AI AND CLIENT VALUE WORKSHOP
AI is destroying what clients pay agencies for.
It’s time to redefine your strategic value.
OUr newest workshop puts your leadership team in a room with three or four of your actual client relationships and a set of frameworks for seeing what you're being paid for, what's exposed, and what comes next.
Before you read further
Six questions worth answering.
If any of these are hard to answer, the workshop is built for you. If most of them are hard to answer, your leadership team needs to be in the same room talking about it.
About your client relationships
-
1
When was the last time you brought a client something they didn't ask for, and weren't planning to bill for?
-
2
If your biggest client's CEO described your agency to a peer, would the word "strategic" appear in the sentence, or would they say "they do good work"?
-
3
Do you know what problem your top five clients are trying to solve inside their own organization? Not the brief they handed you, but the reason the brief exists.
About your business
-
4
If you had to redesign your offering today from scratch, what would you keep, kill, or rebuild? And why haven't you?
-
5
Where does value get created in your work, beyond the deliverable itself? Do you know which of those moments are working, and are you finding new ones?
-
6
If AI made the assembly half of your work free tomorrow, what's the half clients would still pay for? Could you describe it clearly enough that they'd understand what they were buying?
What your team discovers
A shared map of where you stand.
By the end of the session, your leadership team has a shared view of which client relationships are exposed to AI, why, and what kind of work would close the gap. The map gets built by the team, in the room, with the frameworks as the lens.
Assembly versus judgment
The two layers your client is paying for in any given engagement. AI is collapsing the price of the first. The second is what your agency has, and what you're probably underselling. Once the layers are named, every other conversation gets clearer.
From partner to vendor
The accommodating scope calls. The relationships that quietly became transactional. The moments of value that used to happen and don't anymore. None of it was a decision; it was a series of small accommodations over years. The pattern is visible once you go looking.
The AI pressure map
Clients face AI pressure on different timelines. Some are months from building internal capability; some are years. The map tells you which conversations need to happen first and which can wait.
The method that scales
The deliverable most leadership teams remember a month later isn't the map; it's the questions. After the workshop, your team has the language and the prompts to apply this thinking to every other client, every new pitch, every renewal.
How the session works.
Three hours with your leadership team, working through three or four of your actual client relationships against the frameworks I've developed over fifteen years of agency work. We don't try to map your whole portfolio. We work through a sample, deeply enough that the patterns show, and each sample relationship comes out the other side with one or more concrete next moves identified for it.
Pre-session: pick the sample together
You send a short list of your top client relationships. We have a 15-minute call to pick three or four together, chosen to span the range you have rather than just the urgent ones. The picking conversation is part of the work.
The frameworks, applied live
We work through each sample client against the lenses that apply to it: assembly versus judgment, where value lands in the work, how AI pressure is shaped for that client type, and several others that earn their place when the relationship calls for them. The frameworks are tools, and we reach for the ones each relationship needs.
Key next moves for each client
By the end of the session, each sample relationship has one or more concrete next moves identified for it. A pricing conversation. A scope rewrite. A new question to ask in the next review. A relationship to escalate, or to retire. The board your team built holds all of it, and the method to apply the same thinking to the rest of your portfolio comes with it.
The Details
Fixed price, fixed scope. You know what you're buying.
Start HereWhy your team needs to see this together
Your head of accounts sees the client relationships differently than your creative director. Your COO sees the margin picture. Your CEO sees the strategic intent. But nobody sees the full portfolio through both layers at once — until you build the map together.
The most important conversations happen after the workshop. The shared map gives your leadership team a common picture to act from. Repricing conversations, staffing decisions, client development strategies — they all get easier when everyone sees the same thing.
The drift happens to everyone
When you were 15 people, every client got your best thinking. The founder was in the room. The perceptual drivers were strong because the same people doing the thinking were doing the work.
At 40 people, layers appeared. Account management became project coordination. The "big reveal" replaced the co-creation. Forward investment disappeared because everyone was too busy delivering. You became the agency that works for clients instead of the agency that works with them.
It's not a failure. It's a pattern. And it's fixable — once you can see it.
What comes next
From seeing the pattern to changing it.
The workshop shows you the pattern in your client portfolio and gives your team the method to keep seeing it. For agencies that come out of the session ready to redesign what they sell and how, there are two next steps.
AI Client Transformation Program
A multi-session engagement that takes what the workshop surfaces and turns it into a redesigned service portfolio, with real artifacts, implementation planning, and a re-engagement plan for your most exposed client relationships.
Advisory and Coaching
Work through the structural changes at your pace, with a thinking partner who has helped 200 agencies navigate similar shifts. Best when the CEO needs an ongoing sounding board rather than a program.
MY TRACK RECORD
Fifteen years of measurable, structural change
Let's start building an agency your clients still need in three years.
90 minutes. A shared framework. A map your leadership team builds together. Tell me about your agency and I'll tell you whether this is the right starting point.
No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about what you're seeing.