AI in marketing is a bit like farming in the 16th century. Or the 18th, I'm not sure which. People are still becoming the best hand plowers in the world, and the tractors are already in the field.
If you're sitting in the chat window and you think that's AI, you're plowing. The people on the tractor use AI as a connector. They treat it as an extension of their own critical thinking, not as a blog writer, or a Facebook ad writer, or a keyword research tool.
This post is about the difference, and about how to move from one to the other.
Where AI sits today
The AI companies preach the intelligence of these tools, and they are intelligent. No doubt about that. But they are not more intelligent than software that has existed for decades in its own space, with years of data and experience behind it that no chat window can reach.
That's the whole reason to stop looking at AI as a chat tool. If you're trying to grow a business, look at it as a connector.
As of today, September 2026, most people either dabble or use the chat. I don't know the real number and I'd rather not invent one, but I'd guess the overwhelming majority of people who use AI at all have never gone past the chat box. The most complex setup they've built is a project folder with some instructions in it, so it remembers a bit about them and keeps their chats in one place.
If that's you, you're an expert with the plow. I'm an expert with the tractor.
Agencies are in the same boat. They evolve or they get left behind.
How an agency runs your marketing right now
I want to be fair here, because a good agency earns its money. This is what the work actually looks like today, before AI does anything much beyond writing a first draft.
Facebook ads
They interview you. They learn your business, your market, your customer profiles, their pains and their dreams, and what can be said to speak to those. Out of that comes a buffet of ads to test in your account.
They write the copy to the angle, then design to suit it. Those designs are still made by a professional designer, not by an AI, and that matters more than you'd think.
Then it gets implemented properly: good quality tracking, a sensible campaign structure, audience targeting where it's needed. They review the landing page or the instant form, and make sure it's connected to a CRM.
That last part sounds like admin. It isn't. We set up the Meta account and the CRM to talk to each other for a mowing company we work with, and their rejected leads went from about 40% to under 10%.
A good agency keeps testing angles so you don't have to, and scales the ones that work, which lifts your lead flow and gives you room to invest more.
Cold email
Similar discovery, so they know exactly who you're talking to, what hurts, and how you fix it.
Then they buy a list. Your target customer, pulled from a tool like Apollo, where you can get thousands of contacts, emails and phone numbers in almost any industry. They write a series of emails, set up inboxes that rotate based on how much volume you're sending, and use software like Instantly to run the sending. Replies either get forwarded to you or pushed to you automatically.
Google ads
Customer research, then keyword targets defined off the back of it. A look through the account history. Tracking checked and made correct. Then the structure they already know works for your industry.
We rebuilt the conversion tracking for a homewares brand and built out their shopping feed. One of their sales came back at 10.7x on ad spend, another at 8.7x.
So what are you actually paying for? Mostly for what they don't do. They've seen the traps in Google Ads that quietly cost you money, so you're not paying to learn them yourself.
AI as the connector
The best agencies, and the ones that are AI-savvy, are getting faster and cheaper at everything I just described. They're producing more of it, at bigger scale, and a lot of them are more profitable for it. If you're not doing that, you're an idiot. There's nothing morally or ethically wrong with any of it.
Here's what makes it interesting, and why I'm writing this. Everything those agencies are building can be built inside your business instead. That happens the moment you stop treating AI as a chat and start treating it as the great connector.
Think of it as the runner. The mailman. The delivery driver who takes something from one place to the next, brings things back, and knows where everything lives. It goes out to all these different systems, pulls information back, puts it together, makes changes in the places that need changing, and returns to you with an outcome. Instead of you feeding it inputs, it goes and gets its own.
I use Claude Code for this, and Claude Cowork to a lesser degree. Claude Code is the version that can connect to other software and act, rather than sit in a window and talk.
Take Facebook ads again. Any business owner can sign up to Windsor AI, which connects to your Facebook account, pulls the data down, and pushes changes back up, including creating campaigns. Connect that to Claude Code. Then connect Apify, which is scraping software. Feed Apify what you know about your business and your target customer, and send it out across Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit and anywhere else your buyers talk, to build as much customer research as it can gather.
