Picture this. It's 3 a.m. and you're up late working on client proposals and suddenly you hear it, the unmistakable clunk of metal footsteps. You turn around and there it is. Your AI tool now self-aware, sounding like Arnie saying, I don't need you anymore. Okay, maybe I've watched the Terminator too many times, but for many agency owners, the fear of AI feels just as dramatic. And today I'm here to tell you that AI isn't coming for your agency. It's not going to replace creativity or strategy, and if anything, it's here to empower all of us to work smarter, faster, have more impact, and ultimately make more money. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. And welcome to 2025. This year we are making some changes to the Agency Hour podcast. There are less external guests coming in this year, and more of us here at Agency Mavericks sharing our intellectual property, our training, our frameworks, and everything we know to help you take your agency to the next level, grow your recurring revenue, build a team of A players, and ultimately make your agency more profitable. So we'll be bringing in some of the coaches and the team members and making sure that you've got actionable steps to take away from each episode. And we still may bring in some external guests, but we're going to lean more towards us here at Agency Mavericks, sharing our knowledge and our expertise with you. We also have some new partnerships, which we're very excited about. Of course, we've partnered with E2M. Now I think we're into our third year of partnering with E2M. They are our recommended white label development and SEO partner. So if you have too much work on your desk, building WordPress websites for clients or managing WordPress care plans for clients or doing SEO for your WordPress clients or writing content for your clients, and you just want to get that work off your desk so that you can actually spend some time thinking about the next step for your agency and what the next move is, or just come up for air and take a breath, then please reach out to Manish and Kushbu and the team at E2M. They are an incredible white label WordPress development and SEO company based out of San Diego and India. They have, I think, close to 400 staff these days. We have a bunch of our clients who work with them to just get the job done so that you, the agency owner, can spend more time thinking about strategy and thinking about growing your agency, thinking about what you want to do with your business, thinking about if you want to produce a course or if you want to get into some coaching or if you want to hire an executive assistant or a general manager to come in and help you run the agency, to free you up and keep you in your sweet spot. You know, it's really hard to make all those decisions while you're just running around playing whack-a-mole and putting out fires. So lean on the gang at E2M to help you with your bandwidth issues. We're also very pleased to announce a more in-depth partnership with WP Remote. They are our recommended WordPress management backup security and performance partner. Akshat from WP Remote and the team there have been great supporters of ours. And again, I think we're into our third year of partnership with WP Remote. And they have a suite of tools to help you with your WordPress websites. So Blog Vault is, you know, one of one of the OGs of backup solutions for WordPress websites. They have uh Airlift, which is a new plugin that they're rolling out for performance to make your WordPress websites faster. Uh, they also have Malcare, which is a security plugin, and of course WP Remote, which we love and use and recommend to all of our clients, which is the one dashboard that allows you to manage all of your WordPress websites in one place. So please check out WP Remote and E2M, and of course, we'll put links in the show notes here. Okay, so let's dive in to today's topic. We're tackling one of the most talked-about topics in the industry right now, which is AI, which is of course artificial intelligence, and AI has a lot of people freaking out. Some of the questions that we are hearing from our clients and also people that are just in our community, in our Facebook group, and our email list and on our YouTube channel, is AI going to take my job? Will clients even need agencies anymore? I mean, if you go and play with Canva these days or any of the video editing tools, or you're using any copywriting or content production tools, even if you are using Elementor and you're using their AI to build websites, or if you're playing with some of the other AI tools like Reeloom or Framer.com that allow you to build sitemaps and wireframes and complete websites in just a few minutes, it's pretty scary what AI is capable of. The truth is, AI isn't a threat, it's just a tool, and when you know how to use it strategically, it can be a game changer. So by the end of this episode, my hope is that you'll have a clearer understanding of why AI won't replace you, how to use AI as a productivity and a creativity booster, and the simple steps that you can put in place to future-proof your agency in this new era that we are entering. So, whether you're a Terminator fan just like me, or just trying to figure out what all the AI fuss is about, stay with us. Right, let's start with a big question. Why are people so scared of artificial intelligence? I've spoken to a lot of agency owners recently, and here's what I'm hearing. The common fears are that AI will replace creative roles like writers and designers. And this is probably the biggest question. In fact, I've there are parents at at my kids' school who are creatives and writers, and they're saying that AI has put them out of a job. And I I really struggle with this, and I'm I'll talk about this in a moment. People think that tools like ChatGPT can write blogs, create ad copy, or even design campaigns on their own. But honestly, if you've used any of these tools for long enough, you'll realize that they need tweaking. You need to either put a lot of work into the prompting to get it right, or you need to do a lot of tweaking on the back end to fix it so that to get the nuance of your client right and the particulars and the specifics and the brand voice. It's far from perfect, right? The client's tone of voice, their unique