I look at what they've built.

There was an agency in the room, a Webflow shop. Last year in one of our Scale at Speed sessions we sat down with the unpleasant fact that web design was about to become a one-day job. You can ask Claude for a website and have it in thirty-five seconds. We knew it was coming and so did they.

So we set up a growth-hack team inside the business with one task and a three-month clock: work out what the agency's actual role is. The answer we landed on was that an agency's role is to deliver [bags of cash](https://felixvelarde.com/articles/bags-of-cash) to its clients. The creativity, the research and the insight are how you do it. The money is why anyone pays. Clients don't hire you because you're pretty, they hire you because you produce money.

The agency took that seriously, did a deep dive into what their platform could really do and how AI could make it materially better for clients, and turned itself around in three months flat. They now describe themselves as the number one AI-powered Webflow agency in the world. They are growing fast, and they are extraordinary.

The tell, every time, is the direction of travel. The agencies that will make it have stopped optimising internal workflow and producing more SEO copy more quickly, and started building things a client can feel. The quicker you look at what your clients will value in a year, and the less time you spend making your own business marginally tidier, the better your odds.

The Scale at Speed sessions that started that work are now an AI advisor at [scaleatspeed.ai](https://scaleatspeed.ai), free to use. Ask it what your agency's actual role is and see what comes back.

If you'd rather begin with where you are now, [scorecard.scaleatspeed.com](https://scorecard.scaleatspeed.com) is a four-minute check on what's stalling your growth and what to fix first.