I remember when designers started freaking out about Fiverr. And then Squarespace came out with a logo generator. And then Canva.
Every new tool was supposedly going to put us out of business.
Except something funny happened. My clients never brought any of them up.
They weren't hiring Steve and me because we knew how to make a logo or build a website. They were hiring us because they trusted us to tell them what they actually needed.
And now everyone's freaking out about AI.
Sound familiar?
Let's not mince words. If what you're selling is essentially execution, AI is going to replace a lot of it. It already has. It can do things in seconds that literally used to take you, or a whole team of people, hours or days: an entire brand messaging brief, a whole website's worth of copy, social posts, headlines. And the quality has gotten exponentially better. People can get an agency's worth of execution done in seconds, at 20 bucks a month.
But if what you're selling is your judgment, your discerning eye and your relationships, I'm not worried about you, and I don't think you should be either. I'm not saying AI can't do sophisticated work. It can. My argument is about expert judgment, leadership and taking responsibility for the outcome.
We've been here before
When Steve and I started our agency in 2011, we were still custom coding webpages. Squarespace was so early in its infancy we didn't even know about it, and once we did, I had to convince clients to move off WordPress, because to them Squarespace meant templates, and templates were a bad word back then.
So I built my business right in the middle of one of these shifts, and I watched designers panic every time a new tool showed up. Never mind that those logo generators were laughably bad. The fear was that people would think they could get good design for next to nothing, and stop hiring us.
What I didn't see at the time was why none of it touched us. Around then, out of necessity, I'd started opening every project with what I now call the Lead Product: a paid engagement where we got really clear on where the client was and where they wanted to go, and then gave them a plan to get there. By the time anyone talked about a logo, we were having a completely different conversation. Nobody was deciding between us and a designer on Fiverr. It wasn't apples to apples.
AI is a way more advanced, steroid version of Fiverr and Canva. Back then you could get cheap design and copy done, and now you can get it even cheaper. Back then you could get it fast, and now you can get it even faster. Back then it was pretty good, and now it's even better. And the thing clients were really paying for hasn't changed at all.
AI is an incredible assistant, but you still have to think
I'm not anti-AI. I've used it so much, in so many different ways, and a lot of my students use it heavily to deliver the goods to their clients. If you don't use it to help with your execution, you'll become obsolete too, because there's no way you'll keep up with the people who do.
What I'm against is outsourcing your thinking to it. And I learned that the hard way.
In August 2025, I sat down to start my book, 'Scale Solo: For Experts Who Want to Profit More, Deliver Faster, and Cut the BS'. I'd been working on it in my head for years, so I brain dumped every idea and story into a little recorder you wear around, and talked into it for hours. Then I put all the transcripts into AI and asked it to organize everything for me: list the stories and topics, group the concepts, give me ideas on how to structure the book. These were all my ideas, my stories, my details. Of course it was going to be my book. AI was just going to make it so much easier to organize and write.
It felt like wrestling with a bear.
About six weeks in, I got so fed up. The outputs were kind of in my voice, but not quite. To the untrained eye, they probably would have passed for me. But I heard a highly edited version of my voice, and it had lost the essence of me. (I'm verbose. I say a lot of words! People told me they could hear my voice while they read my first book, and I wanted that again.)
Then I asked it for different ways to structure the book, and they were all fine. Really organized. I could have gone with any single one of them. And as I looked at them, I just felt like, this is a boring book. I don't want to read this book. It made sense, but it was flat, and I wasn't going to put a flat book out into the world.
So I put it all aside, opened a new document and wrote my book with my two hands and the keyboard, from start to finish. One night I woke up at 2:30, lay in bed for about 45 minutes, and then got up, went down to the working area in our lobby and started writing again at 3:30 in the morning.
AI didn't waste those six weeks. It was a great intern. It helped me get everything out of my head and onto paper, and while I was writing I'd go back to it and say, show me all the stories I had. But it couldn't do the part that made it my book: knowing what was flat and what was alive, what to keep and what to toss. And that's exactly the part your clients pay you for.
If someone is hiring you for your strategic thinking and you outsource that thinking to AI, the output might be totally wrong and you might send them in the wrong direction. You're also undermining your own credibility.
Clients pay for judgment, not production
It took us a while to believe that ourselves, though. Around 2013, every time we had a logo to do, Steve would say he needed a minimum of 60 hours just drawing in his sketchbook and coming up with ideas before he brought anything into Illustrator. Then he'd futz with them. I'm talking 60 to 100 hours before we'd even start picking which of the dozens of logos he'd made were the best ones. He was really proud of that, and we both felt like that was what we were selling. One of our early taglines was "the Art of Branding," because he's an artist and an illustrator, and we thought that was the value: you're hiring people who can really make this stuff.
But something happened that made me feel completely differently about it. Steve made a logo for a real estate investment firm whose name started with the letter I. He drew all these different I's, and the one the client chose, and Steve perfected, was an I that was also a building. It had lots of lines and great perspective. It felt really creative, and he built it from scratch.
A year or two later, we were walking down the street and saw that logo on something completely different (something that also had to do with buildings, of course). Steve came up with it himself, but it was still out there in the ether. A building can only look so many ways, and Steve had tried all of them.
That's when we realized it's not really about the crafting. It's about the discernment to know that this is a good logo. Our process changed pretty quickly after that. Now we look at what's already out there first, and either get inspired by it (ooh, not that, but something inspired by that), or find something that's really close to perfect and remake it so it's better and perfect for this client. The logos are as good, if not better. And we do the logo at the end now.
The value is in the ability to pick. The ability to know: yes, that one, and not that one. The curation process, the strategic thought process. The discerning eye is the thing that AI will never replace.
You ask AI a question and it can spit out pages and pages of information. The problem is that the answers always sound pretty good, which means it's even more important for us, the strategists, to level up our discerning eye. You cannot get complacent with what AI spits out, because it will sound good. I read students' Lead Product briefs that I can tell AI wrote, because it's a lot of words that sound good, and I get to the end scratching my head. What is this really saying? Not much of anything.
Your clients need to feel that difference early. A colleague told me about a prospect who was so excited on the call that he spent two days writing a proposal. The reply came back within an hour: they'd started working through it with ChatGPT, and they thought they'd figured it out. He never got the chance to show them how he thinks.
So show them on the call, with questions, not lectures. When you ask good questions and good follow-up questions, it demonstrates that the questions you ask are going to determine the direction of your strategy. Even if you don't explain this explicitly, they will feel it, and it will be palpably different from their interaction with AI.
Why AI made humans more valuable
Creating content used to have a real barrier to entry. You had to work with clients, test ideas, learn what actually worked, and earn your perspective. Then AI made it possible to "write" a book in a matter of hours. (A friend of mine canceled plans because he was up all night finishing his book with AI. He started and finished it in one night.)
Let's reach into my Econ 101 textbook: when supply explodes and demand stays the same, or drops, prices fall. In this case the price wasn't money. It was perceived value. As soon as everyone could do it, it stopped being so valuable.
The robots are already here, and ironically, I think they've made humans irreplaceable. In a world flooded with AI-generated content, trusted recommendations matter more than ever, which, by the way, is where premium clients have always come from. That's why I teach referral-first marketing before any content strategy.
Start here
Write down the last three things a client paid you for. Next to each one, write whether they were paying for your hands or for your judgment. The second column is where your value is.
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