AI Is Changing Agencies in 2026 (And Most Owners Don’t Even Realize It)

Digital marketing agency business is drastically changing. On this video, I want to talk about the future of your agency. It kind of where AI fits into that game. There's a lot of new tools just in the last couple of weeks that have come on the market that are rapidly evolving the way that we should be approaching our agency business models, right? From autonomous agents, open claw, the idea that you like literally you can program an autonomous agent to understand a very specific protocol within your business. Like, you're ongoing SEO strategy. If you've got a team, you know, team of one, five, seven, ten VAs or team members that are focused on that, typically you've got a high level strategist that looks at the big picture and then you've got a bunch of team members. So you're going on the website, creating new content and changing titles and micro format data and then an outreach specialist that's building links and citations. If it can be done by an assistant with a step-by-step process, then it can be trained into an autonomous agent on open claw and other platforms that are coming out. So it's also brand new, but you need to be thinking about it. You need to be understanding where things are headed. I really think that the market is about to split into three categories. And your agency is going to sit in one of these replaces. Number one, task-based vendors say, okay, I do SEO or I do website design or I do Facebook ads or Google ads. That's a task-based vendor. You get paid to do a very specific thing. Marketing service provider, that's like, hey, I can do a complete system. I can do like your website, your SEO, your paint search to help you get a specific goal, a specific outcome. And this is kind of where your sem-figure agency has lived for the last couple of years, right? Like specialized in industry, develop a growth program, get that dialed in. But really positioned free, and this is where I think we all need to be, is an AI-powered growth partner, which does it mean I'm using AI to write my content or I'm using AI to move things quicker. It means that I've got a complete system that is powered by AI kind of as the central engine. And I've revamped my entire model to be delivered through that centralized engine. The question isn't going to be, are you using AI? Because we're all using AI. We're all going to be using AI at some level. It's going to be, have you rebuilt around an intelligent growth system? And that's what we want to solve for. That's really where the opportunity is. Because AI assisted the old way? Yes, it's faster to build your website. It's faster to write the content. It's faster execution. AI-powered is a structured system with a compounding advantage. Because with every additional client you get, assuming the system is running and it's all set up correctly, AI gets more intelligence, it gets more outcomes, it can generate better results on behalf of your clients. And so this is a really exciting time. But like fundamentally, okay, get that. I'm excited to build an AI system that can drive this stuff. But how do we do that? How do we make that a reality? And I think the simplest way to break this down, apparently, like if we think about the way we all do it today, client signs up for our growth program. Hey, oh no, you're going to do the website, the SEO, the paint search, the whole nine yards. You'll in an online form, they had a launch call, then our team gets all that information, puts it into a client dossier, puts it into a folder with their logos and all of that stuff. And then it gets kicked into a project management system, handed off to the web dev team, do their thing, to the SEO team, to do their thing, to their paperclip team to go do their thing. And there's a lot of manual, connecting manual work that goes into that. To streamline it on the front end, we have to think AI first. We have to think, okay, every client is going to get a folder within our platform of choice, whether that's Manus, Waclod, OpenColored, or a platform is, they're going to get a client folder. And we've got to give it the key details, the key context about that client. And so I believe you're going to have the strategy and the creative, like the strategy would be who's their ideal customer profile? What are the demographics, psychographics? Why does somebody choose them versus the competition? What are those customers fears, frustrations? That way, AI understands, okay, this is the client, this is the area that they serve. And this is the customer they're looking to attract. And of course, you're going to give it the key service details. Here's what they do, here's what they don't do. Here's our hours of operation and their phone number and all that stuff, right? You give it that information. And then you also give it the creative details. You give it the logo. You give it the truck images. You give it the images of the team. You give it all of those key details. From there, you have to generate a brand home. Brand hub that has all the details about that client that AI would need in order to go out and produce great website, great paid for cleaning pages, great social media, and social media, strategy. And once I wrap my head around that, my wheels really started turning. Because I was like, okay, we can go from just kind of not being able to do this to really being able to hit the ground running. It's kind of opened my eyes to the possibility of this by creating an idea client profile. And then I was thinking about from the web dev perspective, what else will we need? We need those visual components. And so let me walk you through what this actually looks like in the world world here. What you're going to do is you're going to set up a master project or a master