Two ways through the AI wave

I sat on a panel in Boston in front of a room of agency owners. Every attendee had been asked to submit a question in advance, and fifty-one of them did. I read the lot on the plane over.

They were phrased fifty-one different ways and they were all the same question: how do I get through the AI wave without my work being commoditised, and how do I get out of the race to the bottom?

There are two ways through this, and most agencies are already on the wrong one without ever having chosen it.

The first is to use AI to make yourself cheaper and faster. You deliver the SEO three hours quicker than you did yesterday, you tidy the workflows, you consolidate the Google Drive. Meanwhile your clients open a twenty-dollar ChatGPT account and start doing the same work in-house. In Adam Smith terms you have collapsed your own market. I'm watching agencies fail this way now, and in every case it's because they pointed the technology inward at their own efficiency rather than outward at the client.

The second is to become the platform. The things you build with AI are the value the client gets from you, and they can't get them from a twenty-dollar account because you built them and they didn't.

The difference between the two has nothing to do with budget or technical sophistication. It is which way you're facing. One is a race to the bottom and the other is a race to the top, and if you don't choose, you get the first by default.