AI Made Our Agency Better — And Harder To Run transcript

The biggest advantage AJF Growth is creating for our clients is our creative process, our creative messaging. I'm convinced that is true and it's happening not just because of the ideas that we have, but because of the way we are building those ideas into an AI tool that helps us turn those ideas into actual ads. First, the level of copy and scripts and briefs and then at the level of increasingly video generation, design generation, etc.

Holy cow, it's a big job though. And I want to tell you today another updated thought on sort of how AI is playing out in our business and how I think you can learn from it in yours without falling prey to the hype of AI is going to make everything [music] super easy right now all the time cuz it's not true, but it might be over some more time. Let me explain. >> [music] >> I've talked about it before, but so much of the AI content you see is from people selling you something about how easy AI is going to be.

And uh holy cow, that's just not true. In my experience, AI has made the act of running an e-commerce agency drastically more complicated. Uh is is really really hard. Um, and that's precisely because what AI has done has opened up so much capacity to do things and therefore the limitations are basically endless. So now you have an opportunity selection problem because you know should we use AI tools to make a AI avatars for our ads?

Should we use it to generate AI images that people are talking about? Should we use it to um I I don't know, you know, write scripts, write copy, design images for us, like what is the right way? Build reports. Like there's just all of these different things that you could possibly do. Um and and so there's an opportunity selection problem right away. But secondly, um on top of that, it it doesn't actually work as easily as people think as people say.

Okay. So um so first of all like if you're just using claude chat GBT Gemini those kinds of things to create the kinds of things you want to create uh you know those those things can do really amazing stuff really fast but if you have no process with which to integrate them into your workflow there's a thing that happens which is that you suddenly start sort of going back and forth between AI tools for different things ad hoc or not and maybe you are awesome at using AI in your daily process and using it as sort of a co-pilot in your life uh but I guarantee you, you got team members who are not because I am not uh a person who thinks that way naturally.

And uh I'm still getting better and better at it. And so then you've got people who are not naturally great at integrating this kind of tool into their lives and maybe they're just going to fall behind or whatever and you just need to hire away from that. I don't know. But that's a whole problem if that's the case. And in any case, like if you if you're getting to a point where you're trying to integrate those tools, now you've got people using these tools in all kinds of different ways.

They may be they may be bad at it. The expectation for their output is growing, etc. and it just ends up creating a bunch of comp complexity in the business. And I think that's a real problem and is really hard. Um, the other route you could take here is to go buy AI powered tools that do more of this for you and simplify the act of using AI because prompting is hard, building context is hard. Um, but then which AI tools do you use?

And and you know, your experience is probably the same as mine, which is that so many of the AI tools out there are just like so full of overpromising and underdelivering. things do not work as quickly and as regularly as you expect. And so what happens is you try to go generate some kind of an image or a video or a piece of copy or whatever it is. Then you got to go change it five times because you did it wrong, etc.

And that last thing I said right there, uh, by the way, that that process of changing things then ends up creating a whole bunch more time output. So now it takes longer than it did before or maybe you didn't save very much time and also you didn't like the work as much or whatever. That process there is the thing I actually want to focus on for a minute because here's what we're experiencing at AJF Growth right now.

Um what Patrick and I are experiencing as Patrick my COO and and partner in the business like as as we're what we're experiencing right now is a division of labor where I am doing a few things. Okay. I am like uh you know whenever there's bisdev kind of things to do whether it's selling ads on this podcast or or generating um clients that's kind of primarily my job. There's uh some client work that I still do, very very little of it relative to what I used to do, but some client work that I still do in the day-to-day.

There's um you know making content like this, which takes a long time and and all this stuff. There's just sort of like broad business conversations that eat up time and um you know, advising clients and doing some coaching, all that kind of stuff. It a lot of different things pull on my time all at once. Well, Patrick, his job is operations and process. So if I'm on the sales and then sort of some of the delivery of the work side and working with our team to deliver really high quality output at the level of messaging and strategy and that kind of stuff.

