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Emily Hatton, founder of AI in Agencies, explains why most agency founders are using AI wrong, how to build an AI OS that actually embeds into your operations and culture, and what changes for the founder once it's working.
Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone, today I'm joined by Emily Hatton. Emily is the founder of AI in agencies and also runs the female founder AI space. Before founding her own practice, Emily was head of operations at Webtopia, a digital advertising agency, which means her perspective on AI comes from having actually run agency operations, not just consulting from the outside, Emily built a proprietary AI OS framework that embeds AI into operations services and culture. I wanted to have Emily on because most agency founders are either ignoring AI - yes, there are still some agencies ignoring it - or more likely they're experimenting with it like randomly, and they're not actually making progress. Emily's approach is different. It's systematic, ops first, and it's built around making the whole business AI ready before any tool actually gets installed. In this episode, we discuss the biggest AI mistake agency founders are making right now. What AI ready operations look like before any tool gets installed. How to build team capability with AI instead of replacing it, and more. Lead gen is the hardest part of running an agency. For most, it's unpredictable, it's slow, and it's usually expensive. GF flips that. It's the all-in-one growth platform that turns your existing relationships and client work into a steady pipeline. Gia automates lead gen follow-up and content, and it's all from the work you're already doing. You can check it out and get some free bonuses at getgia.ai/dynamic agency. And now, Emily Hatton, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is Agency Forward.
Speaker 1 1:57
What is the
Chris DuBois 1:58
biggest AI mistake that agency founders are making right now,
Emily Hatton 2:04
so what I see when I'm working with agencies, and a lot wider, through talk on LinkedIn or through networks, is that a lot of people are using a lot of AI, so they're buying new tools, or they're using AI in their existing tools, but there isn't really a plan for an agency on how to use it, so with other tools previously that people have used, people make a decision as an agency or as a department head on what to bring into the agency, and with AI it just seems to be kind of not led by leadership, so AI has kind of sneaked into every agency, and leadership either don't know, definitely don't know what is being done in the agency, and in some cases I don't seem to care either, because they don't seem to have an interest in getting a handle on it by just kind of letting it ride down the agency, and it's a huge mistake, not only because of the risk side, which is obviously a big part, like letting people use whichever tools they want to do any of your processes is a big risk, and it's happening across the agency world all the time, but also in terms of wasted opportunities, so you're having everyone across the agency repeatedly experiment with the same things, and not share any learnings, and not share any best practices, because everyone's just doing, trying the same tool, and saying, hey, great, I got these results, nothing happens with that outcome, and then someone else is doing exactly the same thing, so actually AI at the moment is costing agencies a lot more time than it is saving them time, because no one within the agency is actually taking a hold of it, so the biggest mistake people are making is not kind of putting something more rigid, such as a strategy, in place with how they would like to implement AI within the agency and across which processes.
Chris DuBois 4:06
Yeah, I mean, I got so many thoughts now. This
Speaker 1 4:10
is
Chris DuBois 4:11
gonna be a great episode. The I hadn't even thought of, like in the past, right, when we want to adopt a tool within the agency, there's a full process, like what we're doing, like a project requirements doc to like, how are we going to implement this, like what are we spending, how many seats, all this versus like all right, everyone just has access to AI, like I can go pay for a $20 account and have full access to this tool, so now everyone's just doing their own thing, because it's so accessible, yeah, unless we treat it with it like as if it was a tool that we're bringing in, kind of in the old style way, it's like, yeah, this is just going to be chaotic. What I guess, what's the what's the first step in solving for that?
