Send us Fan Mail
Somewhere out there, a business is paying a full salary to a person whose job, two weeks of every month, is copying and pasting between spreadsheets. Command C, Command V, lunch.
One of our Headless Agency members told us about it on a call last week. We all lost it. Then I remembered how most agency owners spend their Tuesday, and I stopped laughing. This week I give you one question to ask before you hire anyone, and it tells you whether you're about to pay a salary for computer work that an AI employee should be doing.
This is a solo episode. Three stories from the Feed (AI search traffic, Anthropic's $16.8 billion quarter and what HubSpot's blog team learned from a year of going AI first), what's happening inside real agencies on our client calls, then the big idea: typing on a keyboard is basically free now, and your clients pay you for knowing what to do.
In this episode:
- The D or S test: write every task in a role, mark D if it needs a decision and S if someone could follow it off a checklist
- Why Marie Haynes's data on 145 million sessions shows ChatGPT sending 0.62% as many visits as Google organic, and why those visitors still convert at 13.8% against about 3%
- Anthropic's July to September revenue of $16.8 billion, up from $11.5 billion the quarter before, and why you should sell AI to your clients before they buy it from the lab
- What HubSpot's blog team found after a year of going AI first, and the MIT Technology Review finding that only 30% of managers and owners rate judging AI output as an absolute must
- A Sydney lead gen agency that moved more than 1,000 pages from Thrive Theme to Divi with an AI employee, at about $200, then $60, then $10 per site
- How a New Zealand content writer rebuilt a sales dashboard in a day, and the $78,000 roadmap it helped close at 1.45% of the client's target revenue
- Peter lifting his discovery sessions from $500 to $1,500, plus Jeremy, Candy, Daniel, Bashir and James and what an AI employee did for each of them
- Why more revenue does not need more hands on keyboards, and how the fear of AI comes from 45 years of identity built on typing
- This week's homework: open last week's calendar, mark every hour spent on steps someone else could follow, write the biggest block as 10 plain-English lines and hand it to an AI employee
Chapters:
0:00 Cold open: the copy and paste salary
0:47 Intro
1:08 The plan and fan mail
1:39 The Feed: ChatGPT traffic against Google organic
3:52 The Feed: Anthropic's $16.8B quarter
5:03 The Feed: HubSpot's year of going AI first
7:01 Inside real agencies: client calls
10:41 The big idea: typing is basically free now
15:49 The one question before you hire anyone
16:48 Homework and fan mail
18:38 Outro
Mentioned in this episode:
Every episode of The Agency Hour: https://theagencyhour.com
