“I want a Strategy for AI that everyone can understand“

Everyone wants an "AI strategy", and almost nobody needs one. What they need is three decisions made properly, instead of forty tools bought in a panic.

I was at a Mastermind Day in London recently where four different owners had four different AI tools running four different jobs, and not one of them could tell me if it was actually saving time or just moving the busywork around.

That's not a strategy. That's expensive fidgeting.

The pattern is the same in most agencies we see. Someone buys a licence. Someone else finds a second tool that "does images better". A third person starts a Slack channel called #ai-experiments. Six weeks later the agency is "using AI", and nobody can point to a single task that is faster, cheaper, or better than it was in March.

Here's the strategy. It fits on one page.

Decide what AI is for in your agency. Specifically.

Not "AI will transform how we work." That's a slogan, not a decision.

Pick the actual jobs. Drafting first drafts of ad copy. Summarising client calls. Building first-pass reports. Speeding up dev and QA.

Name the five tasks. If you can't name them, you don't have a strategy. You've got FOMO with a subscription. The test is simple. If a new joiner asked tomorrow, "What do we use AI for here?", could anyone give the same five answers? If the answers depend on who you ask, you don't have a use case list. You have a rummage sale.

Decide who owns it.

One person. Not a committee. Not "everyone's encouraged to explore."

Someone whose job includes finding what's working, killing what isn't, and telling the team what's mandatory versus optional.

Without an owner, AI adoption in your agency looks like fifteen people using fifteen different tools badly, and nobody learning from anyone else's mistakes.

This is the bit most founders skip because it feels like extra management. It isn't. It is the difference between a capability and a hobby. If it isn't on one person's actual job description, it will drift. Drift is how you end up paying for four overlapping licences and still writing status reports from scratch.

Decide what "good" looks like. Then audit it.

Set the standard before your team starts shipping AI-assisted work. A client-facing document written with AI still needs to sound like you. Still needs facts checked. Still needs a human to own it. Skipping this is how agencies end up sending clients research that's confidently wrong. The big boys do it too. That doesn't make it acceptable. Skip this, and you're one confidently-wrong research summary away from an awkward client call.

Write the standard down. One page is enough. What must always be checked. What must never go to a client unedited. Who signs it off. What "sounds like us" actually means in practice. Then audit a handful of live pieces every month. If you don't inspect the work, the standard is a poster.

Now the bit owners skip: tell the team what's expected of them.

Every role gets one instruction. Not a manifesto.

Account managers: use it to draft your first pass on reports and status updates, then edit hard.

Creatives: use it to kill blank-page paralysis. Never ship a first draft as final.

Ops and finance: use it to build the templates and processes nobody's had time to build properly.

Leadership: use it to stress-test your own thinking, not just to produce content faster.

People don't resist AI because they are Luddites. They resist it because nobody has told them what "good" looks like in their job, and they don't want to be the person who sent the wrong thing to a client. Give them one clear instruction and the fear drops. Leave it vague and they will either hide from it or spray it everywhere.

Measure time saved, not tools adopted.

The metric isn't "we're using AI." It's this: the task used to take four hours. It now takes ninety minutes. And the output is as good or better.

If you can't point to that, you're playing with toys, not running a strategy. No number, no strategy. Just toys.

Pick three tasks. Time them once the old way. Time them again with the new way, including the edit. Keep the ones that move the number. Kill the rest. That is the whole dashboard. You do not need a transformation workstream to know whether a status update got faster.

The Final Thought

The agencies getting real value aren't the ones with the most AI tools. They're the ones who picked three uses, set the standard, and made it somebody's actual job to keep it sharp. Do that this week. Before you buy another licence.