Is AI Convincing Your Agency Clients They Don't Need You? with Devon MacDonald | Ep #924

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Do your clients show up to calls with AI-generated strategies that are mostly wrong, and you then spend half the engagement correcting their assumptions instead of doing the work? Have you had clients who used to trust your expertise now question everything, armed with a chatbot and a YouTube video?

Today's featured guest is an agency owner who came up through programming, crossed into digital strategy, ran creative and media operations inside major holding company networks, and eventually went independent in search of the entrepreneurial freedom that corporate agency life could not offer. He goes into what AI is actually doing to the client relationship and what it means to train a team that can think rather than one that just produces faster.

Devon MacDonald is the president of Cairns Oneil, a Canadian media agency serving clients across North America. His career began in computer programming in the 1990s, working in HTML and SQL for clients in sales and marketing before moving into digital strategy and eventually running a creative agency and then a media agency network inside major holding company structures.

Five years ago, he went independent. He built a cross-functional AI team at his agency that includes both technical and non-technical members, operating from the belief that consumer insight and cultural understanding matter as much as data fluency in how AI gets applied.

In this episode, we'll discuss:

Clients who have decided AI makes them the expert

Is the funnel dead because of AI?

Will this skill disappear once we've completely stopped using it?

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Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

The Problem With Clients Who Have Decided AI Makes Them the Expert Devon knows there was already an education deficit in marketing before AI arrived. A generation of performance marketers came into positions of influence having skipped foundational thinking around brand, audience, and strategy. AI compounded that gap by giving them the ability to produce high volumes of output that look credible but are built on