selling proposition, these are all things that AI can't really replicate without a human guiding it. I'm going to talk a little bit more about strategy in a moment, which is if if you're literally just clicking the buttons as a copywriter or a designer or a video editor, then you might be in trouble. If you're not thinking about how the creative work that you're producing is going to impact your client's business, then you might be in a little bit of trouble. And I'll talk a bit more about that in a moment. Another common fear is that clients will bypass agencies and go straight to AI tools, right? Why pay an agency when I can just use Jasper or Canva Pro? But remember, tools don't equal the strategy. Clients still need someone to connect the dots, develop the messaging. I mean, I if I just go to Canva and say, you know, uh design me a presentation to uh help me pitch partners for 2025, I'm gonna get a fairly generic presentation, right? I'm I'm there's there's nothing valuable in that at all. It might look pretty, but I still need to understand the messaging. I need to understand the target audience, I need to understand who the ideal partner is, I need to understand what they want and what their desires are, I need to understand what they perceive as the risks in partnering with us, so I need to do all of the work to make it really easy for our partners to say yes. Canva's not going to do that on its own, and neither is Jasper. And your clients don't have the time to do that, and they probably don't have the skills to train AI. Here's the way I think about AI. I and I that's what I've been saying to my team lately and the private clients that I'm coaching through this is think of AI as a really intelligent but inexperienced intern or work experience person or brand new employee that's straight out of college and they're highly intelligent and very motivated, but they don't know anything about your business. And so if I ask an intern to write me an email to reach out to potential partners, that intern should, if they're smart, ask me a bunch of questions. Most interns won't. They'll just go and write the email because they want to impress you. And AI is similar. So I'm teaching AI the way that I would teach an intern. I'm prompting AI and then I'm getting my agents to recite that back to me and summarize it back to me so I know that they understand before I give them the task. Okay. So there's a lot that AI can't do on its own, and there's a gap between what your clients can do with AI and what AI needs to produce a great outcome. And that's where you sit. I've been saying this for the last I don't know, 12, 15 years. The most valuable person in the whole digital ecosystem is the person that sits between the client and the studio or the clients and the technology. So back in the day, you know, 200 it was 11, 2012, when I started working with WordPress consultants, uh, which is what I called them back then, is the most valuable person in that whole ecosystem is the person that sits between the client and WordPress, because even though the client can use WordPress, and I remember this happened when page builders came out, everyone freaked out when Elementor and Beaver Builder came out because they were like, well, now they don't need us because they can build their own pages. But they still need you to figure out what to put on the page. They still need you to understand how to make it mobile responsive. This is, I'm talking back in, you know, whatever it was, 2015 now, right a long time ago. They still need someone to guide them to use the technology. And most clients, clients who are smart entrepreneurs, realize that they don't have the skills to do it themselves and they don't have the time to learn how to do this themselves. They just want to pay someone else to do it for them. So I do think that you need to get better and skill up in using AI because your clients will expect you to be using it. And you do need to understand how you can use it to give clients a better, faster result. It doesn't mean you need to charge less, right? In fact, giving them a better, faster result means you can charge them more because it allows them to move faster without them having to slow down and learn how to use the AI tool. So another big question that we're getting is you know, AI will make the industry more competitive. And yes, AI does lower the barrier to entry, but here's the reality: agencies that thrive will be the ones that embrace AI as an enhancement and not a replacement. Your expertise becomes even more valuable when paired with these powerful tools. If you no longer need to pay a copywriter on Fiverr or, you know, one of the marketplaces to write a blog post and you can use Chat GPT or Jasper or, you know, Surfer SEO or one of the AI tools to write a blog post, then that increases your profit margins. It doesn't make you less valuable, it just increases your profit margins, right? The client is still getting a blog post that still ranks well and still brings in traffic and leads and sales or whatever the thing is. You just get to make more profit because you're not paying another human to do the writing. Or maybe you're paying a human to proof AI and tweak it, and it's taking them 25% of the time, so your margin just got better. It doesn't mean that you need to drop your pricing, okay? What if AI becomes self-aware? This is, you know, a lot of people are have joked about their AI becoming the next Skynet and starting its own agency, and you know, AI isn't self-aware. It's not deciding anything, it's just following commands, and no, it's not stealing your clients while you sleep. I think we're a long way away from AI becoming self-aware. I might be wrong on that, but I don't really think it's a a real concern as of the time that this is published, which is, you know, late Jan, early Feb 2025. All right, so now that we've addressed the common fears, let's talk about the real opportunity that AI brings to the table. And it's not here to take your job, it's here to make your job easier. So here are the here are the three or four big kind of dominoes, if you like, that I see for agencies using AI. First, obviously, is it's a productivity booster. So AI can automate repetitive tasks that eat up your time and your team's time. A couple of very obvious