Bottom Line Up Front: AI is the best execution tool we’ve ever had. It still needs someone steering it.
We’re not anti-AI. We use it every day, and it’s made us faster and better at what we do. But there’s a difference between AI helping you execute a strategy and AI standing in for one. Before you decide to go it alone with Claude as your agency, here’s where real experience still earns its keep.
- AI is genuinely great at speed and scale once it knows what it’s building toward
- The direction still has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is strategy and experience
- This is the same role we’ve always played between an idea and a finished result. The collaborator just changed
- The clients getting the most out of AI right now are the ones using it with a strategist, not instead of one
The role we’ve always played
Long before AI, our job was never really “write the content” or “build the page.” It was translating a goal into something that actually works, then making sure whoever executes it (a writer, a developer, now an AI model) builds the right thing.
That’s still exactly what we do. AI just gave that role a new set of hands. It’s fast, it’s tireless, and honestly, it’s a great collaborator once it has the right brief. The part that hasn’t changed is who’s writing the brief.
What this looks like for content
AI can write more content, faster, than any team we’ve ever had. That’s genuinely useful. What it can’t do on its own is know where a new piece fits into your existing site, whether it’s competing with something you already rank for, or whether it’s actually saying anything a customer needs to hear.
That’s the strategic layer we bring. We’re mapping the content plan, deciding what a piece needs to accomplish, and reviewing the draft AI hands back before it goes live, the same way we’d review a draft from any writer. AI makes the production side faster. It doesn’t replace the plan.
What this looks like for development
Development works the same way, just with a different skill involved. You can describe a page to AI and get something built. Whether that build actually serves your business depends entirely on how well the request was framed, and most people don’t think in site architecture or conversion paths, and they shouldn’t have to.
This is the exact conversation we’ve always had with a human developer: here’s the goal, here’s why the structure matters, here’s what to watch for. We’re just having it with a different kind of collaborator now. Good news is, AI is a very fast learner when someone experienced is doing the explaining.
Where this gets really valuable
The clients we work with tend to have situations that don’t fit a template, which is exactly where a strategist behind the AI makes the biggest difference.
Franchises
Good franchise content sounds local, not templated. That takes real local knowledge, the sponsorships, the neighborhood details, what a franchisee is actually known for. Once we have that, AI is fantastic at helping us scale it across dozens of locations. The strategy decides what “local” means for the brand. AI helps us produce it at a pace that wouldn’t have been possible before. We’ve written more on this in our franchise content marketing strategy piece if you want to go deeper.
The same thing plays out on the development side. It’s tempting to let AI spin up a location page for every franchisee and call it done, but franchise sites live and die by structure: consistent schema, clean internal linking between locations, a template that can actually flex for 40 or 400 locations without breaking. AI can build that fast once the structure is right. It won’t know on its own that duplicate location pages will cannibalize each other in search, or that a page missing local schema is going to underperform no matter how good the copy is. That’s the part we’re checking before anything goes live.
White label partners
When we’re working behind the scenes for an agency, AI helps us move faster on drafts and builds without adding headcount on their end. But someone still needs to make sure the output matches the agency’s positioning and holds up if their client asks a strategic question on a call. That’s the part we’ve always brought to white label relationships, and it’s still ours to bring. If you’re evaluating a white label partner and wondering what actually separates a good one, we broke that down in how to choose a white label SEO agency.
Complex builds
Some projects don’t have a template to start from. Building the cooperative network Principle 6 needed meant there was no existing playbook to hand AI. That takes someone sitting with the goal first, understanding the structure, and building the strategic framework before execution even starts. Once that framework exists, AI becomes an incredible tool for building it out quickly. It just can’t get there on its own.
Deciding when to use AI and when to consult a human
This is the question we actually get asked most, in one form or another. Here’s how we think about it.
Let AI take the lead when:
- You need volume: drafts, variations, first passes on something you’ll refine
- The task has a clear brief and a known format, like a location page following an established template
- Speed matters more than originality, like summarizing, repurposing, or reformatting existing content
- You already have the strategic framework and just need execution
Bring in a human when:
- You’re deciding what to build in the first place, not just how to build it
- The content needs real, specific knowledge that doesn’t exist anywhere for AI to pull from, like what makes a franchise location actually local
- There’s no template because nobody’s built this exact thing before
- The output is going to represent your brand, or someone else’s, in a public or high-stakes way
- AI’s answer sounds confident, but something about it doesn’t sit right. That instinct is usually correct
Most projects need both. The mistake isn’t using AI; it’s skipping the human part and hoping the confident-sounding output was also the right one.
The takeaway
AI didn’t remove the need for strategy. It made strategy more valuable because now the difference between a good result and an average one comes down entirely to who’s directing the tool.
That’s the role we play. Take the goal or the seedling of an idea, put real experience and strategic thinking behind it, then use AI to move at a speed that wasn’t possible before. We’re not worried about AI replacing what we do. If anything, it’s made the case for a strategy partner clearer.
Curious what this could look like for your team? Let’s talk.