Well, what is Patrick doing? Well, Patrick um is a COO who's building process for us. And in 2025, that means he's building AI first process. And the bulk of where his time has gone over his time in AJF growth has been building out something that you've probably heard us talk about called Prometheus and Prometheus and now Prometheus Pro. um is our AI coowwriting tool and it's much more than that but it's that's sort of the foundation of it that takes our best ideas and turns them into scripts um and takes our best ideas about what makes an an uh uh an ad work well.

Okay. And so it turns those into scripts. The thing is that sounds so simple for AI to do. You're like great. Throw it in chat GPT. Throw it into Claude. Get a script. Okay. Go ahead Claude. Write me a script about how this product is whatever. But go do that. Just go do the thing I said. Just go prompt AI to write you a script about, you know, about some product you're working on and tell me how good the output is and tell me if that is really a pathway to generating high quality, high performing ads for your for your brand or your clients at scale.

And I will just cut to the chase for you. It is not. It is not a way to do this because what actually powers really really high quality ads and really really high quality AI output is context and uh and context libraries for AI tools. If you [snorts] are the kind of operator building processes to make your brand work better to generate more value in the things that you're doing, you are the kind of operator who should be using Intelligjee.

Intelligence is all about helping operators pursue [music] excellence in their business. real focus on not only growth but profitability generating high cash flowing profitable businesses by testing the traffic that comes to their site beyond the basics. So what I mean is it's very easy to think about uh intelligence as like a simple CRO tool and if you're thinking about it that way you're thinking about it wrong. It goes way beyond all of that by allowing you instead to test the things that really move the needles in your business by integrating deeply into your business's financials and your business's website so that you can test the things and measure the things that really move the needle.

Like an example of what I mean is testing pricing. Uh you should be thinking about uh price tests for your products because it has a huge impact on your margin and on your conversion rate and on your AOV. You should be thinking about testing sitewide offers. This is like my favorite use of uh intelligence actually is like the 10% off that you give new customers. Should it be 15? Should it be 20? Should it be a stack discount?

Should it be nothing? Uh well, you should test it. You should find out by testing it to learn the answer to that. You can actually um fully tie into your Shopify theme in a way you could do an actual full Shopify theme split test. [music] If you are thinking about doing a full website overhaul, like you're just crazy if you do that full rebrand redesign and don't test it first because I've seen a lot of them go badly a lot of times to where people build rebrands and it actually makes the whole experience worse for customers.

[music] Menu changes so that uh merchandising changes, uh free shipping thresholds, shipping charges, there's all of these things that are impacting your customers relationship with your business. And if you really care about building great experiences for your customers that are also valuable for your business, you should use Intelligence to test those things before you do it, get real datadriven answers to your questions.

Um, and of course, it can handle the simple basic uh regular CRO testing that you need your CRL tool to do as well. So, you don't need another tool for that kind of stuff. It also is very easy to install, very, very quick. You don't need a developer and you can get 20% off your first three months by using the code ferris 20 f a r i s20 to get started with intelliggeems today at intellgeems.io. Almost forgot to say that part but there it goes intelligence.io f 20.

And [snorts] so there is so much work to be done on getting the AI tool to do the thing you want it to do. Now once you've done it, it does incredible work. So we have a bunch of AI written ads and scripts and things like that that are working great for us on meta ads that are spending money that are growing clients businesses or are part of the growth of clients businesses that are that are um you know helping us produce a high volume of ads fast.

The process repeatedly breaks and repeatedly requires some you know lubrication of different points of the gears you know but uh but it it's it works. I mean it works really really well. But I I mean the idea that it was going to be easy is just nonsense. Patrick has been hammering away. So the main source of the main place where his time is going, right, is it's going towards sitting down and working with Prometheus to keep getting it to where he wants it to go by continuing to to rework the context.