Emily Hatton 4:53
So I think the main thing is, like, I think it's really scary that agencies are allowed. Allowing it to happen in terms of everyone just doing things in their own way, not only because of things like data protection risk, like not knowing where your data going is going, is a huge risk in itself, but in the fact that you couldn't confidently say as an agency how things are being done in the agency at the moment, like you couldn't say how it's being produced, which tools are being used to do that. And three years ago, probably in two years ago, you could have done, you could have said the designers use this, like we use this for reporting, whereas probably what's happening now is you don't know what everyone is doing, which I think is quite scary. I think, particularly if you're in the leadership team, that you don't actually know how this is being produced, and particularly if you are in a pitch process or a client ever questions you on it, then you have risk, but also risk aside, which is like the kind of operational kind of business wise, like that is a risk, but apart from that, you're wasting so much time by people just doing things in a different way, whereas there's reasons that you, as an agency, make decisions on how things are done and which tools are to be used. Don't allow everyone to choose their own project management platform and just do things their own way. You say this is the way the agency does it, and this is the way that you are doing it with us. There should always be space, and now more so, probably space for people to bring forward suggestions and a process to implement things quickly. So, like, if someone finds a new tool that does things like way better. You should have a way of people being able to bring those ideas to the table, to the relevant person, whether it's head of department, head of bots, whoever leads this for you, but which should be faster than it was previously. It shouldn't be some like long-winded procurement process that you only change systems like ever so every so often, but it needs to be checked. It needs to be like that's great. Also, that'd be useful for other teams. Also, we could use this in other processes, because it would be great for that. Someone needs to have an interest in making it work across the agency and know what's going on and what's being used.
Chris DuBois 7:20
Yeah, yeah, something, so the simple math right behind, like, I think a lot of companies, as soon as AI came out, they realized, like, you can be 5x more productive by using AI, and so they, they took their team of five and brought it down to a team of one, and they're like, boom, now I have the same same output, but in reality, it's like that team of five could have been 25x you know, by just keeping them together, but then if they also adopt like that mentality of like, hey, let's actually share what we're working on together, that that 5x is probably more like six or 7x because now, like, I'm learning something that you didn't have to go learn, so we can get a better output, and so, like, even just that mindset of like sharing across the team, for like, is there a system that you would install in order to make sure that people are finding those insights and sharing them appropriately.
Emily Hatton 8:12
So I think it's usually in agencies there's some people who are like much better with adopting new things and interested in AI than others, and it's not usually the leaders, like usually there's some people in each department or on each team, which, like, who are really interested in, like, you know, just naturally drawn to finding new tools, finding new ways of doing things, and and this is where I think agencies need to shift a bit, so if you think of like a standard agency structure, whether it's like a head of department or a team lead, and there's people under them, I think there's kind of a new rising person who adopts AI more quickly, who probably isn't the best manager could be, but probably isn't. It's like a different skill set who can get people who can see how things should be done differently, and how they should be done better, and how the agency can do things like better for design or better for reporting, and they can explore new tools, find new ways of doing things, and share it with the team, like alongside the team lead, for example, and the best thing to do is to harness these people, so to get those people and use their skills, which is a bit different to the previous leaders that we've had within teams, like you need leaders who are excited about AI and about adopting new things, because those are the people that will move that part of the agency forward and agencies need to like embrace that, not not try and shift it into the existing leaders, they need to find people who have got this new skill set that has emerged, which is different to something we've ever had to adopt before, and like we. It a role around that, I think that's where we'll be in like two to three years, that we'll have this new role, which is AI lead or something like more interesting than that, but you know, like that, that does that job basically.
Chris DuBois 10:13
Yeah, so it's almost worth having like a like a VP of AI, I guess. So I think it was a.. I can't remember who said this. I'll, I'll figure it out later. But it was like structurally within, like, a business, and you could use this in an agency. Usually have, like, department heads of, like, this is our, you know, VP of marketing, or so and so. But, like, what if you also had just a VP of a certain skill set, so someone who might not necessarily want to be, like, leadership in regards of like having to delegate all the tasks and make sure that people are doing things, but like if you had a VP of copywriting who just like they decide how we do copywriting and like that's their skill set, they're really good at it, so they they own this department, or like department, right, air quotes for everyone just listening, but like having a VP of like AI, I guess could be like something powerful, or head of AI, I guess.
Emily Hatton 11:03
Yes, but I think even within like each area, right? Like, so like you need experts in it, like there aren't necessarily.. I mean, you eventually would need a head of AI, but in kind of a small to medium size agency, you just need this, like, slightly more senior, whatever role, see, like with embedded in each department, because, because there's so much of it to look at and to do, and and it's not a one job that you review the tools that you're doing and it's finished, like this is something that has to be consistently done in agencies, because new tech is obviously constantly emerging, so if you just say, "Okay, great, so we've reviewed our tools, done, that's done for the year. No, like it won't work like that moving forward. So, you need to have people in the agency who are consistently having this mindset to be able to adopt these things for processes and improve what they're doing.
