The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I am Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini I, I think that AI is making people crazy. They’re losing their minds and acting irrationally.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes. I completely agree. Some of the stuff I see online, I’m like, you guys,

Chip Griffin: take a deep breath.

Gini Dietrich: Breath, everyone. Take a deep breath. Stop clutching your pearls. It’s okay.

Chip Griffin: Well, maybe the AI really has become sentinent and – sentient – and the, the robot overlords are doing this intentionally to make us go crazy and eat each other alive.

Gini Dietrich: Maybe, maybe. Although this happened with social media, it happened with content marketing.

It happened with blogging. Here we are with AI. Everybody’s freaking out. Like, this is cyclical. Everyone’s gonna calm down. It will be okay.

Chip Griffin: I don’t know if they’ll calm down, but eventually they’ll, they’ll come to the realization that perhaps it isn’t what they thought it, it was, and that it is, it is important.

It is useful. It is valuable. It is not something that upends absolutely everything we do every moment of the day and we need to orbit around it. I mean, it just, it really does remind me of those early days of social media where, you know, you’d see these, these articles and posts about, oh my God, CEOs, they need to be blogging and they need to be blogging every day.

And I don’t care how big your company is, the CEO needs to write those blog posts themselves. Ghost writing is an evil thing and we shall not do it. And if we do have it ghost written, we must disclose on that blog post or article that this was ghost written and not actually written by the CEO. Because we all believe that CEOs write their own darn stuff.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes. That’s why I say it’s all cyclical. Everyone calmed down. It’s going to be okay. That said, I happened upon the LinkedIn post by a second connection, who’s a chief marketing officer, and it essentially said, I’m trying to figure out how to manage my agencies who are using AI and how to ask what kind of discount and how to ask for a discount, because I know they’re using AI. and I was just like, there is no discount because you’re, they’re using AI.

They’re able to focus on other things because of that, and they’re able to be more strategic in some areas because of it, but they, they should not be giving you a discount, just like the surgeon doesn’t give you a discount. Because the imaging is faster. You shouldn’t like the same. You’re not. Just because you’re faster at some mundane, laborious task does not mean that you should reduce your fees ever.

Drives me freaking nuts.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And I would absolutely agree with that, with the asterisk that if, for example, you are being hired to do writing and the AI does all the writing and you don’t edit and you don’t do anything else, and so you know you’re spending 10 minutes on it instead of 10 hours. You absolutely should be either figuring out how you can do more for the client, correct.

Or you should be reducing your rates. Yes. Because it is, you know, I love all the talk about, you know, value-based pricing, which we talk about all the time, and certainly there are a lot of people who say, well, it doesn’t matter if I use AI to do it. They’re getting the same value out of it. Well, they are and they aren’t because they could do the work themselves if they wanted to in less time with less cost.

And so. You’re not really creating that value anymore if the AI is doing it totally on its own and it doesn’t have anything to do with the prompts that you’re writing or, or the management of the whole process. And all of those things do take time, by the way. Mm-hmm. So we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t forget about that.

Right. Particularly when we’re thinking about our own agencies and how we can be more efficient, the time it takes to manage the AI matters. We’ve talked about this recently. You cannot allow those things to, to be forgotten about. And so all of that does go into it. But the, I mean the comments on this post were just other worldly and there was another AI post recently as well that I saw and, and I mean, so we’ve got people out there who are like…

CMOs want agencies to reduce their fees because they’re using AI. We’ve got a whole discussion around, well, we need to be transparent and tell every possible use of AI that we have and be really clear about it with our clients. This is how we’re using it exactly. And this is, and, and people say you can’t do hourly billing anymore because of AI, and so you must go to value-based pricing.

And I mean, just all of this stuff. Take a breath, folks. Take

Gini Dietrich: Yes. It’s a breath. Okay.

Chip Griffin: Again, it is a tool, it is a valuable tool, but it is a tool.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: And it doesn’t mean that you just throw everything out and start over on either side of the agency client relationship.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yeah, that’s absolutely right.

I, I say this all the time, you know, like in other podcasts that I’m being interviewed on or webinars, whatever, the strategy stays the same. The best practices stay the same. The tools have changed and the tools continue to change. The tools have changed dramatically in the last 15 years. Use the tools to make you more effective and more productive.

But like I said, the surgeon is still going to charge you what they charge you for brain surgery. Regardless of how fast the imaging is, regardless of how fast you get your MRI results back, like the, it doesn’t matter. Your expertise is over here in the surgeon bucket, not in the imaging bucket. So remember that. Like the, the stuff that you can do just because you’re faster at creati