Will AI replace your agency in 2026? (here’s the truth)

The perception of AI is as valuable as AI itself. AI is that but tenfold. It will get to a point where you don't actually need developers. With the rapid rise of AI agents and automations, the entire agency space has been turned on its head and forced to ask itself what is going to happen to it in an age where work is done by machines and software rather than by people. So, I thought I'd bring on Jordan Platin, good friend of mine and a veteran of the agency space, to discuss what he's seeing on his side from marketing agencies and digital agencies, how they're adapting to AI technology, while I also bring my expertise from the AI agency side to share how AI agencies are being able to bridge that gap between digital agencies and their clients to upsell more services and make more money for them overall. This is an incredibly important discussion to be had at this time. So, if you're an agency owner of any form, this podcast is for you. — Mate, good to see you. and uh give me a bit of a rundown on what you've been up to lately. I know a whole lot of different stuff in the agency space and software. So, it's good to see you and I want to hear. — Yeah, good to see you, man. Good to catch up. And a lot has changed in this space over the last like 8 years since I got into it. So, um a lot of a lot more AI naturally and us having this conversation. It's nice to tap into your stuff to keep on top of everything that's happening too. Um but, uh dealing with a lot of agencies transitioning over to the AI space. Lots of people now what I was calling initially like AI enablement bootstrapping or putting AI on the back end of existing services now we're going into that full integration phase which has been interesting but uh a lot of change and it's been exciting I've got myself involved in uh the AI SAS pointwise as well which we've spoken about behind the scenes it's an exciting place to be at the minute there's a it reminds me of day one when I started what Facebook ad social media frenzy was like when I used to go and sign up for client and I mentioned Facebook ad socials. It was like, "Oh my god, this social thing, the media are talking about this is all over the news. If I don't get on social, I'm going to lose my business. " Now, it's like AI is that but tenfold because it's like industry household name across everything. So, it's like that energy

but amplified tenfold. So, yeah, it's an interesting space to be in right now, man. — Yeah, I mean this it's like the ground's shifting under a lot of people's feet right now. And I think that's what I want to bring you on and talk about from your side on. Obviously, you're much deeper in the marketing agency space and I've got sort of the AI agency space um to pull from, but what are the main ways you're seeing digital agencies start to adapt to uh the AI shift that's going under their feet right now? — I mean, I think like the majority of digital agencies are still starting um and it's still very viable because the pain is always going to be there for businesses wanting to get clients. So, a lot of digital agencies are still starting in like lead genen predominantly and it's so easy to now bolt on AI to a lead gen offer. So that's looking like AI appointment setting, head to point-wise, um mainly text, but then also voice on the back end as well. We're seeing more of um but it's I think more so than anything, and I think you've probably experienced the same thing, like it's been hard to until probably like the last 6 to 12 months really pull mass value from AI enabled offers into the marketplace or at least to small medium-siz business anyway outside of like chat bots and so on. And so now seeing people be able to um well I suppose the marketplace has evolved itself. The people within it the agencies have been forced to innovate and be desperate to do so. And so we're seeing a lot of people with appointment setting um integration with automating inside of businesses and like understanding their workflows. Even when you've done lead generation for you know three months inside of a business you start to understand their deeper pains beyond that. So, we're noticing big saturated industries that you couldn't even tap into previously, like let's say dentistry. Someone says to me, I want to start a marketing agency in dentistry. I be like, don't even bother. Like, that's such a saturated niche. Now, you're getting an agency coming along that are seemingly offering 90% of the same services before, lead genen, but bolting on AI onto the back end, and now perceptionally, they're a completely different agency, and they're mopping up the market and pulling the rug from all the industry leaders. And that's very cool to see as well. — That was going to be one of my questions. Is it are they using the AI buzzword to get in the door? Because on the sales side, you'll hear like both both ends of the spectrum. It's either like just sell the result, don't sell the don't talk about the tech at all, but it sounds like people are coming in and using that as like the leading part of the offer to get the interest to differentiate themselves. — Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, I think you're kind of foolish not to do so um at the minute like in the space cuz you just you're very quickly going to be perceived as someone that's outdated. I always say to to my audience the perception of AI is as valuable as AI itself if not more valuable like that it adds more value to the service um perceptionally and so yeah even from the cold call like if people are using cold calls or their ads so it's like instead of now being these growthbased hey do you want to get 10 new leads this month style conversation it's are you aware that this competitor is using AI to get new clients every month and so now we've got that fear and we the AI kind of FOMO stacked in there as well. So, yeah, there's definitely a huge element of leveraging AI, but some people aren't as deep as they could be into it. — Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting for us recently at Morningside. We've just had a meeting recently here in New Zealand with I think they are technically the largest independent agency in uh in Australia. Um, so they've got offices in Australia and New Zealand and also I think in the States as well. They were having very serious discussions with us to be kind