Now, I just will tell you that I I just can't speak positively enough about how much I've come to see the value of a great partner in a business. He's been amazing to work with in all these different things. how much value he adds beyond his time and stuff just because he's so talented and so good. Um, uh, a partner with complimentary skill sets but shared vision, shared goals. I mean, there's there's countless future episodes of this podcast about those things because they're really important.

But for now, the thing I actually want to focus on is something interesting about Patrick, which is that he came from uh, uh, you know, he had built previously built and sold an e-commerce business. So, he understands that world really well. But before that, he was an engineer. He was working in aerospace engineering and now he hated that job. Okay. But what that tells you still is a certain kind of skill set. And what does an engineer do?

They build systems to produce out produce things, right? They they build u they build systems for things. And and so an engineer's mind applied to AI creates incredible output. And especially when you combine that with what I think my core skill set in this is, which is sort of like idea generation and and discerning truth about what works and what doesn't and sort of articulating that truth in document form, podcast form in this case.

Uh, you know, people have responded really well to this podcast for a long time to to do that. And so and so the first thing I want to disabuse you of or first thing I want to first thing I want to do here is disabuse you of the notion that it's going to be so easy to build your AI tools that build your never- ending ad machines. Okay? There are some little things that people do and and that can go really fast. But my goodness, it has been an incredible amount of work led by a guy who's actually like got an engineer's mind powered by, you know, knowledge that I've brought to the table that he's brought to the table from a whole bunch of years between the two of us.

We've got something like, I don't know, 20 years working on e-commerce brands and and growing e-commerce brands and uh sort of every step of or from from every perch of the industry and and of the process. So, there's just a bunch of stuff like that that's going into this and it's a huge job. And so the first thing I just really want to to point to is that before AI makes your life easier, it might make your life a little harder because there's so much work to do to get it right.

Um, and you need to know that before you go build AI tools to to do things. Now, the second thing I want to point out is once the job is done, it is not done because two things are happening all the time in the world of e-commerce, in the world of of um of AI tools, both. Okay. The first is the one of the reasons it's not done is because the AI tools are always changing. They're always learn you there's new stuff that each tool can do all the time and uh and every month there's some update somewhere with a tool and so how do you stay how do you build a tool that you can build uh your process on top of while at the same time constantly updating the tool to do something better.

People who have built software businesses or something like that might have easy answers to this question, but I've never built a software business and neither is Patrick. And so it is really hard to stay up on that. The moment you see all the Sora 2 clips that are doing all that are so cool, there's this question from from us internally and from clients and everything else as Patrick and I talked about on the last episode we recorded that's like, okay, how do we turn that into ads right now?

How do we do it? You know, and uh and it's not that easy. It's really hard because of a whole bunch of reasons. And so the the tooling itself is changing because the the AI tools are changing all the time. Secondly though, as also anybody knows who's worked in e-commerce, the brands are always changing. First of all, you got to be able to add future brands to the thing. Okay? So, so Prometheus needs to be able to do two things at the same time, right?

First, it needs to have a whole bunch of context about what makes a good ad. Okay? And so we've done a bunch of stuff to get there. And there's a whole library. We call it the AJFG like um creative playbook. Okay? And that's like our holy grail document. You will not get that document from me uh you know ever because that we think that's like a lot of the ways the secret sauce and like working on that all the time is the most important thing.

This is where I think like you know I've talked about this idea a lot right that an agency is operationalized knowledge. Okay, that's the part of the knowledge part of this um operationalized knowledge in the sense that like that creative playbook is a combined work of me and Patrick that has our best ideas about what makes creative work and has tried to turn those into context that our AI can use and that of course we can read and update and work in all the time but secondly besides that right there's another thing which is that the brands are always changing as I said so what happens when a brand wants to do a product launch well you need to be able to tell your AI coowwriting tool in this case, okay, about the new product.

