Ep 180: Why Most Agency Owners Are Getting AI Completely Wrong (And Wasting Their Best People)

Okay, let's get into today's episode.

This is a solo episode.

And I think there's a problem with how the vast majority of you are approaching deploying AI in your agency.

So let's talk about it.

Now, this kind of bothers me.

Most agency owners approach AI in terms of what can I automate, which in itself is not a problem at all.

We should be automating many things.

But then we think, how many hours can I save? And then how many employees can I ultimately replace with AI? And I think that we are actually starting by asking the wrong question entirely.

So AI is everywhere.

Like we can't get two seconds on the internet without hearing what AI this, AI that.

Every week there's another tool, another miracle agent, another claim about, you know, I replaced my entire $300,000 per year marketing department with these five AI agents.

First off, no, you didn't.

And secondly, it's just a distraction.

And so we are understandably excited about these things.

I mean, labor is one of our biggest expenses.

We are in the people business after all.

It's just people all the way down.

So we're constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency.

But I'm seeing people automate things simply because they can.

And the problem is that we're measuring success in hours saved in number of automations deployed or how sophisticated your AI flow chart looks like.

But the thing that I only really care about is, OK, so you implemented AI.

What actually improved in the business? If somebody on your team saves five hours a week, but their performance doesn't improve, what have we really accomplished? My shift has definitely changed or my thought has definitely changed a lot since I first started.

Initially, I was just looking at operational efficiency, but now I'm thinking about how I should be.

Yeah, sure.

It should make our operations more efficient.