of a white label AI partner within them to basically add that to the massive stack of services that they offer. They're like full service for huge brands here in uh in New Zealand and Australia. I asked the question is like are you do you want us to come in here and offer these to your clients for a revenue lift for an increase in in LTV or are you doing it for the perception for the like we are the people that have our own internal AI team so that they can help you to maybe pull a case study out of that and use that to better like strengthen your positioning in the market and it was basically the latter there. They were like really interested in the positioning of it of being perceived as being AI first and like on the front foot with it. Um, and I'm sure the revenue was a nice thing to throw in there. But it's just very interesting that even at the highest end of the agency scale, uh, they're all looking at the same thing. — It's kind of still the precursor to getting deeper into it, that like you you'd always like the intention to be how can I maximize client result and how can I just do serve the client better, but I think business intrinsically makes people, you know, put their own motives first. And so if they can benefit from the positioning first, naturally they're going to then have to get deep into what that actually means for the client. And so it's kind of like the precursor regardless. — Well, I mean, these guys are going to be making big strides. And it's interesting because they were talking about how if we could uh the brands themselves, they don't necessarily want to make the move as quickly until they hear that it's scarce or everyone else is doing it. So, it's like a very much like you said and even down on like the low level of small marketing agencies, these guys have the same thing with their clients where as soon as they say, "Oh, we're doing this AI thing for X, they all want to get in and do it because they don't want to get left behind. " So, um there's definitely a FOMO effect at work within the within the clients of agencies as well. There's been a lot of buzz around like the softization of agency services. I've seen quite a lot of videos popping up on it. use of AI agents for parts of service delivery uh use of just AI automation workflows for uh taking more parts out of the workflow for um the agency own themselves. What are you seeing in terms of actual implementation? Because I think this is still a bit of a theory that's been floating around. People being able to whether it's through creative generation, they're building AR content generation systems to help mass produce content um images, videos, whatever it is for marketing material or even using AR agents within the uh onboarding flow of uh a marketing agency. Uh what have you seen on that side? Um or is it still a bit of a ghost that's been floating around? fortunately because we've got we we're still running affluent. co as our performance agency that works with D2C brands and we've got a new creative office in the UK now and so we've just been like really deep in okay how can we be more efficient on our side using like AI and so we actually launched an initiative across the company last year and we called it the make yourself redundant initiative and I'll explain what that means but Steven

Bartlet spoke at adcon this year in the UK and he said I've launched this initiative across the company I want our team to make themselves redundant but in their existing role and as it stands at the moment because AI is going to come change a lot of stuff, but I want the team knowing what's going to happen and facilitating the change within their role before it just comes upon them. So, I launched this initiative across the company and we had everybody auditing all of their day-to-day doing like time tracking and so on. And then we started identifying where all of like the small mini repeat tasks were in the business. And then we created what I called an automation hub, which is basically a myro board with all of like the proposed flows. We hired a couple of AI specialists internally and then we created a whole bunch of NA10 automations etc etc. Being straight I think there's a lot of [ __ ] in the in the AI workflow space at the moment. There's a lot of people creating content for uh the business process that doesn't exist. It just doesn't it's process that's it's basically just — like mental porn like that's all it purpose it serves. And so then you actually try and take one of these process and pull it onto your business, you realize the person that's created it is just a content creator and has never created that process as something real. — So, so my and I'd be interested on your take on this, but my theory at least from trying to implement this stuff myself is you've got to build it from the ground up for yourself based on existing process that actually works inside of the business and there's no point trying to automate some process that isn't actually [ __ ] hot. — Um, so we've been doing that. Um, and that's been really interesting. Uh, all on boarding and so on. Yes, sure. But the biggest benefit has been uh the simplest things, custom GPTs for every single client that we have, feeding that with all of the best and most relevant ad data. Um, so we can learn from that. Then when we write new ad scripts, we've already got 20 best performing ads at the target CAC and we can go ahead and we can just shorten that time that creative strategists are spending using tools like Triple Whales, Moby in the ecom space has been insane. Like such a powerful — they've done a good job with it. I remember it coming out, but I was like I think it was pretty [ __ ] when it came out, but — genu genuinely now like I it's one of the most impressive applications I've seen for for analyzing data across like you could you can use something like triple moi to um to plan your entire Black Friday promotion like the whole thing forecast it all and just based on historic data on the store and it does an incredible job of it. So yeah, that's that's been cool. And various tools like motion for creative and so that's there are I think everyone's always looking people coming to me almost on a daily basis like Jordan do you have like the workflows for like AI like dude what's the automated on boarding process? What's the in know the automatic account management process blah blah but it's because it just feeds into the most basic uh desires of any