Prospects be shopping (Chris Rock voice). If it isn’t obvious by my reference, I’m a geriatric millennial navigating the tumultuous waters of being an agency owner in the center of the AI storm. A storm that is scaring the dog shit out of everyone. I, however, have mustered the strength to rise from the fetal position to bring some hope and perspective.
Prospects, from my vantage point, are in the same boat as us agency owners. Anxious, and wanting to make sure whatever choice they make won’t lead to unemployment in a dicey economic state. 52% of US workers say they’re worried about AI’s future impact on the workplace, and 32% think it will mean fewer job opportunities for them. We collectively feel our heads on the guillotine, and like the slightest misjudgment will wave over our executioner. Fear is never conducive to good decision making, but sadly these times feel scary.
With AI in our bloodstream, prospects want to understand why projects are being pitched as business as usual without the mention of the latest technology. Technology that should make things easier and cheaper. So why, they want to know, are we spending what we would’ve spent 5 years ago without this tool? A tool that should deliver anything with a wave of a wand.
Ironically, these prospects are also using AI and know how time consuming this tool can be to deliver something of quality. They know the frustration of constantly reconfiguring prompts that lead to keyboard wrath and all caps commands. Workday found employees spend 37% of the time AI saves them correcting, rewriting, or adding context to subpar output. Stanford and BetterUp found 40% of employees had received AI “workslop” in the past month, and each instance took 1 hour and 51 minutes to deal with.
We all know it’s far from perfect but think everyone else knows something we don’t. An MIT report found 95% of enterprise AI pilots showed no measurable effect on profit and loss.
Time we used to spend on first drafts now goes into prompting, reviewing, fact-checking, and fixing what the tool got wrong. We’re not alone in this. An Upwork study found 96% of C-suite leaders expect AI to boost productivity, but 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload. The thinking still takes the same time. So does the strategy, the back-and-forth with clients, and the judgment calls that make work good instead of passable. AI can get us to a first draft faster, but a first draft was never what clients were paying for. They’re paying for the final product, and the people who know how to get it there.
The importance of leveraging this piece of technology lies in the levers behind it. Who has the smarts to pull the right levers? To adapt, code, and create with this exciting but perhaps ominous piece of tech.
AI best serves as a junior employee. Hunting and gathering. Troubleshooting and aiding, but not something to depend on for innovation or creation the way the human mind can. There is a theory that when a person creates art, music, poetry, or literature, it can be felt beyond the piece due to the energy deployed into it. Walter Benjamin called this the “aura” in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Columbia researchers found that art believed to be AI-made inspires less awe than human-made art, and in turn, less empathy. We connect with the humans behind the work.
I feel this research speaks to the work humans do. We don’t want an agency that operates solely on AI, because AI doesn’t live in the human world. It can’t grab a drink with you, go for a walk, or experience this three-dimensional world we’re in. Reminding our prospects and clients of this is crucial. We still have our humanity, and we still need human connection. We need human creativity and inventiveness. Ingenuity supplemented and assisted by AI, not owned by it. AI doesn’t have vision. We do.
In the end, the better we understand AI, the better we understand where it fits, and the more we can celebrate the humans behind it and the value they bring. So yes, prospects be shopping. Just make sure they’re shopping for the people pulling the levers.
So where does Yellow Lion stand?
We don’t bill by the hour. We never have. Our clients pay for the outcome, not the time it takes to get there. So when AI speeds up part of the process, that doesn’t turn into a discount conversation. It turns into better work.
We build AI, we don’t just use it. Our lead developer, Fernando Diaz, came from Twitter as a software engineer. We build our own AI technology in-house instead of putting a new label on someone else’s tool. That’s the difference between having AI and knowing how to pull the levers.
AI does the junior work. Our people do the rest. We use AI for what it’s good at: hunting, gathering, troubleshooting. The strategy, the ideas, and the vision come from our team.
We’re a person-first business. Our clients work with people they know, who pick up the phone, sit in the room, and understand their business. AI can’t do that. We can.