AI isn't a strategy.
Every agency in the country added “AI services” to their site in the last twelve months. Most of them mean one of three things and pretend to mean a fourth.
What they actually mean.
One: we use ChatGPT to write blog posts faster. This is true and not a service. It is a productivity tool. Charging for it is charging for a calculator.
Two: we resell a SaaS chatbot. This is reselling. The margin is real, the work is small, the differentiation is zero, and the client could buy it themselves in four hours.
Three: we built a Zapier automation between two of the client’s existing tools. This is genuinely useful. It is also $400 of work, not a $40,000 retainer.
What they pretend to mean is “we will architect the AI transformation of your business,” which is a sentence you can say at a conference and not at a kitchen table.
We do AI work. We just do not sell it as a strategy. We sell it as the cheapest way to fix a specific problem the client already has.
A senior care company that was losing two hours a day reading discharge paperwork from the local hospital. We built a parser that pulls the relevant fields into the CRM in seven seconds. The client got two hours a day back. The build took us six hours.
A bookkeeping firm that was answering the same fifty client questions over and over by email. We built a knowledge base, fed it to a model, and routed inbound emails through it as a draft response the bookkeeper accepts or rewrites. The bookkeeper is now answering twice as many emails in the same time. The build took us four hours.
A community management company with four properties whose maintenance request ticketing was a chaos of voicemails and a Google Form. We built a single intake page that classifies and routes by property and category. The build took us a weekend.
In all three cases the conversation started with a problem, not with AI. We did not pitch AI. We pitched fixing the problem and used AI as one of three tools to fix it. The other two were a database and a bash script.
If your agency is selling you AI as a service category, ask them what specific problem they are using it to solve. If they answer with a problem that already exists in your business and that they understand in detail, listen. If they answer with “transformation” or “the future of marketing” or any sentence containing the word “leverage,” do not buy what they are selling.
AI is not a strategy.
It is a screwdriver.
We have a lot of screwdrivers.