business owner. It's like is this going to save me time and make me more money and ultimately just feed into people's laziness. But the true benefit for us has been doing those internal audits and then finding automation and like a couple of cool things we've done is um sales manager spending a lot of time on sales calls and so uh creating an automated sales call review system based on historic reviews and then analyzing has there been a previous review? If yes um and they didn't then improve based on the previous feedback then a strikebased system and so on. So, we've gone quite deep, but they've all been very custom, very personal. — Um, and so we've Yeah, it's — I'm yet to see like some really big kind of like default setting marketing based automations that are just making everybody loads more efficient. I think everyone's still a little bit in dreamland. Um, trying to save time or really just make themselves a little bit more lazy, I suppose. With that in mind, if you were a uh a marketing agency owner right now, what would be like the uh the road map for the next like 12 to 24 um of the top priorities? Would it be doing a basically an internal audit like you've done there? Uh would it be looking to pull in a lot of these softwares that are popping up to allow you to deliver AI services? Basically, the strength of the the agency right now is that you've got clients, right? You've got direct access to them and you can upsell uh new services, new AI services using various softwares into them. Um, so for that 12 to 24 month road map, what would you be recommending? — I still think I mean it depends on revenue level. If you're going from like 0 to 10k a month, I'd still just throw [ __ ] at a wall as much as manual stuff as possible and see what sticks. Like I'd still just believe that to be true because if you just won't even learn the basic principles of business that'll get you anywhere. Um and then beyond that, so there's two sides to it. Like yes, the internal auditing and then creating automation inside the business, which some of like kind of debatable. Is this even really AI? Some of this stuff, you know, like just because you've got an LLM plugged into a basic workflow, is it really a full AI automation? Probably not. That stuff is like one side. I think like many people try and um are trying to over complicate the whole like let me create custom workflows thing because there are so many out of the box software solutions that exist for that. I think we saw a lot of that in the um in the AI appointment setting space. Hence why the reason I got in point wise you got a lot of people creating very custom appointment setting solutions. And by appointment setting I mean I'm sure I don't have to point to you. — Oh man, that was so freaking janky. Yeah, I remember being I'm pretty sure my uh one of my students original like my original eight students back when I first started teaching anyone I called it the original eight took him on for free um one of them Isaiah and he was the one who kind of brought this AI appointments thing to the surface and he started to sort of rig the first prototypes um and sort of went from there but I remember just how janky they were for a very long time um and I think that not to cut you off on that one but there's a whole different topic we can go into after that on the like softization of these specific use cases and I think that's really an interesting space to look into. — Yeah, 100% man. I mean it's and you also you create this custom solution it's great for like one two weeks a month max and you have to keep updating the thing and it costs you to run it and etc like so I don't think like if we're talking about roadmap for agencies it's not like okay what great custom solutions can I build it's like what out of the box solutions can I use that can stack additional perceived value and actual value to the clients because appointment setting for example we keep coming to the back to that because it really is one of the main things that marketing agencies are doing anyway um that looking at that specifically like of course it's saving them time on hiring setters, money on hiring setters, the clients getting better results because of speed to lead and all of that stuff. So you're getting a better result but also as an agency if you're getting into the space now or you're even in the space and you're trying to bolt on an AI offer something like that makes the most sense because it's out of the box and it's very simple and it's easy to set up. I think the whole custom integration piece I think is I think it's very an interesting conversation. I said a master I hosted a mastermind three weeks ago and I spoke a lot about this is AI enablement is what I think is like the stacking service the stacking software onto an existing services but then AI

integration is that step further when we then start hosting like a monthly coaching call with our clients just to understand their deeper pains inside the business like what actually like I mentioned that dentist agency who started who've come into the space and they've now they this agency by the way went from zero to 7 and a halfk in 12 months so it took them quite a long time to get to that point because they were there's no AI They bled on into their service. They went from 7 and a halfk to 25k in 4 months. And they went from 25 to 50 in one month. They've now gone from 50 to 130 in another four months. And so, and it's because they've now like they've dominated the industry market that the industry leaders and they've got this perceptual change. They then started speaking to the clients on a deeper level. They realized that there was an issue with in the UK there's one software that owns like has a monopoly as a CRM for dentists. They don't integrate with go with uh Google calendar and all this stuff. They now have created like the pain of those guys. Yeah. — Create and exactly and can you create a solution for that? And now all of a sudden you've got a moat that other agencies can't compete with. Like that's I think is the part that people are trying to do at the start. They're like what's the custom AI system I can build for this from the ground. It's like — just work with them first. Just figure out what they need. marketing agencies are in a really good position just to make the transition because I work with a lot of people who are coming into business completely new like they don't have any