You need to be able to tell it all the information it needs to be able to write good ads about that. And that requires your AI tool to have some way of plugging in to an ongoing updating sheet. Now, this is much easier updating set of context. Now, this is much easier than it used to be when you had to just upload PDFs the whole time, right? when you just had to upload PDFs the whole time. This is a really big challenge because the only way to go make an edit was to like change a PDF into you know a cloud project or whatever it was and and go and like uh uh you know download change something re-upload export PDF whatever now now we've built everything in notion and so now what do we do we maintain brand playbooks alongside our internal creative playbook or like brand manifestos alongside our brand um creative our our our uh internal creat creative playbook.

The two of those together in the context of Prometheus and now Prometheus can speak to both at the same time. But that updating work is also extremely hard and requires a bunch of ongoing efforts. Okay? And if we want to come up with new ideas and if we see new research or something like that at either of those levels, we have to do that. On top of that, there's new ad formats we're adding all the time, there's new, you know, so it's just an endless job.

And that means building a foundation that is easy to update over time. And so first there's like hours and hours and hours and hours of work from Patrick on doing that. Okay, and that's the operationalizing the knowledge part, right? On building the core tool. Secondly, there's the updating and keeping the knowledge fresh and using the newest and best tools whenever it's possible to do all those things. And when you put those together, you end up with a tool that's really, really good.

And now what I think we have is the beginnings of a tool that's just like unbelievable and can do all kinds of incredible stuff for uh for our clients and uh and it's getting better all the time. Now, now we're adding to it the ability to brief creators and brief influencers in the ways that we want them to and to identify and to fill out our briefs for us completely, right? And to like turn those into weekly plans for us and increasingly be able to have it do some reporting for us, but holy cow, it's a monster job.

And the notion that AI was just going to do all this super fast and super easy is just wrong. Maybe for the super tech AI wizards out there, like it's fast and easy, but that is just not the case for for the vast majority of us, I don't think. And I don't think most work is going to work that way because AI is still very capable of hallucinations. It still says things wrong. It still says I think one of the hardest things.

It says things that sound really smart but are actually misleading. Um you know there's there's uh all kinds of examples of that sort of stuff. And so wrangling it and getting it to do the thing that you want is really hard. I want you to think right now how much better your business would work if you uh had more margin or if you had lowerQS or if you had better payment terms, [music] you just had better quality product from better vendors, if you had faster shipping timelines from your vendors, uh all kinds of things like that.

There's a bunch of other stuff you could say in that bucket. Better relationships with your 3PL. Um, all of that stuff will make your business go from merely potentially break even or profitable or whatever to actually generating growth and cash flow by having a dialedin supply chain. And you can do that without killing yourself to go do it all by working with my friends at move supply chain. Move supply chain built supply chain for my business.

I'm just about to place my first PO like probably this week um for the brand that I'm starting. They shopped like over 50 packaging manufacturers for us. packaging. It's more expensive in my brand than the actual product itself. So, they did a whole bunch of work there to land on people's highly custom packaging. They shopped over they have shopped like 20 different manufacturers for uh the product itself as well. There's like so much I could say about doing that.

And what I can boil it down to is that I just know you have not gone and shopped that many manufacturers, sent that many many emails to uh to go and see if you've got those kinds of relationships dialed in your business to get the best possible setup for your supply chain. Uh, and so you should go to move supply chain, move supplychain.com, and get them doing that for you. Move supply chain is a supply chain agency, like an ads agency or something like that, but a supply chain agency that operationalizes their knowledge of e-commerce supply chains, which they built by working on US-based e-commerce businesses and having like years and years and years of supply chain experience across [music] all kinds of businesses.

You should go work with them to go and and rebuild your supply chain, be an extension of your team. And the beauty of this, or not rebuild, but just optimize your supply chain. The beauty of this is that they're based in the Philippines. So, they're also affordable and a very quick trip to China. So, if you're manufacturing there or in Vietnam, any places in East Asia, they can get there on behalf of your team really quickly, really easily.

Uh just all kinds of benefits. I just couldn't say more uh about how much I love working with Move Supply Chain and their sister companies. All of my businesses are built [music] around or both my businesses I should say are built with their help. Huge fan of everything they're doing. So, go to moveupplychain.com, just get on a call, tell them what your supply chain is like, and see if they can help you cuz I bet they can.

