Transcription
I have been running my own AI automation agency for 2 years now, consistently hitting multiple 5 figures per month. And I need to tell you something that is going to piss off a lot of people in this space. The skills that had originally got us here, they are all about to be completely worthless.
And before you think that this is some doom and gloom, let me just be clear that I am not saying the AI agency model is dead. I am instead just saying that the way that most people are approaching it, it's about to get them left behind and broke and wondering like, what the hell happened.
Over the past two years, I have worked with about a dozen different companies across various different industries. I have seen patterns. I have watched the market shift. And what I am about to share with you is based on real conversations with real clients who are making real decisions about their AI investments right now. And the uncomfortable truth is that while everybody is focused on learning the latest automation tools, the market is fundamentally changing underneath our feet and most people, they have zero clue or zero idea what is coming.
And here's the uncomfortable reality. So this is what nobody wants to actually admit: that the barrier to entry for AI automation, it is dropping faster than most people are actually realizing. Now, 2 years ago, when I started building a solid automation, it required genuine technical knowledge where you had to understand API configurations and web hook setups, error handling, data transformation, you know, just stuff that took real time to learn and master. And I remember spending entire weekends just trying to figure out why a simple Make.com automation integration just wasn't working properly. So there was hours of debugging and testing different configurations and reading documentation that might as well have just been written in ancient Greek.
But today, like, one of our 90-year-old clients can build a full functioning, end-to-end system, including automations in the front end. So if seniors who barely know how to use email can create complete business systems, what does that say about the value of technical expertise? So the platforms, they're getting more intuitive and the AI assistants, they're just getting better at writing the technical parts. And the drag-and-drop builders, they're becoming more and more powerful. Hell, you can literally describe what you want to chat. Right now, it'll give you a step-by-step instruction for building the entire thing. And what used to be specialized knowledge, it's becoming just a Tuesday afternoon project.
It's not just the tools that are getting easier. The educational content as well, it's exploding. YouTube channels, online courses, free tutorials. Everyone and their grandmother is teaching automation right now. And the information that used to be pretty scarce and valuable, it's now commoditized and just freely available.
Now, the warning signs are everywhere. And one of the biggest wakeup calls that we had as of late was when one of our clients, they're a midsize logistics company. And they just mentioned that they are looking to hire an internal AI automation specialist because they actually want to bring this stuff in-house, as do most other companies nowadays. This wasn't just some tech startup where, you know, they're going to be a little bit more advanced. This was actually a traditional freight company that has been around for about 30 years. And they handle, you know, anything from physical shipments to dealing with truckers, managing warehouses, about as non-tech as you can get.
So, if this logistics company is talking about hiring internal automation people, something fundamentally has shifted. But it's not just them. I'm seeing this pattern across multiple different industries. So, we have a dental practice that actually asked us if they could learn to do all of these things that we're looking to implement for themselves. And another local restaurant chain. They wanted to know like, how hard actually is this automation stuff? And they're always asking me about the technical like, nitty-gritty stuff, which we try not to really get into. But the point is that businesses that used to rely entirely on agencies or contractors, they're now asking questions like, "Do we really need to outsource this?" And honestly, the answer is getting more uncomfortable every single month.
And one of our other clients, they're just a small law firm. They told me that their 22-year-old intern built something with Cloud Code that replicated about 80% of an automation that we had charged them $3,000 for 6 months earlier. And I have no hard time believing them because we often use Cloud Code ourselves.
Now, this is the problem that everybody is ignoring. And this is what really concerns me is that most people teaching this stuff, they are still focused entirely on the technical side. So they're telling you to master N8N or become an expert in automation workflows or just learn all the API integrations. Every day I see new courses promising to make you an automation expert by just teaching you like, which buttons to click.
But now, with all that being said, like, there is a true purpose in understanding that stuff. But it's not, at the end of the day, like, in essence, what you should be learning. What you should be learning is to actually solve business problems, not just the technical. And you shouldn't be starting with the technical either. All of this stuff, all these teachers, it's like somebody in 1995 just telling you to become really good at using Microsoft Word because, and yeah, document creation is valuable, but also knowing which specific software to use and which buttons to click. That is what actually becomes relevant real fast when better tools actually come along.