business experience maybe they're working a job right now and they want to make the jump they've always wanted to start a business but they just didn't have maybe the opportunity they didn't catch the right like timing of this of a trend or something to hop on to and they think now that now is the time and starting at complete zero in terms of zero business experience and usually like very minimal AI experience as well just sort of personal use that's a much longer road that the first 12 months of business for any of us is uh is like bump bumping into [ __ ] non-stop and just like stubbing your toe and like eating glass and you just really don't make a huge amount of progress and it's just you gradually building the entrepreneurial skill set right there's a lot of these little peripheral kind of things you pick up as you go whether it's mindset or managing teams or hiring or on boarding all these little thing or just run managing a P& L um that you pick up along the way but the agency owners already got this they already if they're already running at 10 20 30k per month you're very familiar with how to run an agency you've got all the business skills and you know marketing as well. And there's a very interesting spot when you look at like a speed to lead system which is one of the best kind of conversational AI use cases in terms of uh the input output equation of how much effort you have to put in to get a result. If you can reduce that speed to lead increase I never get this right. Increase or decrease the speed to lead. — So increase Yeah. — You want to increase your speed or wait decrease your speed to lead. — You want to increase Yeah. — Decrease your time to respond. — Time to lead. Yeah. — Yeah. Um, but those systems create a ton of value just by like chopping it from 12 hours or 8 hours down to 30 seconds. And when you have that marketing skill set on top of that, you can strap in the ads on top of it, which is really like if you want to pump a ton of value, that's going to make your ads ultimately more uh more performant. You're going to get a better ROI on the ads because you're getting a much faster response time and able to set them into appointments or whatever it is after that. So I have this issue when I'm talking to AI agencies and that's building these kinds of systems and they're like, "Oh man, like it's good, but they I built the system and it's going great for them, but now they need more leads. " And so they the agencies are kind of stuck on that side where they can do all the conversational AI really well, but they don't necessarily have the marketing knowhow. And I'm like setting up a whole ads funnel for people is like a pretty like significant job and you need to know quite a lot about how to run ads and consumer psychology and copyrightiting and creatives. There's a lot to pick up there. And so the marketing agencies have an interesting opportunity to be able to learn the conversation AI aspect which if you look at how the trends are pointing is getting easier and easier to deliver on um when you're getting softwares like pointwise and others that are taking these specific use cases and I think we're getting to see things like AI receptionists and stuff get validated in the market by these I'm actually just shortly after this having a pod with some of the guys who've really led that in the voice AI space and these things that have been cobbled together on go high level and like air table and Vappy and all this mix of softwares um just to get a working receptionist and they've been condensed down into like all-in-one softwares where you can go on and set them up relatively easily. So I think agencies are in a very good position to be able to hop on the back of those softwares as they appear. Now is really the time for them to wake up and be like [ __ ] the tools are here now and there's no reason why I can't pick up these and start to attach them to my services. Whether that's — shifting into a predominantly AI based and adding the marketing on top or you're still sort of marketing centric um but you've just added these tools uh tools to help it uh allow you to deliver a little bit better. — I think a lot of agencies have been sat in limbo for I would say the last couple of years to be honest until really the turn of this year a lot of people been sat in limbo kind of wanting to do something but not really being able to do so. I think it was you that mentioned this recently which is a coincidence because I was talking about the same thing as I said at this mastermind a couple weeks ago but you are you talking about AI integrators was it you talking about integrate

— I haven't used the integrators word but um — what was the what is the word you used the word about people facilitating AI inside of a business you — we've got the we've got it the AI transformation partner is what we call now — partner — and that seems to have stuck pretty well in terms of people like ah okay like you don't really need to if you talk to a business I'm an AI transformation partner they go oh okay I get it like we're full service we go from education consulting development and partnership beyond that and that's what our companies are really wanting right now even as you get bigger go to bigger and bigger companies these CEOs are under a [ __ ] ton of pressure and they really just want someone to be able to talk to and so even if you're a marketing agency owner if you upskill enough you you're sort of familiar with it maybe you've done a few of these conversational AI builds for uh your clients you can still go in there and have this kind open and honest discussion with the CEO or the leadership team about like where they actually are right now. And the AI audit offer is something that if you guys are I mean AI agencies and marketing agencies right now, you need to be looking at the audit. Um we're absolutely crushing with it at Morningside for much higher ticket audits. But then all the way down to the smallest little maybe you're a marketing agency or AI agency starting out selling them for 200 bucks. You have your intro or discovery call 15 20 minutes. Okay, great. Next step is a $300 audit. And these things are absolutely crushing right now because companies are at the stage where, like you said earlier, they're like, "Okay, [ __ ] Well, I need to do something about this right now. Everyone's talking about it and these guys are going to tell me where I'm at and give