AI is Changing Agencies in 2026 (and nobody even realizes)

Digital marketing agency business is drastically changing. On this video, I want to talk about the future of your agency and 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, OpenClaw, the idea that you like literally you can program an autonomous agent to understand a very specific protocol within your business, like your ongoing SEO strategy. If you've got a team, you know, team team of 1, 5, 17 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 microformat 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 OpenClaw and other platforms that are coming out. And so it's all so 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 3 categories and your agency is going to sit in one of these 3 places. Number 1, 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 paid search to help you get a specific goal, a specific outcome. And this is kind of where your 7-figure agency has lived for the last couple of years, right? Like specialize in industry, develop a growth program, get that dialed in. But really, position 3, and this is where I think we all need to be, is an AI-powered growth partner, which doesn't 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 That's really where the opportunity is because AI-assisted, the old way, yes, it's faster to build your websites, 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, I get that. I'm excited. I'd love 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, comparatively, like if we think about the way we all do it today, client signs up for our growth program. Hey, I wanna, you know, like we're gonna do the website, the SEO, the paid search, the whole nine yards. They fill in an online form, they had a launch call, then our team gets all that information, puts it into a, like 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 to do their thing, to the SEO team to do their thing, to their pay-per-click 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 or Claude, Open Call, whatever 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, right? 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 their hours of operation and their phone number and all of 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 it generate a brand hub, brand hub that has all the details about that client. That AI would need in order to go out and produce great website, great pay-per-click landing pages, great social media strategy. Once I wrapped my head around that, my wheels really started turning because it 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. Andrew Ansley kind of opened my eyes to the possibility of this by creating an ideal 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 like what this actually looks like in the real world here. What you're going to do is you're going to set up a master project or a master prompt for 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 context about the brand, their unique selling proposition. What we can do is just pull up Manus. So in this case, we're going to go straight to Manus and we're going to give it the prompt. Could be Claude, could be whatever platform you use. We use Manus because it's a great generative engine. I need to create a brand guide for paultheplumber.com. Here's the website, paultheplumber.com. Please include details about their service area, main services, why somebody 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. And so this, just for example purposes, I generated this. It took about 5 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 color scheme looked like, the, the actual hex code for each of these colors, the typography, like what fonts they use. And so with that, you, you literally have given AI the ability to say, okay, this is the look and feel for this particular client. And then we want to tell it 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? You can give it 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, is this the right details? Is this what we want to use? But assuming that all check the box, then you can go back to Midas and say, hey, go ahead and generate whatever it is, right? Generate the website, generate the landing page, generate whatever. So here's an example, right? We generate the website within 2 minutes. And this isn't a website we would go live with, but within 2 minutes it came back just with the basic context from that brand guide. This actually really sharp looking version of the site. Obviously we gave it pictures, We gave it the service area, we gave it the existing website, which had some details on it, and we got a great first iteration. And so really the concept though would be come back to that prompt and then turn it into a project. And in that project, you load up all the files, you load up all of the details, you load up the examples. Here's how to do a service area page. Here's how to do a very specific city page. And they've got these 10 cities that they're focused on. And the outputs that you can get very quickly are pretty phenomenal. And so you could do the same thing for your own brand. And I'll just kind of show another example here. Let's just say plumbing and HVAC SEO. We've around for going on 15 years. Though we've got a lot of data, we got a lot of information, but we always struggled with quickly generating high-quality content for social media, for internal guides, for presentation files. And now, same thing. Project, all the context of our company, our color scheme, our ICP, our ideal customer profile, and then we ask it to create a brand page. And so brand.lumberseo.net, if you wanna look at it as a point of reference, there's the different variations of the brand, there's the colors, there's the typography, here's the tone of voice, and then here's the ideal client. Who is it that we serve? What are the problems that they had? Who have they used in the past? The better this is, the better content you can generate on the other end. And so I'll just give you an example because I'm a big fan of case studies and creating world-class case studies, documenting the results of the clients that we work with. A lot of times we get those videos and they go up on YouTube and they're just kind of buried. They're hidden away. What if we asked Manus to create some case study pages for us based on just the actual raw video file? Because Manus doesn't need the transcript. You give it the video and here's what it came back with. And my mind was literally blown. And so if we open this up, this was just from, hey, I want to create a case study page with these case study interviews. I'm going to give you the videos, right? So we created this, which I think is visually stunning, right? Because it's based on the brand guide that we gave it. And then it created unique case studies. Carmel Plumbing, Heating, Cooling. Let's go in. Let's see this case study. Just from the video, it gives you this beautiful articulated case study. That's very compelling. And so hopefully this just kind of gets your creative juices flowing with what I'm talking about here in that we can give it the prompt, develop the guide with the ICP and the imagery, and then generate assets. And it's not just a website, it's not just a landing page. I can then, and I did, take the case study and say, hey, you know what? This is a great case study for Cardinal. Now create a Facebook ad that I can use to attract my ideal client. Now create an email sequence that I can send out that's curiosity inducing to get somebody to click on it and come watch to generate leads opportunities for our agency. And so if we zoom out just even a little bit further, this is the kind of the AI-first framework and the client's intelligence engine. Client fills in the form after the sales call. They give you their logins, their details, their USP. Ideally, you're collecting that in the sales process and in the onboarding conversations. You use that to create a brand page, brand guide detailing their ideal customer profile. That's the first layer. That's the unique area of their business. From there, you bounce it against all of your proven frameworks, proven landing page templates, copy frameworks, special offers and incentives. And now AI is primed to generate beautiful work, websites, landing pages, social media posts, ongoing blog content. And then the next layer beyond that, they can map out your programmed SEO strategy. We do that in a Cosmo sheet in Google Sheets. It's very programmatic. It's like, here's the city, here's the service, here's the sub-cities that they operate in, and here's the sub-services. And it maps out like, okay, here's all the pages we need. Here's what the title tag, the H1 tag, the meta description should be. Here's the content we're going to need to create. And so we're able to draft that SEO strategy and then give it human oversight. And then craft the content based on the ICP and the details that we have, actually deploy it onto those service pages on the website and then drive the SEO strategy. So really exciting. But the base of this is developing your intelligence core, understanding that when you develop 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 that's 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 paid 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.7figureagency.com. That is our lay of the land thesis. You can read it, you can study it. It's for 7 Figure Agency members only. Just to understand where we think think things are headed over the next 6 to 12 months and why we have to act so quickly as individuals and as a community to drive ourselves forward with AI. I've also put together an OpenClaw resource guide at openclaw.sevenfigureagency.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 OpenClaw, how to make sure you're secure, whether to use a virtual private server or set it up on your Mac Mini. That document's going to be a live dynamic document that we're updating. We'll be doing workshops 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 subtask, whether it's SEO, pay-per-click 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 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 gonna cut it. It's just moving too quickly. And so we're gonna 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 gonna be rotating with those two, show and tell, Q&A, brainstorm what's working, what's coming next. But at the end of the day, AI is only gonna amplify the systems that you have. So before you go out and buy 12 additional AI tools. What I want you to do is think about, do I have the right systems? Do I have the right fundamentals? And that's what we're focused on here at 7 Figure Agency, giving you the right fundamentals so that you can multiply that with AI and get not just cheaper outcomes, but get exponential results for the clients 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.