Chris DuBois 12:03
Yeah, so one of the studies I was just looking at from Agency Corps, they, they, one of the questions that they asked was around, like, what basically what is stopping you from achieving your goals as an agency, like, for I mean, they had one fascinating piece where it was like almost every agency knew what strategies they needed to be running, but then over 50 something percent of them weren't doing it. They're like, they just said, "No, I'm not doing this strategy, even though they know exactly what they have to do. And so, when they went into, like, "Oh, why aren't you doing that? One of the big things was like resources, like I just don't have the time and the team like ability to be able to just go in here and knock it out, but with AI one would assume we do have the resources now, right? You should be like 5x more productive, and so I guess just what's your take on like how we have access to all this technology yet we're not able to actually, you know, do more, or I guess I don't even know if that's the right question. Like, yeah,
Emily Hatton 13:08
I mean, like, like, I mean, AI exists to assist kind of anything you want, basically. You know, like, anything you want to speed up, you can likely. There's something that serves it, the what happens in reality is that AI is great at some things, and it's not so great at others, and obviously, if we said AI is amazing at everything, all agencies, yeah, business, so it's not true that AI is amazing at everything, AI is really good at some things, but it's not good at other parts, and the agencies that understand the strengths of AI and where they should be using it, and where they need to keep their strategy, keep their thinking, like, and keep their knowledge, and use AI to speed up the things that AI is great at, so AI is obviously amazing at research analysis. It's great at, like, you know, whatever, like easy things, like putting together good-looking dots quickly, like, you know, the things that agencies shouldn't be wasting time on. You need to get AI to do those things for you, and then what you can really focus on is what you actually need to be good at as an agency, which is like the knowledge of your teams and your understanding on what you do with other clients and all this stuff, and you need to get all that information together and apply it using AI, because now you can get that information and apply it and do like a better job with AI than you could have done just doing it manually, so you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses, so you can like, I don't want to say defend yourself, but you need to understand it, so that you can comfortably say we charge this because. Is like, okay, you could do this with AI. You like, you, mr. Client, could do these things with AI. What you would get is, for example, like with a design. Yes, okay, you can create your own graphic with AI. Great, try it. You try it and see what it looks like. It will look okay, like it will look okay. But what we will do is our designers are trained, they understand how to prompt whichever tool you use really well, so it's actually like, I mean, creating graphics is difficult anyway for people who aren't trained on how to do it, so the designers need to learn really well how to prompt AI, so that they can produce outputs more quickly, and there'll be lots of steps ahead of a client doing it themselves, but also they're applying like design knowledge, which, whichever version of AI use knows some things, but it doesn't have the personal application and knowledge of experience, it's just got like a data set of what has existed before, which helps once you've got an expert to also help you apply it. Then it's like an amazing combination,
Chris DuBois 16:11
right, which gives more credence to the idea of having those experts within your agency to like for each different skill.
Chris DuBois 16:18
Yeah,
Chris DuBois 16:19
and there's also like a we can use AI to speed up what we're trying to do, but like when that expert gets their hands on like a great designer can prompt AI to make something, and then they pull it into their own, like Photoshop or whatever, whatever designers are using these days, and then they do manipulate it right and do all the things, but they didn't have to spend all the time creating it from scratch the same way, like you could outline this article for me, or give me a draft, and then I can go in and just make it my own
Emily Hatton 16:51
with AI, obviously, like it's not creative, so using like graphics as an example, it's based on a data set of already existing things, so you will never get like an original thought or original creative idea from AI. So, if you want that, which a lot of people expect, these like, you know, amazing original ideas, you, there is.. it's not possible, so that is just out the window anyway, and you need experts to come up with those creative visions and ideas and things anyway. What they can do is obviously get to an output much faster than doing it manually, you know, in Photoshop or whatever, because actually once you've got like a good version, you can easily make, you know, like duplicates of it, and things like really quickly, because that's much faster now. That's great, but, and, and also, designers should learn to utilize it better, because it's allowing them to spend more time on the part that's more interesting, which is the greater part, rather than on kind of the boring manual tasks of like changing colors or like applying brand stuff, like they can, they can use AI to help with all the stuff that is boring and kind of non mentally challenging, and they can use their expertise on the stuff that is worth spending the time on.
