Every agency owner is feeling the same pressure right now. Boards want an AI strategy. Clients ask what you're doing with it. Competitors are announcing pilots on LinkedIn. And under that kind of pressure, the instinct is to go and adopt AI - fast, visibly, before anyone asks why you haven't.
Here's what gets lost in that rush: automation. It's a quicker conversation than AI, it's usually simpler to put in place, and it tends to pay off faster. But it rarely gets a look-in, because it isn't the exciting option.
And before you automate anything - AI-powered or otherwise - you need to be honest about whether the process underneath it actually works.
Most agencies can't describe their own workflow
Ask an agency owner to walk you through exactly how one of their projects runs, step by step, and most can't do it in real detail. They know the shape of it. They don't know the specifics: who touches the project at each stage, where it sits waiting on someone, or where the whole thing quietly depends on one person remembering to chase it up.
That's the real problem. And no piece of software fixes it for you.
Map the process before you touch any tools
This is where I start every systems and tools review with a client: take one live project and walk it from start to finish exactly as it actually happens - not how it's described in the onboarding deck.
You're looking for two things:
Where it's genuinely broken. A step that stalls. A handoff that drops between two people. An approval that goes out and nobody follows up on.
Where it's repetitive. The same manual task done on every single project, out of habit, that nobody has questioned in years.
Fix the broken parts first. Only once those are sorted does it make sense to look at automating what's left - because what's left, at that point, is usually the tedious-but-not-actually-wrong stuff. That's exactly where automation belongs.
Before buying anything new, check one thing: is the fix already a feature inside a tool you're paying for and simply not using? Only once you've ruled that out is it worth talking about a new tool.
This is where the real efficiency comes from
The point of fixing this isn't the automation itself - it's what the automation frees up.
Every manual step someone does purely out of habit is time they're not spending on the part of the job that actually needs a human. Chasing a status update. Rebuilding the same timing plan from scratch. Typing out the same follow-up email for the tenth time. None of that requires someone doing it well. It just needs doing.
Take that off someone's plate and they don't sit idle - they move to the work that's genuinely hard to automate: judgement calls, client relationships, the creative and strategic thinking that's the actual reason clients hire your agency in the first place.
That's where the real gain shows up. Not in hours saved on a spreadsheet, but in the time your best people get back for the work only they can do.
Get out of the AI funk
There will be a new AI tool launched every week for the foreseeable future. It's genuinely easy to lose yourself trying to work out what you should adopt next.
My advice to agency owners: don't get swept up in the AI tornado. Focus on making real, tangible changes to your agency right now - fix what's broken, and get as efficient as you reasonably can. Profitability is what drives growth, not the number of AI logos on your tech stack slide.
Start with automation. There's a good chance you're already paying for a tool that has it built in, sitting unused. Go and find it before you buy anything new.