And we actually learned this the hard way when a client just was showing us an automation that they had built themselves using some new AI-powered platform that I'd never even heard of. But it was the same functionality as something that I would have charged them several thousand for. And I mean, built it in an afternoon just using some natural language prompts. Now, the platform basically just let them describe what they wanted in plain English and it built them an entire workflow for them. So there was literally no technical knowledge required. There was no API documentation to read. There was no web hook configurations to be debugging. And all of this is just when we realize that the technical stuff is not where the real value lives anymore.
And here is the historical pattern that we have been seeing. This is not the first time that this has happened. Of course. So if you look at the history of technology, the pattern repeats itself over and over again. So in the 1980s, like, being able to operate a computer, it was a specialized skill that commanded premium wages where you literally needed training to use basic software. And companies, they hired computer operators whose entire job it was just knowing how to make machines work. And by the 2000s, computer literacy was expected of practically everybody. A specialized skill became worthless because the tools, they just got easier and easier to use.
And in the 1990s, just building websites, it required knowing HTML and CSS, maybe some JavaScript. Web developers, they were like digital wizards creating code by hand to actually just create online experiences. And today, anyone can build a better-looking website than most developers just using some drag-and-drop tools. Like, maybe it's using Webflow, Squarespace, whatever it may be. And it all, I'm just saying is, the technical barrier, it has disappeared. And the same thing has happened with graphic design, video editing, music production, and countless other skills that used to require specialized knowledge. And now it is obviously happening to automation.
So here is what clients are actually going to be paying for. And this is something that took us way too long to understand: is that clients do not buy automations. They buy solutions to their business problems. So they do not care about your technical expertise with specific tools. They only care about the outcomes that they cannot figure out how to achieve themselves.
So here's the important thing that you should be taking from this: is that they are getting better at the technical stuff, but they still struggle with something entirely else. And that is just understanding what actually needs to be automated in the first place. So most businesses and most business owners, they look at their operations and they typically just see chaos where they know that things could be better, but they can't exactly pinpoint, you know, what is broken or how to really fix it. They just know that they're spending too much time on stuff that feels like it should be way easier for them. And that's where the real value actually is. It's not in the building, it's in the diagnosing.
And before I actually share some more, I just wanted to mention that my free community where I break down exactly how I have built my agency and I share live case studies from real client work and a bunch of different other things. We now have a little over 12,000 members and it's all about just sharing what's working in businesses and helping each other navigate this rapidly changing market. So if you care to join that and that sounds remotely interesting, check it out. Link is down below in the description. We would love to have you.
So, here is the skill that actually matters. And this is what's going to separate successful agencies from the dead ones. And it isn't technical knowledge. It's business problem diagnosis and becoming what I call an AI transformation partner. And this is fundamentally different from being an automation builder.
So, an AI transformation partner. They essentially just understand business operations at a, you know, strategic level and they use AI to solve real problems, not just automate tasks. So let me just go ahead and give you a quick example. So we've been working with a professional service firm which has about 50 employees, give or take a few. They initially contacted me just wanting to automate their proposal process because it was taking their team, you know, hours to create custom proposals for each individual prospect. Now, their old approach, I would have just said like, "Great, like, I can, I can absolutely build you a proposal automation system using N8N, maybe Google Docs, and maybe some AI for content generation."
But a new approach that we take is we ask deeper questions about what was really happening with their proposal process. So where was the time actually being spent within their organization? What information was needed for each proposal? Who was involved in creating them? What happened after proposals were sent? And it turns out that the time-consuming part wasn't actually creating the proposals for them. It was just gathering all the information that's needed to create accurate proposals. So their sales team, they were going back and forth with prospects multiple times just to be getting basic project requirements. So questions like, "What is your timeline? What is your budget range? Who else is involved in this decision?" you know, stuff that really just should have been captured up front. And then even after gathering all of these requirements, different team members, they would still interpret them all differently, leading to proposals that didn't quite match what the prospect is actually looking for or wanted.
