How Agencies Are Actually Using AI In Marketing

About This Episode

Three AI platforms built in six months, including an audit that would take fifty people to produce by hand. Headcount did not drop. They just got a lot more done.

In this episode of SEO On-Air, host Koa Kauwe sits down with Jason Ciment (Get Visible), Andrew Melchior (Avalaunch), and Adam Taylor (Splendor) to find out what AI is genuinely doing inside agencies with decades of operating history between them.

The panel explores three honest answers. Jason says headcount has not moved, they are simply getting more done, and his team built an audit platform that produces a report he could not have hired for. Andrew frames AI as the first draft, useful for research, reporting narrative, QA passes and data reconciliation, but never the strategic judgment about what the draft should be about. Adam adds the hiring angle, pointing to an art director and former typography professor whose assembly work dropped from five days to an hour.

They also discuss why brands stopped buying deliverables and started buying accountability, the client who fired their agency for AI tools and came back saying the site was annihilated, why Jason no longer lists detailed deliverables in proposals, why the sales to fulfillment handoff is where quality breaks, the hiring pendulum swinging back from foosball tables, and the conversation that ends with telling a client they are undercapitalised by 80 percent.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

– Why AI has raised output without reducing headcount

– Why AI is the first draft and never the strategic judgment

– The audit platform that replaced fifty people of manual work

– Why entry level roles feel this first

– Why A players adopt new tools fastest

– Why brands stopped buying deliverables and started buying impact

– Why one agency stopped listing deliverables in proposals

– Where quality actually breaks down as an agency scales

– Why the hiring pendulum is swinging back

– How to tell a client they are undercapitalised

Whether you’re an agency owner, marketer, or deciding how far to lean on AI inside your own team, this episode provides actionable insights into scaling without losing quality, hiring for the current market, and positioning your agency on impact rather than activity.

Because AI won’t be what separates the agencies that last.

It will just make it far more obvious which ones never had anything else.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 Introduction to SEO On-Air & Meet the Guests

02:32 Why Brands Buy Impact Now, Not Activity

04:32 Why One Agency Scrapped Tiers Entirely

06:55 The Two Kinds of Clients & Why One Clings to Deliverables

09:13 Why Brands Assume Agency Costs Went Down

11:10 Why the Conversation Should Start With the CFO

15:05 How COVID Forced the SOPs That Made Scaling Possible

17:43 Going From One Employee to Eighty to Five Hundred

19:50 Where Quality Breaks Down as You Scale

21:05 Why One Agency Only Hires A Players

26:57 Overseas Talent, Cost Control & What You Lose

33:44 The Three AI Platforms Built in Six Months

36:13 Why AI Is the First Draft & Nothing More

42:43 Why He Stopped Listing Deliverables in Proposals

Three agencies, three models, one shared answer on what AI did not replace.