Chris DuBois 18:18
Yeah, one of my clients right now is web design and he's built his own tool so that he can quickly get their like the brand kind of guidelines and stuff just built out as one in one fell swoop and then he can then pull it into Figma and manipulate everything he needs to and like it's working great but so like awesome use case for exactly what you're saying.
Emily Hatton 18:42
Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Chris DuBois 18:43
but going back to the no original ideas, I've had a couple ideas recently where it's like I'm going back and forth, like I'm talking through something that I've been thinking with AI to try getting it to like pull more of my thoughts out, so I can like, I don't know, make this more concrete, and and I get to the end with like something good, and then I go somewhere else to like research that idea, and it turns out like everybody else has already thought of this, like yeah, it was like five other people, and like AI was just trying to convince me it was original with me, but it's like, but if I went and like use that in my content, like guys, look at this idea I thought of, like everyone would be like actually no, right,
Emily Hatton 19:19
and it'll probably make it worse for you, because probably I mean it is good, as it is good as like a thinking challenging partner to, to like help with ideas, idea you know, to bring an idea forward, you know, like if you have a new idea and then you want to turn it in something else, it's good for that, but it will bring in additional, like areas that might bring it down, I guess, like to a level that is more mediocre, which, of course, is always the risk of AI, because it's always going for the highest probability average, so it's always going to bring it down to like what it thinks you want to see, or what most people. Want to see which
Speaker 1 20:01
is
Emily Hatton 20:01
like ends up being mediocre,
Chris DuBois 20:04
right? Yeah, I want to shift gears to talk about your AI OS. Can you give me the give me.. let's start with like quick pitch.
Emily Hatton 20:13
Okay, so for I developed an AI operating system, because what I found, so my background is in business operations, so I'm very like process and operations minded, so I was working as a business operations consultant with agencies, still do, but what I was finding last year in 2025 is obviously there was so much discussion about AI and agencies and all the clients that I work with at the time were very interested in the area, and they all had on their goals, I want to implement more AI in my agency, all of them. So, like, so I was like, great, that sounds great. So, what I, I said, like, why, what's the purpose, what are you aiming to achieve with this? What's what's your idea of implementing more AI? So, what I was doing with each of my clients kind of naturally was setting goals for the areas that they wanted to introduce AI. So, the same way you would with making any kind of like process change, what are you trying to achieve by making that change, so like breaking it down a lot further into what's the point. Do you want to increase outputs? Do you want to decrease time? Like, what's the purpose of introducing AI in this area, you know, or like reduce the number of people you have working on it, because you feel like it's whatever it is, you need to set a goal on it, so, so I did that, and then what was happening in other agencies I was talking to was they were kind of just dumping tools on the team, and obviously nothing happens, because, like, they give the team a tool, the team kind of play with it, and then nothing happens, so it's the same thing about setting goals, about what you're expecting to achieve through using this tool to address that process, monitoring it, and saying, are you doing that, so measuring it, are you achieving that thing you want to in the set period, say over a month, two months, did you get what you wanted to get to with that goal? If not, what's the problem, is it training, is it like the tools wrong, is it the process? It's not the right use case for it. So, for each of these uses of AI we were introducing, was it working? So, for anyone who knows the OS, it's kind of a similar framework to that, or like still is kind of part of that framework, and so I kind of developed an operating system for implementing AI within agencies, basically, and I thought, okay, so you know, this is really helpful for other people who just want to actually measure some business impact and say where they're introducing AI, how it is actually benefiting the business, so for an art person, for a founder who's really involved in the business processes, they should be measuring this and not just adding on to the team's already usually high workload by dumping tools on them, put something proper in place, set goals for it, it motivates the team as well to see like what's working well encourages you to try out other tools or see what to do next, because you know what's working well. So it's a framework to support that, really.