me sort of a compass reading on where the company is and where we could go from here. " Uh, that's something that I think for all agencies, I should be looking to strap up on that as a capability of being able to do a brief audit. There are layers and levels to it. You can start off super basic two-hour call and you can go right up to what we do which is like 8week audit very comprehensive of a 200 person company. So that it scales really nicely as well. — I completely agree. I and I see that as the natural progression of the marketplace. I remember when chat GBT first came out and I said I remember saying to Joe, my business partner in the agency, the biggest role and the biggest like the biggest role we're going to see in the agency space and in the international market is going to be these chief I called it a chief AI officer back then. But it's not really what a chief officer nec necessarily does in the company. I'm not sure. Maybe they do. But that I saw that as being the single most important role in these companies. It's auditing the business and then creating solutions inside of them. And that is as a marketing agency, you're very primed to do that because you're already b the business is already bought into you because you're helping them do the one thing they want to do the best and that's scale and grow. You know, apart from like the big enterprises are kind of beyond that point. If you're working at enterprise level, it's a completely different conversation. Um, and it doesn't just narrow you down to, you know, automation. It's also what am I doing in my specific vehicle. You could be an ad agency or a creative agency and you're just diving into, you know, you're hosting an audit or transformation in that specific area of the business without it having to be like a big broader picture. So, I couldn't agree more, man. I think that's a natural progression for a lot of agencies right now. — The good thing about the marketing agency space is that a lot of them are niche down, right? They we work with a specific kind of business. Um whereas many AI agencies like Mside, we're quite broad. So our audits will be sort of spread across lots of different industries and we don't necessarily like roll that expertise over um to the next client. It has to be kind of spread and like reinterpreted over to okay we understood what happened there we can take it over to a new one. Um but these marketing agencies are usually so deep in a niche like the dental example the auditing process like you can charge 5 10k for these audits depending on the size of the client um all the way up to 50 60 even we're putting proposals out for 80 or 90 $100,000. And when you have that specific understanding of a of a niche, the auditing process is just like an absolute walk in the park on that second one. If we went into another company, say in the in the at home care space, which is a big audit we did recently, um it would be an absolute layup. Like all the hard work has been done. We know how these businesses, if we know how one works at that certain size of okay like 100 to 200 people, we know how they work while like the other one's probably going to work in a very similar way. There might be a few tools changed here and there, but the delivery is going to be so much easier and we're going to just be able to compound that knowledge. So, getting into just it's going to be scary at first, but having a dig at that first few kinds of AI audits is a really smart strat in my opinion. And I've put information out there. I put out our whole basically a order straight here on the channel, which I can link down below if some of you guys want to check it out. But it's the information is out there now. Um, and there's no excuse why you can't just go in there and start to offer. Hey, like we'll do a free audit for one of our clients and just see where you are and apply the frameworks that guys like myself and others are putting out. So that's an offer that's sitting there ready for people to take it up. When I think about that and I think about agencies doing this some of the agencies that are already doing this who have transitioned and one of the biggest dangers for people is that they get so swept up in that everybody as an agency wants to then transition into a SAS and I think that's kind of ultimately where when we think long term if we think big picture like if I think 10 20 years I think agency ultimately rolls into SAS like but conglomerate SAS kind of see like a few big players that will dominate individual subsections um that's kind of where online business is going in general and then rollups and so on. But uh I think lots of agencies are at danger of really getting sidetracked by SAS. The people who are not haven't got the experience in the marketplace to be able to do that as well, which is a completely different beast. Getting involved in SAS, different beast. Completely different beast. — Um runs more like ecom than it does an agency. — They'll come into uh start wanting to start an agency and suddenly they're talking about SAS. I don't think people really understand like the amount of cash flow you need to support it. The like development knowhow. You need cash flow, you need a team, you need a freaking great idea. Um, and I keep trying to tell people the best way to find those ideas is to start an AI agency. And literally, if you haven't delivered it for 5 10 clients and they're absolutely over the [ __ ] moon, then there's no chance that you should not be swinging on anything um SAS wise. Apart from that, it's just way too much of a gamble in my opinion. So, I just think it's such a great like the stuff that we're doing at Morningside as well for sports teams. Really, really exciting. Like we didn't think we'd end up working with sports teams, but we're working with some of the biggest ones in the world at the moment. and the SAS opportunities uh that are coming off the back of that is just like mindboggling and basically know you get to the point and get to the insight before basically anyone else does you're really at the frontier of all these industries you're working in if you're doing it right as an agency and you're able to take that and say okay how could we work with our current clients and roll that out to the rest of the industry or how can we take that and build our own thing and so if you're looking for SAS opportunities and you want the cash flow and the dev team underneath you