Moveupchain.com. It's affordable. it would make your business run better. Go check it out today. On top of all that, there's a third thing, which is getting people to use it the way you intended. That's really hard, too. So, the process part of this problem is its own thing because there's going to be a need for humans to interact with one another um about a lot of this stuff and think about prioritization and all that.

And um and as that happens, getting all the different people who are involved to use the tools the right way is like a process job. Anybody who's ever tried to train a team internally for anything and get them repeating your process knows that that is not easy. Um, but it's the critical thing. So, this is a shorter episode today and and that's really the whole point that I wanted to make. What I want to do is just note to you upfront those basic things and to help you think about how to use AI tools in your business.

I I increasingly think this is this is the thing that gets us from the trough of disillusionment in terms of the tech adoption thing where it's like you know people people talk about this notion right that like the you know the initial promise of new tech comes everybody gets super excited everybody starts working with the new tech you go to the trough of disillusionment where people suddenly are annoyed with the new tool and then eventually you get long-term adoption and uptake with it and I think we're getting to that point now and the key thing for me is is recognizing that um AI has this incredible ability to make your work uh more efficient and better and to create better quality output over time, but it requires a bunch of knowledge, a bunch of process, a bunch of work, a bunch of working with the machine to do it.

And what I really want you to think is to recognize is both of those things at the same time. It is incredibly powerful in your business, but and you should be thinking about ways to build it into your processes that help you first of all, but secondly to recognize as you go do that that you ought to have reasonable expectations for yourself in the timeline in which you can do it because I just don't think most organizations in our space are going to have the ability to just overhaul everything they do with AI super super fast.

Instead, it's going to require somebody's mind in your organization pairing down your best thoughts and best ideas into the things that actually make your brand work, okay? Into knowledge bases, into sets of context that can be given to tools of yours. And then it's going to be to build tooling with somebody putting a bunch of time and effort to getting that right so the output is actually good. And then from there, um, to to turn that into actual adoption over time.

All those things take time. You should have both of those mentalities at the same time as you adopt this stuff. If you do that, I think and you have a long-term vision in this respect. In this respect, the adoption of AI as this sort of like it solves everything problem, okay, is very similar or like your reaction to it, I think, ought to be very similar to if somebody came along and said, "Hey, I've got a way for you to make $10 million in a year and it's not even hard." Okay, you would you would respond to that claim with uh a whole lot of skepticism, right? you know that a get-rich quick scheme is probably a way to actually lose a lot of money really fast and it's probably too good to be true.

AI is incredible. Like you know obviously like I don't need to tell you that. I'm not not trying to downplay that even for one bit. It seems even silly almost at this point to even say that phrase because it's so sort of obviously true. But I think when people treat it like a get-rich quick uh uh get-richqu kind of thing, that's where it creates a bunch of problems for brands. And uh and I'll tell you like when I watch my clients use AI well, when I watch us use AI, well, it is on the other end of all of this time and context building and project building and all this kind of stuff that then allows you to actually do it.

Um and uh I hope you will have that attitude about it as you adopt it as well. Much shorter episode than usual today because this is a very top of- mind thing for me and for us at AF Growth and so I wanted to make sure to communicate. I think a lot of businesses are really trying to figure this kind of thing [music] out, being really um forward thinking at the same time, trying to sort out uh reasonable expectations at the same time.

So, [music] um that's where we're at and seeing incredible benefits from all of this and yet at the same time trying to set reasonable [music] expectations. Uh you should email me podcastfgrowth.com. You should go to ajfgrowth.com to see everything that I'm doing, including if you want to um work with me in any way, you can go fill out a couple forms there to to go get a conversation about that started. And uh and you should also of course subscribe wherever you're watching or listening.

Like this video, like this uh podcast, and leave comments. All those things really help me. I appreciate it so [music] much when you do that. I love interacting with you, too. So, so um please do all those things. Thanks so much for watching or for listening. I'll see you next time. [music]