Chris DuBois 23:32
Yeah, so what would you say, like, an AI ready agency would look like,
Emily Hatton 23:43
I mean, I think all agency AI ready, but everyone's ready for it.
Chris DuBois 23:48
I just made up that term too, so like you just take it however you want.
Emily Hatton 23:51
So AI red, I mean, everyone's ready to use AI, like AI, like moving into AI competent or someone who's kind of delivered like using AI well, it's if they're measuring it, to be honest, which like hardly anyone is, so it's if it's actually making a difference your business or the parts that you're using it in, so otherwise, How how you measure, how do you know if it's working well or not? Like, you need to measure it through speed, output, quality, obviously is a big one, because it doesn't matter if you're getting a load of outputs and they're all not good. So, there needs to be the quality check in there as well. And AI can obviously help improve quality of outputs as well, because if you learn how to properly wow, and if you learn to give it all the right information when you're creating something, you can create actually better outputs than you would do manually. So, it's great. So, the ones that are doing good job, they just have to show how it has, like, it should be improving your profit margin, it should be. Me, if you're using AI well, it should be improving your profit margin, because you should understand where you're losing money through inefficiencies, and therefore be able to make changes to improve that, so you should be able to have a profit impact on your profit margin in a fairly short space of time,
Chris DuBois 25:19
right? So, all right. This is a this is coming from some personal thoughts I've been having. I have always been just like a productive person, and using AI has made me way more productive. Like, so I basically just installed it into the systems I'm already doing for myself, and I do way more. Like, I'm probably adding an extra week of work every given month now.
Emily Hatton 25:42
Okay,
Chris DuBois 25:43
but results haven't necessarily increased with that productivity, right? Like, I'm still getting the same ish results with client, maybe a little better, because we're able to do more now.
Emily Hatton 25:55
Yeah,
Chris DuBois 25:56
volume play, but from the pure, just like quality, like we are getting exponentially more leads, because we're doing so much more work, and stuff like that hasn't shifted. Are you seeing that across like your clients?
Emily Hatton 26:14
No, honestly, like I think results have kind of improved, like in terms of
Chris DuBois 26:19
just me, got
Speaker 2 26:20
it, but I'm sure, like,
Emily Hatton 26:26
I think, because if you, if you are like kind of more purposeful about how you implement it, then you are reviewing it more regularly, what, how to improve it, and I think the thing is, like, probably what you've done, which is, which is right to make things more productive, but you need to have some kind of measurement, like, you know, whatever is a scorecard, whatever it is, to say, what am I trying to achieve with this? Okay, so which metric is not where I need it to be, so what do I need to change, is it the tool that I'm using isn't good. Okay, so like, let me review this with some of my peers, see what they're getting, see what the problem is, and it's like, in terms of, like, I know performance results, AI tools isn't the only what you're using with AI isn't the only factor that will affect results, so I'd say, like, directly AI isn't like what they're setting goals in for AI to do is positive, whereas it might not be that the results overall have improved with AI, because there's other factors, not only what you're using AI for. Does that make sense?