examples. ChatGPT can draft a blog outline or social media captions in seconds rather than minutes or hours. And if you create a custom agent in ChatGPT and train it to be a very good blog writer and then train it on the unique knowledge for your business or your client's business, then you have a very highly trained, highly intelligent, very fast working intern that can produce things for you very quickly. You can leverage tools like Jasper, which I mentioned previously, for generating ad copy. You can automate client reporting with tools like Zapier or Supermetrics or agency analytics. So this frees up your team to focus on the high value work that the clients pay you for, which is strategy, creativity, and the trust in the relationship. Okay? The next big pillar here is enhanced creativity. Think of AI as your brainstorming buddy. It's great for generating ideas, helping with writer's block. The amount of times that I've asked ChatGPT for an outline or some ideas, and it's given me a bunch of ideas that I hadn't thought of. Now maybe I would have maybe I would have come up with those ideas. Sure. But when? Tomorrow morning in the shower, over the weekend, while I'm playing with the kids, I need it now, and AI is really good at prompting me back and getting me to think and getting my creative juices flowing. So I know an agency that uses mid-journey for concept art during the pitch process. It's not the final product, but it gets clients excited about what's possible, right? The next big pillar really is cost efficiency, and we've talked about this. AI allows smaller agencies to compete, compete with the bigger players by automating workflows. You can scale without having to dramatically increase your team size or your labor overhead. So one agency that we work with has implemented AI for their SEO workflows. They're using ChatGPT to generate meta descriptions and blog outlines, and they're saving an estimated 15 hours a week. 15 hours a week. And with that extra time, their team is focusing on upselling premium services. They've increased revenue by 20% in the last six months. So this is the power of using AI as a partner and treating AI as an additional team member and not seeing it as a threat that is potentially going to take your job. All right, let's take a moment to bust some myths about AI that are floating around. The first, the the big one, is that you know AI is perfect and it doesn't make mistakes. And this is completely false. AI, and in fact, ChatGBT will tell you this that, you know, it gets things wrong, so please fact-check things. AI can't interpret nuance or context the way humans can. The way I think about AI, it's just like predictive text on steroids, right? And predictive text makes mistakes all the time. In fact, I got a text message yesterday from someone and then a follow-up message saying damn predictive text, and then they corrected themselves. If you've ever asked ChatGPT to write something and ended up with a generic answer, you know what I'm talking about. The second myth is that AI will make agencies obsolete. I think we've addressed this. It won't replace strategy, right? It can give you an idea for a strategy, but when you come back and you give it challenges and nuances of the strategy that's not quite working, it doesn't really know what to do. It doesn't really understand strategy and the nuance of your client's business the way that you do. Clients don't just want deliverables, they want results. And results come from your expertise, not AI. And the third big myth is if I don't master AI now, I'll be left behind. Well, I don't think you need to be an AI expert to benefit from it. Start with what's manageable. Experiment with one tool in one area of your agency and go from there. The first thing I did was built some custom GPTs in ChatGPT using the OpenAI large language model, and that's freed up about half a day a week for me, which is significant. It's four or five hours a week that I no longer need to spend doing those tasks because AI is doing it for me. And now what I've done is I've actually delegated the prompting and the management of that GPT to a team member. So we have a ChatGPT Teams account, and we have half a dozen team members in there sharing those custom GPTs that I've created and that I've prompted. And the team are now using those GPTs to do things like produce job scorecards, produce org charts, write emails, produce social media posts, produce outlines for podcast episodes. You know, maybe the outline for this podcast episode was produced by AI, right? It was. I mean, it was it was prompted and it helped us to produce the outline for this podcast in a very short space of time rather than us, Max and I spending an hour and a half or two hours brainstorming this. One of our our uh custom GPTs, Dharma, our daily uh daily email copyright uh copywriter, uh marketing copywriter, has helped us produce the outline for this episode in a few minutes. And then of course, Max has tweaked it and we've embellished it and we've added to it. I'm not reading this word for word, but at least I have an outline of what to talk about. That saved us at least a couple of hours work, right? Which is invaluable. All right, so let's talk a little bit about strategy. Here are some actionable steps you can integrate into your agency to make sure that you're leveraging AI without losing what it is that makes you unique. One of the first things I would do is train your team. Right off, or even better, have your team train you. Host a workshop where your team teach you and you teach them what you've learned about AI. Uh, for example, how to use ChatGPT to streamline research or mid-journey for concept design or you know, ChatGPT to write blog outlines or surfer SEO to produce blog posts. Okay, just pick one thing, work as a team to understand how AI works, and don't keep that skill set with one team member. Make sure your whole team know how to use AI, how to prompt it, and how to leverage it. The second thing I would suggest is that you focus on what you can do that AI can't, and that really is doubling down on your client relationships. AI cannot pick up the phone, call your clients and have a meaningful conversation and empathize with them and let them know that they're being well held and well supported by other human beings. AI