that's why I've said the if you chart it out over 5 10 years Um the AI agency is has got the best like best legs um for anyone who's coming in and if you had the choice um right now we've had this agency come to us um at Morningside and wanting us to do white label stuff for them and come underneath them to have u have AI capabilities for them. Have you seen much of that crossover of people reaching into working with AI agencies either just for internal development and uh you said you brought up some specialists for yourself um but bringing on and sort of white labeling their services or partnering so that people can sort of increase offer AI consulting or development through uh AI agency partners. I've — seen a lot of agencies tapping into the Filipino AI agency market. There's a lot of — I didn't even know that was a thing man. Yeah, there's a lot of — Manilo. — Yeah. AI development agencies and they're just like running a dirt cheap — Silicon Island. — Mhm. Exactly. Well, the biggest NHN um uh Facebook group is a Filipino Facebook. It gets like 18,000 new members a week. It's something insane like that. It's like absolutely ridiculous traffic. But um but yeah, so I've seen I've seen it, but more so as kind of okay, so an agency's got an idea. they want to create a system or a product or a solution and it's like a quick someone comes in creates it over the course of a couple of months and comes out. I haven't yet um at least personally spoken to many marketing agencies who have got like a full-on AI integration partner um agency which is an interesting thing though because white label has always been such a great way to do things and it's always I actually think it's better to not distract yourself from your core service too much and if you can have a great white label partnership that works both ways then — yeah I mean on the on that in front I think um that's another interesting point about the commoditization of lower level kind of AI automation development. Um we're starting to see tools that are you've got text to workflow basically where you put in the workflows. Zap has had this for a long time. Makes now released it. Um people sort of building their own way of doing it through claw projects and stuff for a while. This is where it gets really interesting for digital agencies is that the difficulty of development to at least get uh an MVP up and running or PC is uh is dropping rapidly through these kinds of tools. And so the cost of maybe bringing on an AI automation specialist from the Philippines or something and having them as part of your internal team uh could open you up to not just the sort of more narrow delivering on essentially what I see is things like a pointwise and others where they're boiling down the specific use case to a software that basically anyone can use. I see that as kind of like the Facebook ads manager moment for AI where you've got these kind of three layers of code, right? If you wanted to build value with AI, it'd be starting off with as even I was initially is building with with custom code. And so you're writing Python, whatever language you choose to build these kind of systems, traditional development. And then on top of that, there was no code and low code where you've essentially abstracted a lot of that to these nice little colorful bubbles that you drag around, but there's still quite a lot of knowhow and connection of different tools. But that's how you get kind of the appointment set that was made on a couple different platforms and sort of was running many chat and uh you might have uh what was it flowwise I think flow was one of the back ends people used but now you have this final iteration which is like you don't even need to necessarily know how to do no code and low code automation like it's basically a six-month self-development like personal development course to really learn a automation and get to the point where you've done maybe a few personal projects and done uh things for friends or done things for free but the final iteration is condensing of those specific use cases, the AI receptionist, the AI appointment setter, uh the speed to lead system, the list reactivation system, and distilling those down into easy to use softwares that essentially anyone could use like the ads manager if you're willing to like get in there. I remember getting into the ads manager for the first time when I was doing ecom and I was like, "Fuck me. This is I don't know how I'm going to figure this out. This is like really overwhelming. " The amount of buttons and tabs and the business manager is just like layers and layers of accounts and business managers. So overwhelming. And you could liken that to a lot of other like going into make. com it's just as overwhelming maybe a little bit less than their business manager but if you look at something like a pointwise and others that's it's distilling that down into something that is now accessible to basically the masses. And so that's I think the opportunity for these agencies to get in there whether they're using that and then maybe they have on the side of it as well their Filipino AI automation dev who's using text to workflow for more custom stuff. I think it's just a really good time to be getting in because delivery has never been easier. Um, I think is kind of the take away from that. — It'll get to a point where I mean, dare I say, you don't actually need developers. — Oh, we're going to clip that. You're going to get a lot of heat for that one. You just got all their smoke in the comment cuz man, I when I got into it, I'll let you do the disclaimer after. Yeah. You go. when you don't need developers to achieve the goal outcome of creating a business that's going to make money and you're going to start an agency, AI agency, you don't need to be a developer to do that. Would you need certain things within the advanced stuff within the AI industry? Of course. But if we're talking about creating a vehicle that's going to make money as an agency owner, you won't need that knowledge. You just need to understand problem solution. — The point then becomes what do you define as a developer? Because like that's obvious are we saying if you are a no code develop like is that a developer right now like if you know how to use make. com or NA10 like is that developer? So I guess the line at which you draw that counts as a developer because right now if you're if you come in as a complete newbie