Chris DuBois 27:39
Yeah, yeah, you're reliant on the market to response to the AI, so at some point it doesn't matter how much you're pushing out, how much content, everything, like,
Speaker 1 27:50
yeah,
Chris DuBois 27:50
until it's to get in front of the right people who you know take the right action and everything, so
Emily Hatton 27:54
yeah, but if you're looking at, but what AI should be doing, for example, like, is if you need to get ads, ads ready faster, or if you need to be able to iterate more quickly, whatever that is, like, and your goal is to improve that. AI will likely help with that, but AI is not likely to overall like it could do, and hopefully it will, obviously, with like all the stuff that is doing, obviously, there'll be big advancements, and there should be more developments in that, but at the moment I think people just need to get handled on now. Where should you be using AI, and where should you be implementing your part? Because if you speak, if you are using AI in the parts where it's really strong at the moment, you can spend more time on the strategy and therefore improving the results, you know, like yourself, because you're not wasting time on whatever, like, like, you know, bringing out manually, or whatever it is,
Chris DuBois 28:47
right? And I think a lot of people, especially when AI just came out, a lot of people were trying to, like, outsource to AI the stuff that they're uniquely gifted at. Yeah, like, if you're a content agency, they're like, 'Let's get it to create all of our content. It's like, yeah, but people are hiring you for that, right? What if it could do all of the stuff like that you don't necessarily need? Like, you have to do it. You have to do this content brief, and you got to do the research, and you get.. and it just gives you everything you need to now focus more on doing your job. Is there, like, I guess.. do you have a way of like outlining, hey, these are the things that we should still have humans doing, because it's what it's the main thing, right? We shouldn't outsource the main thing,
Emily Hatton 29:30
yeah, yeah. I mean, all I mean, always like nearly always what they're like end user see. So, an example, so I tend to, with some agencies, like we look at the four operating system, and some would kind of break, you know, break it down into processes, so for like lead gen, new business for agencies, like there's lots of places that you can use AI to speed certain parts up that people find a drag, but what people tend to be doing. Is using it to write the message that, that, like, you know, the outreach message by email, which is literally the worst part, you could use, like, use it fully in, so, so, but what, but you can use it in all the other parts that the end user doesn't see, so you can use it to find better ideal clients for yourself, so do research on, like, you know, these are the best clients I have, these are the dream clients that I want, like, find me, look, look at likes of this, like, and give me, like, more specific, you can do, like, great research on who you should be targeting and why, you can use AI to help float to that, you can use AI to help with analysis on what's worked and what's not, so if you've got like a data set on what has had replies in the past, you can also feed in like from wider research what works in terms of like messaging and angles and stuff like that, you can put all the stuff about your brand to come up with some great messaging angles and like give you ideas, and and then you need to do the part, which is like the outreach method, so right now kind of more personalized outreach method, you can use AI to draft it, but you should be like writing most of it yourself, because that's the part that your kind of personal take on things, and you're the reason that you are the right person for the job is that important step, so you spending the time on that rather than all the other stuff, which can all be sped up using AI and can give you good results better than you're doing manually. Then spending the time on that part, which is the part that will get the outcome that you want, you know, like, that's that's the part, so, and you can do that through all parts of the business. It's just breaking down, like, and, and what agencies aren't doing at the moment is they're not making decisions on it, and that's what's causing a problem, is that they're just like letting everyone experiment, but actually it's stronger as an agency to say, yes, we would like to use it here, here, and here, and this is why this is where you shouldn't be using it. This is a decision for the whole team, like you shouldn't be using it to do x. Like, we're happy for you to use it to draft comms, do analysis, like pull this reporting. However, what you must do as an account manager, what you know, whatever media buyer, you must check the reports yourself and check the commentary, and make sure that it's, you know, like there's certain steps that are different now with AI that you need different steps in the process. You don't need to necessarily write the commentary from scratch, that's kind of a waste of time,
Speaker 1 32:38
but you probably
Emily Hatton 32:40
should rewrite some of it, like you should write it from your language, you know, whatever it is, like you, and you need to check it, because, as we know, AI isn't always 100% accurate, so, so, like, it needs to be checked, because that is still coming from you and the agency, so you cannot pass that off and say, well, someone else wrote it like it's unacceptable, so the agencies need to be more definitive about going through each part of the process, like the department head with the team, where it's useful, where they've had good results, where you shouldn't use it, and what additional things need to be done. Now people aren't using it, so that everyone, everyone's on the same page, basically, with youth,
Chris DuBois 33:25
right? So we're gonna, as we start to wind down here, what, what question haven't I asked you that I should have about agencies using AI, I
Emily Hatton 33:40