So, the real problem, it wasn't automation, it was their discovery process, through and through. So, they needed a better system for collecting detailed requirements all up front, not just faster proposal generation. So instead of building a proposal automation, I actually helped them redesign their entire sales discovery process where we were able to create structured intake forms and developed qualification frameworks and we even built some workflows to ensure that nothing was falling through the cracks. And as a result, what they saw from this was the proposal creation time, it dropped by more than 70%. But more importantly, their close rate increased by 30%, because they were having better discovery conversations and actually creating more accurate proposals. And with all that being said, the technical automation, it was maybe 20% of the solution. The other 80% it was just pure process improvement and a little bit of strategic thinking. And that is a $50,000-plus annual impact from what most people would have just treated as a simple automation project.
Now to get a little bit deeper into the AI transformation partner model. This is essentially where somebody just uses AI and automation as tools to actually solve fundamental business problems and not just making existing processes faster. So an AI transformation partner, they don't just ask like, "What can we actually automate?" They instead are asking like, "What problems are preventing this business from achieving its goals and how can AI actually solve them?" So they don't just build workflows. They redesign business processes to be more effective and then use AI to enable those better processes. And they don't just save time, they create competitive advantages and they unlock new revenue streams and they solve problems that previously could not be solved before AI existed. And this is what will keep you sustainable and relevant over the next decade. So the ability to actually solve real business problems with AI, not just build simple automations that will be commoditized very soon, is the answer for you. And how you can stay relevant.
So let's now just look at something I call the new value hierarchy. And essentially, this is broken down into a few different levels where we have level one. And this is just tool operations, knowing how to use automation platforms, whether it be N8N or maybe it's Make.com, Zapier, or any other workflow builder. But this right here, this level one, it's being commoditized very rapidly. Anyone can now learn this stuff. N8N has just released something very recently where you can just use natural language to create your automations and it's not perfect, but it very soon will be perfect.
Now, level two, this is just technical integration. So more or less just understanding how to actually connect different systems, working with APIs, handling any data transformation. Now, it's still valuable today and this is what we still teach today, but it won't be for long as AI gets better at handling the technical heavy lifting.
Level three, this is all about solution design. So just knowing what to automate and how to structure workflows for maximum efficiency. Now, I estimate that this is going to be valuable for maybe another 12 to 18 months before AI can actually do this as well.
Next is level four, which is problem diagnosis. So just understanding business processes and operations well enough to identify what is actually broken versus what just feels broken. And this is where the money actually is moving and where you should be focusing.
Level five, this is strategic AI transformation. So actually redesigning how businesses operate, just using AI as an enabler, not just automating existing processes. And this, this right here, is where the real value has always been and where it is heading.
So most agencies, they are competing at levels 1 through 3 and fighting over the same technical implementation work that's just getting cheaper and easier every single month. They're fighting for literally scraps. And the smart money is moving to these levels four and five where the barrier to entry is business knowledge and strategic thinking, not these technical skills.
Now, really quick, I just wanted to mention that if you enjoy this video and you want to see more content just like this, then please subscribe and like the video. It just lets me know that you enjoy this stuff and it really helps out the channel. But anyways, let's get back right into it.
So, what does this look like in practice? Well, let me give you an example that actually illustrates the difference between automation building and AI transformation partnerships. So we could look at a small manufacturing company that was looking to automate their inventory tracking. Now, it seems pretty straightforward. They were manually updating spreadsheets and they just wanted something that was a little bit more sophisticated. Now, most agencies out there, they would have quoted them on just building an inventory management system, maybe some API integrations beyond this and automated updates and fancy dashboards.
But when I and our team actually dug into their actual operations, we discovered the inventory tracking problem. It was actually a symptom of a much larger issue, which was that they had no clear reorder protocols. So there were different employees who were making purchasing decisions just based on gut feeling rather than the data. And their production manager, he was ordering materials when he felt like they were running low. And their owner, they would sometimes override those decisions just based on cash flow concerns. So the sales team, they would promise delivery dates without checking actual inventory levels. And sometimes they would run out of critical materials and have to halt production. Other times, like, they would over-order and tie up cash flow and excess inventory. And the manual spreadsheet tracking, it was just documenting all of the chaos, not actually causing it.