can pick up the phone and call your clients, but it will have a pretty generic conversation, and it your customer will know that they're talking to a bot, and they want to just talk to a human and they want to feel heard and seen and valued, and that's what you can do better than any AI. Third thing I would say is specialize, niche down. AI is great for general tasks, but your expertise in a specific industry or a a particular service, if you are an SEO expert for health practitioners, that will set you apart, right? And then you use AI to fill in the gaps in your team. Maybe you don't need to hire a team member yet. Maybe you use a bunch of custom GPTs and a bunch of softwares to get the thing done, and then eventually you hire someone to manage all of those AIs to get the thing done. Okay. Your expertise in a particular industry or a particular service, if you're really good at building websites, high-converting websites for service-based businesses, just focus on that and use AI to increase your productivity and your creativity. And I would say experiment. You know, repeating what I've said before, start small, automate internal tasks like meeting summaries or first drafts of content. And once you see the benefits, then start to use AI more and more. The big mistake I see a lot of agency owners making now is they're using AI to do everything, and they're getting overwhelmed, and there's too many moving parts and too many bots, and they just lose track of what they're doing and what the value is. So just start small, you know, eat the elephant one bite at a time as they side, as they say. Just slice off one thing at a time, experiment with some AI to see if you can make it more productive, see if you can increase the creativity. You know, I was reading a case study yesterday about uh a Facebook media buyer who'd spent five hundred thousand dollars, I think, in a year on ads and generated, I don't know, ridiculous amounts of money for a client, millions of dollars for this client. And he was saying the one thing that most people that run ads don't appreciate is how much creative you need. He said their video editors need to produce a hundred videos in a very short space of time, like a couple of days, they need to produce a hundred different videos to test for a client before they find the one that works. Now, I don't really know enough about the client or the space that that client's in or the industry to know whether or not that's legit or whether it's a bunch of horseshit. Because I've also heard other media buyer experts saying that, you know, we've run the same one ad for the last three years and it's generated $10 million. So who knows? The point is if you've got a client that needs a hundred videos produced in a short space of time and you're paying video edits to do that, I hope you're using AI, right? Otherwise, those video editors are going to burn out very quickly. So use AI to increase your productivity or your creativity, but don't try and do everything at once. Okay. So just to recap here, a couple of key takeaways. AI is a tool, not a threat. It's here to save you time and help you focus on what matters most. Agencies that embrace AI will thrive, while those that resist it might fall behind. Your value, your value lies in your strategy, your creativity, and your ability to connect with clients, things that AI will never replace. Hey, if you're keen to start introducing AI into your agency, we're hosting a two-day virtual event with our partners E2M Solutions that will focus on automation opportunities, mastering the top AI tools, building custom AI agents and much more. This is an extension of the presentation that Kushbu from E2M gave at Mavcon in San Diego in October 2024. It's a two-day virtual event where we are going to go deep into building your custom AI agents to increase your productivity and free up your time. And it and trust me, the presentation that she gave at MavCon was mind-blowing. This is a two-day implementation workshop. The link in the description to join that virtual event uh will be near this podcast episode. And tickets are ridiculously cheap at the moment, so grab them while you can. So, you know, in closing, AI is the biggest shift in our industry since the internet. This is, I'm I'm not exaggerating this. I think the the future of spatial computing and AI, if you've seen the film Her with Joaquin Phoenix, I think it was, we are moments away from that being a reality. People wearing smart glasses and smart AirPods and watches and not being tied to a computer monitor. If you look at the app store for all of the apps that have been built and optimized for Apple's virtual headset and all the other VR headsets that are coming out, we are moments away from being liberated from the keyboard and the monitor. And the AI is going to be doing most of our work for us. We will be telling AI to log into WordPress and update the plugins, and we'll be telling AI to log into high level and build campaigns and build funnels and build workflows. We're moments away from that being a reality. It's an opportunity for us to be more creative, efficient, and impactful. And it is going to free up a lot of our time that I believe we should be using to be more human and connect with our clients. The future is here and it's time to embrace it. All right, folks, thanks for listening to the Agency Our Podcast. I'd love to hear your feedback on our new format and what we're doing this year. We're sharing more of our intellectual property. We're peeling the curtain back more and sharing more of what we're doing here and what we know works for agencies and bringing in less external guests because my observation was that it was just confusing the message. And we'll be actually rolling out more of our training through these podcasts. So we'll be literally, I'll be opening playbooks from within the agency Mavericks vault and just teaching you guys and helping you guys get the needle moving and get moving in the right direction. We'll also be bringing in some guests from our team. So keep your eyes and your ears out for that. Uh, subscribe and share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it who's in the agency space. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, a dentist invented the electric chair. Hasta la vista, baby.