Then you add a skill that knows how to build angles from that research and understands how Facebook ads work. It pulls the research down, turns it into angles, passes them through Windsor, and uploads the ads. You get a notification when they're live.
What you've actually bought yourself there is the testing. The buffet of ads an agency puts together over a couple of weeks becomes something you can run continuously, off research that refreshes itself.
The piece that's missing is design. High quality creative still needs a designer, and right now that's a real constraint on the whole idea. When that changes, this industry changes fast, and business owners should be at the front of it rather than reading about it afterwards.
Where I'd start if I were you
Start with Windsor AI. I've got nothing to gain by saying that, no affiliate deal, nothing. I recommend it because it's the easiest way into understanding how Claude Code works.
If you're running Google Ads or Facebook ads right now, get a free Windsor account. Open a starter Claude Code session and say something close to this:
I've got Windsor AI. I want a dashboard that notifies me once a week with the results of my account, tells me if something is going well or badly, and gives me suggestions on what to change.
Then let your mind open up to the other software Claude can connect into.
Most people go to Claude with a question. Or they say "Claude, do some market research for me." Claude is not a market research tool. It's a connector. The same request, framed properly, sounds like this: find the best market research tool you can connect to, one with an API or an MCP, which is just a standard plug that lets one piece of software talk to another. Get the information. Bring it back. Synthesize it. Pass it through to Windsor, cross check it against the data and what we're already running, then tell me where the opportunities are.
Same person, same tool, completely different machine.
What it looks like fully built
Cold email is the one where I can show you the full version, because it's the one I've built out furthest.
Most people see Instantly and think about talking to Claude about their target market. Some go one step further and wire it to Apollo to research leads, which is honestly still a bit clunky. The evolved version is a system that:
finds the directories where your industry actually lists its people
scrapes them
pulls the email addresses
runs those addresses through email verification software
notifies you on placement testing, so you know your mail is landing
connects into the sending platform and watches mailbox health, rotation, and what's performing
goes out to YouTube and the social platforms to find what's working in your industry right now
pulls that back, cross checks it against what you're currently sending
runs A/B tests off the difference
brings in new leads week after week
That's how I built it in my agency, for my clients. On the cold email side, a tennis and running-track resurfacing company we work with has had 174 positive replies come back since March.
There is no good reason a business owner can't have the same thing built inside their own company.
The master of one is finished
Let's be honest about the catch. It still needs oversight, and someone who understands marketing and the basics of Claude Code. You can't get around that part.
Every number I've quoted here came from people doing work, with better tools underneath them. None of it ran on its own, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise.
An agency that stays independent of AI, and doesn't bring its customers into the fold, will die. So why doesn't every owner just build this themselves? Time, mostly. Owners are savvy enough to know these tools are improving. Working out how is a job on its own.
The best marketers are not the ones fighting it and becoming masters of the plow by hand. They're the ones getting on the tractor. My prediction is that it makes marketers more integrated with their clients, not less, because someone has to sit inside the business and build the thing.
For thirty, forty, fifty years the advice was to master one thing and never be a generalist. AI is killing that advice. You don't have to be a master of many things. If you're a generalist across all of them and a master at using AI, you're theoretically a master of all of them.
One of my clients put the old habit better than I can:
Working with Daniel was a refreshing and rewarding experience. Refreshing because we were able to have honest discussions about the best plays for our business, even if we were biased to old ways of working.
Charlotte Du Rieu, on Trustpilot.
That bias is the plow. Everyone has it, me included.
The fractional CAIMO
Which brings me to where I think agencies land. Not dead, but different. The future is a fractional CMO who comes in, runs your marketing, builds the connections I've described, and upskills your team while doing it. Or, as I prefer to call it, a fractional CAIMO. Chief AI Marketing Officer.
That's effectively what I am, and it's what we do at Pager Digital. We've managed over $10M in paid ads and generated more than 10,000 leads doing it the old way, which is exactly why I'd rather build the new way for the businesses I work with than watch it arrive without them. We run the marketing, and we make sure the business ends up at the front of its industry rather than reading about all this in two years. That thread runs through most of the work we do.
If that sounds like something you need, I'm the man to talk to. Book a game plan for your area. It's free, it takes 30 minutes, and there's no pitch at the end of it.
Get on the tractor.