So the solution, it wasn't better inventory tracking. It, as a matter of fact, was just establishing clear reorder points and defining purchasing authority levels and creating visibility into the entire supply chain process. So you have to be able to think in systems. So what we did is we set up automatic reordering triggers just based on actual usage data. We also created an approval workflow for large purchases. And we built some dashboards that just gave everybody real-time visibility into their inventory levels and pending orders. And again, the automation, it just was the small piece of the puzzle. And the business process redesign, it was where the real value was created. So they went from having inventory issues every single month to having them maybe once a quarter. Cash flow, it of course, just in turn improved because they weren't over-ordering and production efficiency, it increased naturally because they weren't running out of materials. And the impact, I mean, well, it was definitely over $100,000 annually to their business. But most of it, it came from strategic thinking, not any technical implementation per se.
Now, here is the other major shift that is happening. AI tools, they're getting so good at technical implementation that soon, just describing what you want accurately will be more valuable than knowing how to actually build it. So, we are rapidly approaching a world where you can have a conversation with an AI system just about your business needs and it will design and build the entire technical solution all for you.
But here is the catch: that most business owners, they're terrified at describing what they actually need. They will say, "Automate our customer service," when what they really mean is, "We spend too much time answering the same basic questions and we on our team just focus on complex issues that require human judgment." So they'll say like, "We need better lead tracking," when what they actually mean is, "Leads are falling through the cracks somewhere in their sales process and we actually just don't have clear visibility into our pipeline." They'll also say things like, "Automate our invoicing," when what they really mean is, "We are losing money directly because invoices go out late and follow-up on overdue payments is very inconsistent."
And this translation skill from very vague business pains to specific actionable requirements. This is becoming incredibly valuable and it's not necessarily going to be commoditized from what we're seeing. And it's not just about translation either. It's about knowing the right questions to ask actually ask to uncover what is really happening within the business. So when a client does say they want to automate their sales process, I do not start building a sales automation. We instead just start asking relevant follow-up questions like, "How do leads currently enter your system? What happens to them after initial contact? Or how do you know when to follow up? What causes these leads to go cold? Or how do you know, you know, to prioritize which leads to focus on? What information do you need to close a deal?" So and so forth. And the answers to all of these questions, it reveals the problems which are often just completely different from what the client had initially described.
So here is the framework that's going to be changing everything for you. Now, I've started using what I call the Business Impact Assessment with every potential client. So tier one, this is all about efficiency improvements. So this is just making existing processes faster or at the very least easier. So it saves time but it does not fundamentally change any of the outcomes. So the value, I mean, it can be ranging anywhere from a few thousand to $8,000.
Now, tier two, this is all about cost reductions. So, you know, eliminating significant manual work or just reducing operational expenses. Now, there is going to be clear return on investment from this, but there will be limited upsides and the value from this, it can range from anywhere from $8,000 to $25,000.
Tier three is revenue enhancement. So this directly improves the business's ability to generate more money. Also, it captures opportunities that were previously missed. The values from this, it ranges from, you know, multiple five figures to about $75,000.
Tier four is competitive differentiation. So this is just creating advantages that competitors cannot easily replicate. Also, it changes the fundamental value proposition of the business. So the value of this, I mean, it can range up to $100,000.
Now, most agencies, they focus on tier one where they just automate the obvious stuff, the low-hanging fruit, and they should. So things like data entry, basic notifications, simple workflows, you know, where the work is just easy to understand and easy to sell, but the value is very limited. Now, some agencies, they work on tier two projects and this is just all about eliminating manual processes that are actually costing real money. So there's better value, but it's still mostly about doing the same things more efficiently.
But the real value, it's in tiers three and four. In identifying these opportunities at these levels, it does require deep business understanding, not just some technical know-how, technical knowledge. And these tier three projects, they might involve fixing, maybe it's leaky sales funnels or improving customer retention or increasing the average order values. But the automation is just the tool. It's just a vehicle. The value actually comes from understanding how to actually drive more revenue.
In tier four projects, they're about creating entirely new capabilities. So maybe it is enabling a service business to scale without proportional increases in their labor costs. Or maybe it's helping a manufacturer to offer customization options that competitors cannot match. Instead, they're business transformation projects that happen to just use automation as part of the solution.