prompt for every client. Let's just say we got a new client and that's Paul the Plumber. We want to figure out like what's the easiest way to give AI all of the context about the company, all the contact about the brand. They're unique selling proposition. What we can do is just pull up. Man, so in this case, we're going to go straight to Manus and we're going to give it the prompt. Could be a cloud. Could be whatever platform we use. We use Manus because it's a great generate of engine. I need to create a brand guide for Paul the Plumber.com. Here's the website Paul the Plumber.com. Please include details about their service area, main services, why some of us should choose them. All the details that you got from your onboarding process, you want to kind of incorporate into that initial prompt. You're asking it to generate a brand guide. This, just for example, purposes, I generated this, it took about five minutes of it running in the background and it came back. Here's Paul the Plumber. Here's their logo. Here's their color palette. Kind of what their colors came look like. The actual hex code for each of these colors, the typography, like what fonts they use. With that, you literally have given AI the ability to say, "Okay, this is a look and feel for this particular client." Then we want to tell a little bit about the tone of voice, right? Which is, are they warm? Are they friendly? Are they professional? Who's their ideal client? Who's the core messaging? Why somebody chooses them versus the competition? The story brand framework, who the hero is, who the guide is, right? You get this back relatively quickly. Obviously, you want to check and make sure that these are the three details as this is what we want to use. But, soon now, that all check the box, then you can go back to the minutes and say, "Hey, go ahead and generate whatever it is." Generate the website. Generate the landing page. Generate whatever. So, here's an example, right? We'll generate the website within two minutes. This isn't a website we would go live with. But within two minutes, it came back just with the basic context from that brand. And then, we'll go back to the website. that now you've got the raw materials to build an engine to consistently deploy world-class outcomes for your client. And so your niche is what multiplies everything, right? Rather than being a generalist, as using AI for everybody, the fact that you're in a very specific industry, plumbing, chiropractic, pool contractors, whatever the niche is, you understand the industry, you've got proven points of websites and paint search campaigns. And what we can do is leverage that to create a world-class AI-powered engine that generates more consistent, measurable results for the clients that we serve. And so the line is in the sand. You've either got to act or become obsolete. And so you're choosing right now in this moment, are you going to be a task-based vendor, a service provider, or an AI-powered growth partner? And I think all of us don't just want to aspire to, but we have to become that growth partner. And that's what we're building here. That's what this thesis is all about. Helping you build this system out with us. And we've got a lot of really exciting things that we're rolling down the pipe that we're going to be building this together. First and foremost is AI.7figuragency.com. That is our Lay of the Land thesis. You can read it, you can study it. It's for 7figuragency members only. Just to understand where we think things are headed over the next six to 12 months. And why we have to act so quickly as individuals is and as a community to drive ourselves forward with AI. I've also put together an open-claw resource guide at openclaw.7figuragency.com. That's based on a bunch of different courses that I went through because this is brand new in the last couple of weeks. On how to set up open-claw, how to make sure you're secure, whether to use a virtual private server or set it up on your Mac mini. That document is going to be a live dynamic document that we're updating. We'll be doing workshops live as a community. Not only on how to use open-claw for yourself, but more importantly, how to deploy this to build autonomous employees that are AI-brilliant in the very specific sub-task, whether it's SEO, paperclip advertising, Facebook ads optimization, or even like your own SDR, that's trained on going out, finding your ideal clients, making introductions based on real-world analysis of their current online marketing and where there are gaps. Lots of exciting things on that front. We've got two AI coaches that are going to be doing a monthly session. Tony Ricketts, who's on the really on the cutting edge with all of this stuff, sessions have been great every month you get access to him, plug into these sessions. What we realized is one AI session per month isn't going to cut it. It's just moving too quickly. It's where we're going to be adding more. We've also got Billy Sticker, who also runs an AI recruitment service and is implementing AI strategies at his agency, Cairo Candy, at a very high level. And so we're going to be rotating with those two, Cholentel, Q&A, Brainstorm, what's working, what's coming next. But at the end of the day, AI is only going to amplify the system that you have. So before you go on by 12 additional AI tools, what I want you to do is think about, do I have the right systems, do I have the right fun and manals? And that's what we're focused on here. That's M Figure Agency, giving you the right fun and manals so that you can multiply that with AI and get not just cheaper outcomes, but get exponential results for the client that you serve and within your own efficiency. Remember, the agency that wins are not the ones with the most tools. They're the ones with the best systems.