For months now, almost every Agency Academy call has drifted back to the same subject. We sit down to talk about pricing, retainers, or a tricky client, and twenty minutes later we’re knee deep in AI again. Nobody planned it. It just crept in, one call at a time, until it was everywhere.
I wanted to write down what that actually looks like, because the public conversation about AI is either breathless excitement or quiet doom. Inside our community it’s neither. People aren’t waiting for some grand transformation. They’re quietly stitching AI into the dull corners of their businesses and keeping whatever works. So here’s a tour of how members are actually using it.
Winning the work
The first place AI took hold is the bit most of us hate, writing proposals. One member built an AI skill that drafts a full proposal for him. It’s cut his time dramatically, taken away most of the dread, and he’s winning a healthy share of the work that follows.
I’ve leaned on the same trick. I keep a backlog of past proposals for AI to refer to, which helps most with pricing, the part I find hardest. My own history turns a cold guess into something closer to an informed estimate. I can now produce a credible proposal off a single client meeting.
Producing the work
Once the work is won, AI shows up in the making of things. The example that made my own jaw drop was, if I’m honest, mine own. I sat down with a rough outline and a report, opened an AI design tool, and built a 53 slide deck, content and visuals together, in under two hours. I loathe building decks and I build a lot of them, so that one felt like a genuine shift.
I’m not alone.
- One member used AI to write both the pitch script and the proposal behind it, then poured it into a deck he was actually excited to deliver.
- A designer built wireframes she liked enough to start the real project with.
- Copy is being quietly reshaped too. I stopped asking clients to write their own content years ago, because it always came back wrong.
Now I take a few bullet points and run them through my own process. One member had the opposite problem, a client who delivered content four times too long and obviously machine written, so the sensible fix was to trim it with AI rather than start a fight.
The machinery behind the scenes
The most impressive uses are the ones clients never see. One member walked us through a system that still makes me slightly dizzy.
Every meeting recording lands in a database automatically. One agent pulls out the action points and transcript. A second mines that for blog, social and LinkedIn ideas, then runs each past a panel of personas who score it, and the scores feed a production queue. It’s an assembly line for ideas, built by one person in his spare time.
He also treats his whole archive of past AI chats as a searchable memory bank. Another person, keeps his prompts and skills under version control in GitHub. These are the habits of people who’ve stopped treating AI as a novelty and started treating it as infrastructure.
Not everyone has gone this far, and that’s worth saying. One member has automated almost nothing, and reckons his real value is helping clients agree what to fix. Another automated everything, drowned in it, then ripped out three quarters to make the rest usable. Both ends of that are fine.
Running the business
AI has crept into the back office too. I now upload my own financials, profit and loss included, and let AI help me make sense of them.
Others use it to sketch projections, pressure test their pricing, and untangle a project before quoting. One member even got AI to build him a browser extension that tracks time lost to social media and converts it into income lost, second by second. Half joke, half productivity tool, and only possible because building small custom software is suddenly within reach.
At the client coalface
The conversation is shifting from how we use AI privately to how it shows up in the work. One member is fielding requests from clients who want their websites wired up to AI, though she points out the technical side is rarely the hard part. Sensible guardrails are.
Security is its own challenge. Members have watched AI bring a new ruthlessness to attacks on client sites, and one suggested turning the same tools back on the problem to audit code for weaknesses. Meanwhile the platforms are racing to embed AI of their own, which will lift a lot of fiddly work off our plates while quietly threatening some maintenance retainers. The work isn’t disappearing. It’s moving.
The honest tensions
It would be dishonest to pretend any of this is friction free. The most common complaint in our calls is that AI isn’t actually saving time overall. It speeds up each task while tempting you to do more of them. One member keeps rethinking everything he knows, trying every process a new way, then reverting because the new way was slower. That whiplash is real, and it’s tiring.
There’s a creeping sameness too. One member reckons everything looks generic now unless you fight the defaults at every turn. And trust sits underneath all of it, from whether to feed sensitive financials in, to clients leaning on AI for awkward emails, to where the ethical line sits. The group keeps landing in the same sensible place. Learning the tools and choosing not to use them is fine. Refusing to learn them at all is not.
What I take from all this
The pattern is clear. The members getting the most from AI aren’t chasing every release. They picked one painful, repetitive corner of the business, pointed AI at it, and kept whatever worked. Proposals, decks, copy, research, each one started somewhere small and let the wins compound.
So if you’re wondering where to begin, don’t try to do it all at once. Pick the task you dread most this week and let AI take the first pass. That’s how everyone in our community started, and it’s how the useful habits quietly take hold.
Where these conversations happen
Everything here came straight out of our weekly Agency Academy calls, where a group of agency owners and freelancers work through this kind of thing together, honestly, with nobody pretending they’ve got it all sorted. That’s the real value of the place. It’s the difference between reading about what other people are doing and having a room full of peers help you work out your own next move.
If that sounds like the company you’ve been missing, the Academy is open at the relaunch rate of £59 a month until 6 August, after which it goes up to £79.