So here's the consulting shift, and this is also where I think the industry is heading. It's going away from these automation agencies and towards AI automation transformation partners or just AI transformation partners in general. So this is people who happen to use automation as one of their tools among many others. And the most successful agencies in 2025, 2026, and, you know, up until 2030, they won't be the ones with the deepest technical knowledge. I mean, that will be, you know, a benefactor, but they'll be the ones that can walk into a business and actually understand how it really operates and identify the biggest opportunities for improvement and then designing AI solutions that may or may not involve traditional automation. And sometimes the solution, it will just be pure process redesign. So sometimes it'll be organizational changes. Sometimes it'll be technology implementation, but often it'll be some combination of all three of these things. And the technical automation, it will eventually just be one tool in a much larger toolkit. And this does require a completely different skill set than what most people are learning today. So instead of studying API documentation, you should instead be studying business operations. And instead of mastering automation platforms, you need to instead master business analysis. And of course, like instead of learning how to build workflows, just learn how to diagnose problems and design solutions.
Now again, if you're looking for help doing all of this and really just a way to speed up your learning process of running your own AI automation agency, that we are taking on just two more people to work one-on-one with myself and my team where we will literally handhold you to starting and growing your AI business and teaching you, you know, everything from A to Z, whether that's how to actually source and find clients or how to build out everything and build relevant solutions for your audience and much, much more. So, we do guarantee you that you will start closing clients within 30 days. And if you do not, we offer a full refund. But just to preface, this isn't needed to be successful. And it's really just a way to, you know, provide those to people who have been asking for this sort of thing and wants to learn everything that we've done and avoid all the mistakes that we had made early on and the best frameworks for success to building their business even faster. So with this, like we are very selective about who we work with. So again, that's why we only take on two people at a time. But if you are interested in that, the link will actually be to apply down below in the description.
Now, let's look at the real-world application. And this is where I'm just going to be giving you one more example to make this very concrete. So, recently we had worked with a regional accounting firm that was struggling very much with client communication. So, what they wanted to do was essentially just automate their client update process because their staff, they were spending, you know, hours every single week just manually sending these progress reports. So our traditional approach, it would have been just to build an automated reporting system that pulls their data from their project management software, you know, and in turn would just send regular updates to their clients.
But the new approach that we were taking about this was figuring out why the client communication was actually such a big problem. So through conversations with their team, like, we just discovered that clients weren't complaining about the frequency of updates. They were actually complaining about the quality of these updates and the manual reports that their staff were sending. They were very generic project status updates that didn't tell the clients what they actually wanted to know. So things like, "Is my project on track? Or are there any issues that I need to know about? Or what do you need from me to keep these things moving?" And the real problem, it wasn't anything to do with automation, anything related at all. It was just that their staff didn't know how to communicate effectively with their clients about any of the project statuses.
So instead of automating bad communication, like, we instead just redesigned their entire client communication framework and we identified the key information that the clients actually wanted and created templates for different types of updates and we also had built some simple workflows just to ensure that nothing important was being missed. And this automation, it was very minimal. It wasn't very technical at all, actually. So there was just some basic triggers, some basic reminders, but the business impact, it was huge and client satisfaction scores had improved dramatically for them and their staff felt much more confident in their client interactions. And they went from having this, you know, regular client communication issues to having clients frequently complimenting them on how well they actually informed them all throughout the entire process. And again, the value wasn't in the technical implementation, but it instead was in understanding what good client communication actually should and has to look like and designing a system to just deliver consistently.
So, here's what success looks like going forward for you. Now, the agencies that are going to thrive in 2025 and beyond, this, they aren't going to be the most technically sophisticated, if you could not tell already. They're going to be the ones that position themselves as AI transformation partners who happen to be using automation as just one tool among many. So they will be spending more time analyzing business operations as opposed to just configuring any integrations. And they'll ask more questions about business outcomes than any technical specifications. So they'll also price based on business impact rather than any technical complexity. And a simple automation that solves a $100,000 problem, it's worth more than any complex automation that solves a $5,000 problem. And they won't just automate existing processes. They will be redesigning processes to be more effective, all using AI, and then automate any of the improved workflows.
Beyond this, they'll develop deep expertise in specific industries rather than these broad technical knowledge across all these platforms. They also speak the language of business outcomes, whether that's increased revenue or reduced cost or improved efficiency and competitive advantages, and rather than the language of any technical features. But most importantly, they will be positioning themselves as partners in their business transformation, not just vendors of any technical services.
