Your Team Isn’t Afraid to Adopt AI.

A few weeks ago, Meta confirmed that, as part of their AI adoption strategy, the company is logging employee computer activity, keystrokes, and using screen captures to train AI to use a computer the way a human does. When workers asked if they could opt out, the answer was no.

The reaction was exactly what you’d expect. Fear and outrage, and a deeply uncomfortable feeling of watching yourself become the training data for your own replacement.

The AI adoption fear quietly cycling through agencies is not that different, and I think agency owners need to understand it before they have the AI adoption conversation with their teams.

Agency employees and the owners who lead them fear that AI will eventually become good enough that clients decide they don’t need agencies at all. Why pay a team to run your marketing when a sophisticated AI can do it faster and for a fraction of the cost? That question is being whispered in the back of every agency owner’s mind right now, even when nobody’s saying it out loud.

And into that context, a lot of agency owners are walking in and telling their teams: “We need to get better at AI. It’ll make us more productive and keep us competitive.”

They mean well. But I doubt that pitch is landing as strongly as they’d like.

When the Efficiency Argument Backfires

Here’s what employees hear when you lead with productivity and efficiency: we’re trying to figure out how to do more with fewer of you OR how to squeeze more work out of you without paying you more money.

It doesn’t matter if that’s not what you mean. It’s what the words signal to a room full of people who are already anxious about their relevance. The business case argument for AI creates compliance, not adoption. Compliance is people using AI because you’re telling them to, and quietly hoping it just goes away when you’re not.

If you want real adoption, the kind where your team actually gets better and your agency gets sharper, you have to sell something different. You have to sell what AI actually does for people at a human level.

If it were my agency team, this is what I’d tell them to turn AI fear into AI excitement.

With AI Tools You’ll Never Be Stuck Again

In my business development consulting work, I’m regularly asked to synthesize enormous amounts of information and turn it into a strategy that an agency can actually execute. Sometimes the answer is obvious to me because I can see the agency in ways they can’t see themselves. Other times, I feel like I’m drowning in a tsunami, and I can’t find a stronghold to serve as a starting point. I’m stuck alternating my view between the blank laptop screen and the calendar counting down the days until the strategic report deadline.

That’s when I open Claude and ask it to brainstorm with me, or load everything into NotebookLM and ask for a mind map. The AI isn’t giving me the answer. But it usually helps me find a starting point, and once I have that, I can do what I do better than anyone else in the world: connect old dots in new ways to build something the agency hasn’t thought of yet.

That stuck feeling is one of the most demoralizing things that happens to smart, motivated people. It wastes hours and makes talented people think they’re not as smart as they actually are.

When you tell your team that AI adoption means they’ll never have to sit at a blank screen wondering where to begin, you’re not selling a productivity tool. You’re removing one of the most psychologically draining parts of their job. Lead with that.

The Meeting They’d Never Get to Have in Real Life

It’s usually not a great career move to admit ignorance or that you don’t have the answers.

A few weeks ago, I built an AI board of directors. Not a real one. A simulated one made up of hand-picked sales and marketing executives, each with a different area of expertise covering brand building, performance marketing, procurement, digital strategy, and a few other specialties. I gave them my website, my key landing pages and my product offerings, and then I asked them a question most business owners never get to ask anyone:

Am I doing this right?

I asked them to challenge my positioning and tell me whether my product strategy actually made sense. I challenged them to find the holes in everything I’d built. The funny thing is, I’ve been having that conversation for almost a week. They debate, give me their recommendations, and I stop to sit with it. In some cases, I agree; in others, I push back. Then they debate my response, and the cycle continues.

It’s been one of the most interesting and useful experiences I’ve had since starting my own agency in 2010.

But here’s why it excites me, and should excite your teams. I would never have that conversation in the real world. Not because those executives don’t exist, but because I’d never be able to get them all on the same panel to tell me everything that’s wrong with my company. Even if I could get a panel of people I know, civilized people are trained not to be brutal to your face.

Believe me, my AI panel doesn’t suffer that constraint.