you learn nad or make. com and you figure out how to deliver AI automation solutions on that. Um technically don't need a developer but you have learned development skills. Um but then if you go on to an appoint wise or something and you are building creating value through that like you would through an ads manager does that make you a developer tool because you're still technically developing soft software in a way you're you're architecting and planning them in your head about how you want it to function. Um I suppose you're a generative AI like mostly prompting it prompt engineering is mostly the the technique there. Um so it's interesting where that line of developer would be. Yeah, I think that only matters in a world of ego and identity because so I say this is something that's quite close to home. My dad is a senior software engineer. I built computers as a kid have done my entire life. I built my first website on HTML. I learned py a bit of Python. I'm no I'm not a developer at all. Never would identify as one. My dad is and he knows every computer language there is under the sun. He's an incredible developer. I've had this de debate with him a hundred times over. He refuses. This is an old man who now refuses to use AI because AI isn't real AI. It's just a predictive model and blah blah blah. So I've been on either side. My younger brother is a web developer who custom codes and so on. And we I've gone I think it's a debate of identity and ego. I don't think it really matters whether it's defined as developer or not. Of course, there is always going to be a an honor to understanding the art of how something is done and how and I know I can very much imagine how frustrating it is for true developers to see — tools and solutions being created on something like lovable where the code is so [ __ ] messy like there is no structure and no there there's no honor to that but it is still only identity and ego unfortunately that is coming into that — but it doesn't make it wrong. Yeah. — Yeah. No, that's 100% right. I think um it would [ __ ] you off. It would really and people saying that they are and people and just like where that line is being drawn people saying that they are developers and it's like mate you build like on NA10 and you've like learned a little bit of Python like — oh of course — we are not the [ __ ] same bro like there's different beasts like — um I suppose there'd be like a marketing equivalent of that or like a creative equivalent of that where it's like an artist who's like done digital art by hand for a long time now there's these digital artists with AI and it's like you don't know [ __ ] mate but — you don't know what I had to to understand what I know and you just see black for white whereas I see everything else that came to make that thing. — Yeah. But I suppose that's them missing the chance to really realize that their expertise gives them an incredible advantage still to this day. Like experts who are AI enabled are the most valuable people with this tool the stuff right now. So the designer who really understands design from a like uh fundamental um position, they're going to be much better at getting the outcomes they want. they can better direct it. It's like I really focus when I'm teaching people development and teaching people how to like vibe code or do software composing, whatever word you want to use. And in the course I've done here on YouTube, we taught from the ground up. It's like you need to learn the vocabulary. You need to understand how the stuff works under the hood so that you can describe to the AI what you want to happen. Like uh I want a database with these tables, one, two, three tables with these sort of um columns and I want it to have uh these particular uh this backend set up. I wanted to have these different API endpoints for us to run the connect to the front end. Being able to be very descriptive about that and same thing goes with basically everything with AI these days um is really where the value comes in. So — yeah, the output is only as good as your understanding of what good output is in the first place. — Yeah. Back to your point on what sort of started that the developer thing, I also do agree that to get a 10 $20,000 per month business, the need for actually technical experience, which is what I've kind of been screaming from the rooftops for years, is uh is like really vanishing. Um if you want to work with the biggest companies in the world and do custom AI integrations and build systems that are really going to maybe push them forward in their industry and really give them ridiculous competitive advantages. Yes. And I can tell that firsthand from being at Morningside. You do need good developers to really be and like you say, there's a lot of custom stuff. There's a lot it's not super easy to integrate a lot of the time when you're building custom. But if you're look just looking to make your first 10K 20K per month, taking the stuff that's already working and I keep I always get the question like there's so much AI news, there's so much new stuff coming out, I just can't seem to keep up with and it's an overload. I don't know what I should be learning, telling my clients to do. I always say like I think of the AI space as like a city kind of like floating off into the distance and down on the ground is everyone. Uh all of the business owners, us, most people in their jobs, employees, and you're essentially as an agency, you can be kind of a conduit that connects this thing that's rapidly floating away. It's getting further and further away and the ground's not moving. Um and you can connect between the big companies and where the tech's moving all the way down to the people on the ground. But that can be using the most basic LLMs that came out two years ago basically or just like checks completion. The technology that came out so long ago is still needing to be integrated to into a lot of businesses. So you don't need to be everything that's new is by nature experimental. The newest models are going to be or the newest tools and stuff that are coming out. The AI the AI SDR that's going to go out and like do all the lead generation and outreach for you. These things are quite experimental. Whereas if you go, okay, I'm going to be able to build you a speed to lead system or list this reactivation or an ARI receptionist. These things are a lot more standardized and understood now. And that's really