So here's your action plan. What should you actually do with this information? Well, first, just stop obsessing over automation tools. It doesn't matter. You probably already know enough technical stuff to be dangerous and to be effective. So learning more tools, it won't differentiate you in a market where the tools are already getting so much easier to use every single week. But instead, just start learning about actual business operations and actual business problems. So you have to get out there and talk to these business owners and picking, you know, pick an industry or two and just become an expert in how those businesses actually work in the common issues and bottlenecks that they typically are facing. So you have to be understanding their typical challenges, whether that's, you know, understanding their revenue models, their operational bottlenecks, their seasonal patterns, their regulatory requirements, their competitive pressures, whatever. Beyond this, read industry publications. So join professional associations, attend regular industry conferences, talk to business owners in those industries about their real challenges.
Second, develop your diagnostic skills. So you have to practice just looking at business problems and identifying the root causes versus any of the systems. And it's not going to come naturally to you. But you know, once you work with some businesses, you will understand this and it's just becoming, you know, a learned skill. So when somebody says like, "We need to automate X," just train yourself to ask, "Why do you need to do that? Like, what's currently happening with X? Like, what's the real impact of the current situation? Like, what happens if this doesn't get fixed? What have you tried before to solve for this?" So you have to learn to dig beneath surface-level requests to actually understand the underlying business drivers.
And third is just to learn to actually communicate in terms of business outcomes, not any of the technical features. So instead of saying like, "I can build you a multi-step automation with advanced filtering and maybe some conditional logic," you can instead say, "I can help you ensure that your high-priority leads get immediate attention while routine inquiries are handled all automatically, so that your sales team is instead focusing their time on prospects most likely to buy." So just focus on the business result, not the technical process.
And fourth, start positioning yourself differently in the market. So instead of just saying like, "An AI automation expert," like everybody else in the space, you have to consider different things like "AI Transformation Partner," "Business Process Consultant." And instead of learning like, "What you can build," lead with problems that you can solve and transformations that you can enable.
Fifth, develop expertise in specific types of business problems rather than just broad technical knowledge. So try to become known as the person who solves sales funnel leaks or customer retention issues or operational bottlenecks, all using AI.
So here's your timeline and how I think that this is going to play out. The next 6 months, it's all going to be about technical automation skills becoming less and less valuable as these AI tools are just improving and these platforms are just becoming more user-friendly. Now, the next 12 months, basic automations and building basic automations, they're going to become accessible to most of these business owners and the technical barrier to entry, it's essentially just going to disappear.
Now, if we look at the next 18 months, the only agencies making serious money are the ones who are evolved into an AI transformation partner or the ones that are super niched into one specific thing. So pure automation work, it's going to become a race to the bottom. In the next 24 months, it's an AI automation agency just becoming AI business transformation. So the technical component becomes invisible infrastructure rather than the main proposition at all.
And the bottom line is, I'm not trying to scare anyone out of this business. In fact, I'm trying to help you and actually evolve with it before you have to. So the opportunity, like I always mentioned, it's still massive. Businesses are investing heavily in AI transformation and digital innovation and the market for these AI business improvements, it's enormous and it's continuously growing by the second. But the value, it's actually just shifting from technical implementation to strategic problem solving. So from automation building to business analysis, from knowing how to use tools to knowing how to diagnose problems and design AI solutions. And with that, the agencies that actually see the shift coming and adapt early, they're going to be dominating their markets. So they will be commanding premium prices just because they're solving high-value problems and enabling business transformation, not just automating tasks. And the people, people like yourself, the ones that are grinding and keep on grinding on technical skills are going to find themselves just competing on price with freelancers and internal teams and eventually AI systems themselves.
So you have this choice. It's either evolve now while you have time to do it strategically, or essentially just get forced to evolve later when the market has already shifted and you're going to be scrambling to catch up or, you know, scrambling to find like, "What do I do from here?" And the businesses that thrive during market shifts, they're the ones that can see change coming and positioning themselves to take advantage of it. So which one are you going to be?
If any of this has resonated with you, hit that subscribe button because I'm going to keep sharpening the real, unfiltered truth about where this industry is heading, even when it's uncomfortable to hear. But with that being said, like, the future, it does belong to the AI transformation partners who can actually solve these real problems, not just building automations because they will be rendered useless very, very soon. So don't wait until you have to change. Start evolving now. And with that being and with all of that being said, I thank you guys for watching. I'm rooting for your success and I will see you in the next.