As much as agency leaders try to create supportive office environments, most agencies don’t reward or promote people who don’t know things. Hence, employees don’t ask the basic question in meetings because they don’t want to look clueless, and they don’t share half-formed ideas because they don’t want them shot down in front of people who matter (YOU). So they nod, figure it out later, and later never comes.

The people on your team are silently desperate for a place to think out loud without it costing them something. AI gives them that, and trust me, the work that comes out the other side is better for it. That’s an AI adoption benefit worth selling.

The Thing They Were Never Allowed to Try

I have never written a line of code in my life.

Last month, I used Claude Code to build a native desktop app, available on both Mac and PC, that helps users move from a blank screen to the first draft of a blog post in about 10 minutes. The app has seventeen built-in frameworks covering everything from Contrarian Take to Personal Story. The user picks a framework, answers a series of questions, defines their writing style, and hits submit. The app writes a first draft in their voice.

When one of my clients asked for new features, I went back in, added them, and shipped an updated version. I didn’t hire a developer or buy software. I built exactly what I needed and iterated when clients had better ideas.

Most people in agencies have spent their careers being one kind of person, whether that’s a writer, a designer, or an account manager. They know their lane and stay in it, but many of them wish they weren’t so narrowly confined.

AI makes the walls between roles more permeable. Your copywriter can build a rough prototype, or your account manager can spin up v1 of a blog post. They’ll still need their expert teammates to finish the job, but they can now play in spaces that were previously off-limits. Best of all, occasionally they’ll offer up a big idea the experts would have missed. And THAT psyches people up in a way that “increased productivity” never will.

The Cost of Failure Just Changed

As a small agency and now as a consultant, opportunity cost is my #1 decision-making variable when it comes to time spent.

I’ve used Nimble as my CRM for years and love it. But there’s always been one feature it didn’t have: the ability to track contacts on my website and log which pages they visited directly in their activity record. Unfortunately, the kind of feature you normally have to pay out the nose for by licensing a tool like HubSpot. And fiscally conservative Tom was just never ready to pony up that extra dough.

Until I built the app. After I saw clients using it and loving it (one called it a content marketing cheat code 😊) I thought: why not try? I set a three-hour deadline. If I wasn’t close by then, I’d abandon the effort and get back to building my newest client’s Perfect Pitch.

Long story short, I used Claude Code to build the feature and integrate it into my Nimble instance. Now, when someone fills out a form on my site, every subsequent visit creates a note in their record showing which pages they visited, how long they stayed, and the order in which they consumed them.

I would never have attempted that before. Not because I couldn’t imagine it, but because the time cost of trying felt too high. The internal negotiation always ended the same way: not worth it. Move on.

AI changed the math. When trying is fast and cheap, the calculus of “is this worth attempting” shifts dramatically. People start things they’d have previously talked themselves out of and start taking swings they’ve always dreamed of taking.

And when that starts happening at scale… you’ll see your team culture and AI adoption change faster than any workshop or training day ever could achieve.

Here’s the Agency AI Adoption Pitch That Actually Works

If you’re an agency owner trying to get your team to adopt AI tools sooner rather than later, stop leading with efficiency and competitive pressure. Those arguments are true but also terrifying to a room full of people who already wonder if they’ll have a job in five years.

Lead with this instead: AI is not here to replace what you do. It’s here to give you capabilities you’ve never had and amplify the ones you already have.

Show them what it feels like to never be stuck at a blank screen again. Let them build an AI board of directors and have the conversation they’d never get to have with real people. Invite them to try something they were never allowed to try before.

The agency owners who win with AI aren’t the ones who mandate adoption. They’re the ones who make their people feel like AI opens up a world of tools and possibilities they could only dream about, and then get out of the way.

If you’re an agency owner trying to chart your AI adoption path, come back next week for the third and final installment in this AI Adoption series. I’m going to focus on the dark underbelly of AI adoption and the very real threat it poses to the future of strategic thinking and agencies as marketing partners. And if you missed the first installment, The Real Reason AI Adoption is Taking Off… go give it a read.