where you should be looking. If you there's still millions and millions of businesses who need these things that have been identified as valid AI solutions that companies are buying and also getting a lot of value from. So block out the noise, block out the news in a lot of cases and just really focus on um on the stuff that's been selling for a long time. — Agree. I think people always obsess over like what the nervous thing is. you just you only have to look into your local area and count the amount of businesses that are using social media and running Facebook ads and we're talking like 15 years on from like a boom or something like it's not about like what is the latest greatest service that I can offer in the space it's like what do people fundamentally need and even looking back like there are still companies that have that are great companies making great revenue that have terrible websites that have terrible CRO and don't serve purpose so it's like not about the newest thing it's like what which of the things actually solves the biggest pain for people. — Yeah. And I think with AI just massively slicing the cost of delivering a lot of things. I've made videos recently whether it's uh it's going to them and figuring out a AI creative generation system that's allows them to say if it's a restaurant or uh any kind of local business using AI for like if you just come to them with a system that's going to say I will get you more image creatives or I'm going to get you a tons and tons of like really nice high quality like Fortune 500 looking uh creatives and you're selling it to them. I will give you so much more for so much less and so much less time than any other kind of creative agency could. Um that's an opportunity. Then you've got say websites I you can literally in the age of AI if you're looking to really get off the ground is you can do the thing and before you even sell it to them right I can go and if I can find a local business with a shitty website I can go and in maybe an afternoon use uh use v coding tools to create an initial prototype of something that looks a lot better and would function you could say hey it's going to convert better because of these reasons. you can go and show it to them and even if like they can see the proof of result right then and same thing goes for anything image or video as well and this just really opens it up too and I don't think a lot of people really realize this but there's so much more opportunity to uh make the sales process a lot easier and getting those first closes when you can show them the result um because of the time savings and also the offer itself and the service you're giving it is going to be in many cases faster and cheaper than what they used to work with. you had a little nugget in there which is really valuable to reh highlight and it's uh and I've seen this a lot because I get and you probably get this all the time you get pitched by people in DMs all day every day which is great because I get to see like the latest pictures of people coming up with — um and we recently signed on to an agency who pitched me in the DMs and the reason why I did is like they they're pitching on a service and I the services are relevant but then they created a snapshot thing and they said oh by the way I've already started working on this thing and they sent this thing over to me now I know that somehow and I don't know exactly what tool they've used. You can probably see it and know exactly what they did. Um, but they, — you know, there's some funny business going on. Yeah. Oh, — there's something going on. They created this thing and I'm like that would normally take someone like a good couple of hours to get started with and I'm like, no, this is actually banging as well. It's like those outreach strategies if you're like an AI agency or whatever agency you are like where you actually prove the thing in the first place. I mean, you know Lucas from Hamby Media, don't you? So, um, you've met Lucas. Yeah. Are aware of Lucas. One of their best strategies for getting like the biggest clients or was for getting in the e-commerce space was just on Twitter. They would just generate creatives and they didn't do this with AI but you could now do this with AI. You they generated if I if we were to manage this ad account this is what the ads would look like and then that brands are coming to them because they can see that preview whereas yeah I think there's very sophisticated ways to do that with AI now. It's just such a nice — such a great acquisition strategy. Yeah, I always believe that the and part of what I used to kind of try to get clients over the line a lot of the time is these technological revolutions as like when the market gets shaken up. It was very difficult leading up to like end 2022 for or a company to like use social media to rapidly like climb up the ladder and like leaprog like the dental guys that you've mentioned have done. But when the new technology comes and shakes up the industry, that's when people can really climb up and it's the people who are able to use outreach strategies and acquisition strategies like that are able to climb up. Um there's just a small window for people to really like see the future, bring it into like the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed is the quote that I like to go back to. And that is the future being here using like pre-made outcomes for your clients in your outreach and your acquisition funnel. um now rather than waiting for that to be sort of mainstream and you've lost all the like — novelty of it. Right. So — it's the ultimate evolution of that uh autogenerated loom video strategy that — Yeah, I was just thinking about that. — Yeah, there was always something fishy going on with those on you could tell. — Yeah. Or like Lemlist put some We got a bit of paper with someone's name on it. — Yeah, — that was the OG of that. — Yeah. Oh man. Um that was fun. Um, love to catch up with you as always. If you guys aren't already in and in touch with Jordan, following him, I'll leave his details down below. Um, do you have any last minute words of encouragement to the agency owners going into this tumultuous period? — Developers big up. Respect. — Yeah. It's like my dad's a developer, so like — I'm like please my dad got raised by a developer. I'm one of you. — Yeah. Oh well, sweet man. Um, yeah. Thanks for coming on, mate. And I'll talk to you soon. Cool, man.