Um, I think that I think the thing that I keep coming across, which, which people seem to like miss, is like the wasted opportunities, like I think people just I'm missing so much by just not taking control of it, so like, just so I mean, the question is, you know, like, where could people get more out of AI, and it's that it's like having some structure around it, like, people aren't optimizing it at all, like, at all. I hardly see any agencies doing this really well. If you're not, if you haven't got a structure, and people don't understand where they should be using AI versus where they shouldn't be, you can't really justify yourself as an agency and where your expertise lie, which puts yourself at a huge risk in the future, as things develop, so if you haven't got like a stance on that, that's a big risk, and then also like, like we said at the start, just having all these people doing different things across the agency is a huge waste of time, and it's like a huge waste of resources, with people just each learning the same thing again, again, again. Whereas all that knowledge could be like shared and safe, so people need to change the structure of how you share things. It needs to be way quicker than we did before, and, like I mentioned, like one solution is to have some people leading this. That's a great solution that can share that with the team, and if not, you need to come up like shared them in forums like spaces, so that people can do this stuff, and people like it, and you should also encourage your employees to be involved with this, like they need to be interested and learn about it, because they will have to, so whether they're with you, whether it was someone else, you should be proactive, employer saying, hey, get on board with this, like we want to do a great job, you should as well. So, yeah, so I think that's where people can optimize AI. There's so much opportunity, don't just like go after every tiny thing, like put some structure in place, measure the results, see what you're achieving, share that with the team, and it motivates everyone. And then you can actually say, "Hey, great, we have managed to do this with AI this year. We've managed to get these results. We managed to, like, you know, whatever it is, like, set yourself some goals and achieve those goals through using AI,
Chris DuBois 36:19
right? All right, you just gave me another follow-up. I've had some clients who they're trying to get their team to use AI more, and essentially some of the team members are saying, like, yeah, we're using it, but, like, in reality, they're not, because they're worried about losing their job to AI, right? Like, they, they're going to do what they are told to do, but otherwise they want to show that, like, they are the reason that this project, or whatever assets, are still being created because of them. What's your advice to an agency owner who wants to make sure the team understands, like, no, this is just part of life now, you're not going to get fired for using AI, like it's not going to replace you. How do you approach it?
Emily Hatton 37:02
So, I mean, that's where it's good for leadership to take a stance on it, and take, and you know, take it seriously, because the more you talk about it, and the more you say, like, this is a part of what we're doing, that encourages everyone on the team to get on board, and to be honest, like, in quite a brutal way, like, you should be honest with your employees, and say, like, look, you are professionally damaging yourself if you do not get on board with this, not like, I mean, in a, you can do it in a much nicer way, but everyone is professionals in the workplace, and so what I would never want to, you know, say, "Oh no, that's fine, that's a great idea. You know, why don't you keep doing things your way? If I was a good manager, I wouldn't say that. I would be brief, so I'd say, like, "Look, we can help you. What are you scared of? What can we do? Like, AI helps you with the stuff that is a waste of time for you. Think like, think of it that way, we're not trying to take away your creative abilities, we're trying to take away the staff that is not a good use of your time and leverage your creative abilities more, so actually say at the moment your job is 50% great and 50% boring admin, it should be more like 75 80% creative thinking time, 20% admin, because that's what AI will do in your job, so you should be able to do the things you like more, but that is reliant on you being on board with it and understanding it.
Chris DuBois 38:34
Awesome. All right, I could, I could keep going with questions, but like, I love this topic, you're awesome to talk to. Two last questions, though. What book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Emily Hatton 38:49
So it's a boring one, and not boring, but like maybe people know. So it's traction. I loved Traction by Gino, and I just always worked to a lot of it, like, through, and you know, really structures my thinking. I think he's put together a great framework for agencies. I think every agency should read it. I don't think you have to follow it religiously, but I think it just gives, like, a really good structure for, you know, rapid smallish companies to follow, which really does allow them to get the goals that they want to, so I think, like, it's a great book for every agency owner to read, basically.
Chris DuBois 39:31
Awesome. Last question is, Where can people find you?
Emily Hatton 39:35
So I'm very active on LinkedIn, or I tried to be, so on LinkedIn, and yeah, and I on Substack as well, so I wrote a Substack, which I get nice feedback on, I think, and I got a newsletter as well, so yeah, so I try to share as much information as I can.
Chris DuBois 39:58
Awesome, Emily, thanks for joining, I'm glad we. Finally made this happen.
Chris DuBois 40:01
Yeah, thank you for having me. It's really good.
Chris DuBois 40:08
That's the show, everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits you. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to Agency Forward on Substack. You'll get weekly content, resources, and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward,
Unknown Speaker 40:24
you.
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