In this episode, Chip and Gini explore the impact of AI on client expectations. They discuss how AI is perceived to speed up work, leading clients to have unrealistic expectations regarding turnaround times and pricing.

The duo emphasizes the need for agencies to set realistic boundaries and manage expectations from the outset. They share stories about AI’s inconsistency, particularly in generating imagery and written content, and stress the importance of educating clients on the limitations and potential of AI.

Ultimately, they advocate for leveraging AI’s efficiencies while maintaining transparency and setting clear guidelines with clients to avoid morale and operational issues within your agency.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini I, I used some AI and so we’re gonna conclude this podcast in just about a minute because we’ll get to all the key points that quickly because of the technology.

Gini Dietrich: The instant output, are we getting?

Chip Griffin: An instant output.

Instant amazing, instant results. Amazing. And we can move on with our day.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. But before we get to that

Chip Griffin: mm-hmm.

Gini Dietrich: Happy belated birthday.

Chip Griffin: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome. I didn’t get to wish you happy birthday last week because the coffee shop and the satellite office and the wifi, blah, blah, blah.

So happy belated.

Chip Griffin: Thank you. It is, it is nice to have you back in your home office so that we don’t,

Gini Dietrich: it’s very nice to be back.

Chip Griffin: We, we don’t have to, to figure out all the technical issues every week. Yes. And, and figure out can we record, can we not record? Yes. Yes. But I think, I think we only had two weeks where we couldn’t make it work, so Yeah, you’re right.

That’s not, that’s not too bad given the challenges of recording in a coffee shop environment.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Summer school is over. Yay.

Chip Griffin: Well, there you go. Alright. We are gonna talk about AI and we are gonna talk about AI making us faster, but perhaps the bigger problem is clients and prospects thinking that it would make us even faster.

Than fast.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: And so it does tend to lead to unrealistic expectations about how much you can do, how fast you can do it, and of course what that means for pricing. And so these are all challenges that agencies are facing and, and we’re all excited about the technology around us and how we can leverage it.

But, but how do we manage those expectations effectively with clients and, and how do we integrate it effectively with what we’re doing so that, that it adds to the, the results and, and doesn’t just give us a giant headache.

Gini Dietrich: Part of the reason I like this topic for today is at six o’clock this morning, I saw a client in a Google Doc, a shared Google Doc making some changes, and then at 7:30 he emailed and said, have you updated it yet?

And I was like…

Chip Griffin: yep.

Gini Dietrich: Uh,

Chip Griffin: nope.

Gini Dietrich: No. Nope. It’s not, not even 8:00 AM yet on a Monday. Let’s thanks for playing. Let’s settle down. Yep. So that’s part of the reason I like this topic is because I think that that’s exactly what’s happening, happening is everyone’s like, oh, well you can do it faster. So I expect it in minutes instead of hours or even days.

Which may be the case in some, some things, but not the case in all.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look, I mean, agencies are, are used to unrealistic client expectations. Fair. It’s something that that agencies have, have mm-hmm. Been dealing with for decades, certainly as long as I’ve been in the business and, and it is always something that you have to be mindful of.

But I think to your point, AI is making it so that people think that all of these things can be done even faster than they really can. Or that AI alone can solve problems and create content or edit content, and there is no need for any human touch. And so that means in their minds that this can be truly instantaneous.

But the reality is that AI still requires a level of management, a level of review.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And, and is, it is a tool to help us get there, but it, it’s not gonna take over and do its thing on its own. So, you know, a client can’t expect that you get things just as fast as you might from chat GPT when you ask a question.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s not, it’s not that, I mean, everybody knows this. That’s not the case at all. Christopher Barger, who’s on my team, has a really good article coming out in a couple of weeks about how he used AI for his fantasy baseball draft. And part of the reason he did that, which he explains in the article, is that he wasn’t using AI at all and I was trying to encourage him to use it and said,

Why don’t you see what it would tell you for your baseball draft? Just to like, get an idea of how to use it and what kinds of things. And one of the things he says in the article that he learned is that the, the output is only as good as what you give it. It’s only as good as what you’re training it with.

So because, and because it’s a little bit delayed, you know, he was, he was getting information from it, from players that played two years ago instead of more current players. And so I think we, for tend to forget those things that the AI has to be trained, it has to be trained over time. It still has a delay.

It still hallucinates. So no, you can’t just input a prompt and expect that you’re going to get an output and then send it over to the client. That’s just not how it works. And it’s unrealistic for them to think that.

Chip Griffin: Yes, but as, as we know, you know, clients aren’t necessarily always grounded in reality, when it comes to expectations, and so, so honestly, it, it’s our job as, as agency leaders to help educate them. And to help them to understand what the technology can and cannot do, what is or is not unreasonable to expect of us and our teams.

And so I think now more than ever, the advice that we always give that that as soon as you spot unrealistic expectations, you need to call them out and adjust them. I think that becomes even more important now.

Absolutely. Because otherwise you’ll really put yourself in a difficult position if they assume that it’s quick and easy and cheap to do all of these things that they want you to do.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I remember, gosh, just a year ago, maybe even shorter than that, where agency owners were freaking out because they were afraid they were going to lose retainer budgets.

Or have them shrink in size because clients are saying, well, you’re now using AI. It shouldn’t cost this much. I think that that concern has eased a little bit because clients understand that maybe they’re getting more for their retainer dollars, which is great. I think we all, all like to be able to do that for our clients.

But I do think there is this idea that now we’ve gone from Oh, well, you can use AI for your job, so we shouldn’t, you shouldn’t charge me as much to, oh, you can use AI for your job and deliver all of these extra things today in the next 30 seconds or 30 minutes versus a week from now. And you’re right, you should be setting the expectation that it still takes time.

We have other clients, even though we don’t like to let our clients know we have other clients, we do have other clients. There are fires that pop up. Clients have crises, clients have issues, like there are things you still have to deal with, with or without AI. So setting those expectations and realistic expectations is the right thing to do.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I mean certainly clients don’t like to hear that there are other clients. Right. But, but I think that makes it even more important for us to be clear from the get go that yeah, we do have other clients and, and that’s a good thing. Yeah. And, and part of the problem comes because agencies try to deceive people in the prospect process.

Not necessarily out of any malicious intent, but, but we often try to, particularly as small agencies, we try to make clients think that we are bigger than we are.

Gini Dietrich: Mm mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: We always try to make people feel like, you know, they are the only client that matters. Mm-hmm. Which in that moment, in that phone call ought to be true.

Yes. You shouldn’t be thinking about or responding to emails to other clients while you’re dealing with, with another or a prospect. But, you can’t make them think that they are your, your only priority forever in the future. Because that’s, that’s just unrealistic. Right?

And, and so we need to work to educate clients about these things and, and not try to allow them to believe that we are bigger, that we are, that they are, you know, the A number one client always and forever that you know, we can turn things around, licketysplit. We always wanna make sure that we understand what it really takes to get the job done and share that in a transparent way with the prospect, because otherwise it becomes a real battle to try to, to walk that back six months down the line when they’re like, well, I don’t understand.

Why is it taking you so long? Taking me so long, I, I did it within like six hours. I, you know, I mean.

Gini Dietrich: Right? I stayed up till 9:30 last night working on this for you. What do you mean? Yeah. Right.

Chip Griffin: And yeah. But, but a lot of that comes because we didn’t correct the expectations soon enough. And, and as we’ve talked about before, oftentimes very early in the relationship. We will respond lickety split, and at 7:30 at night and all of that kind of stuff because, you know, we want to make a good impression. And, and the AI may in fact allow us to do that at times in a more, you know, in a faster, shorter labor timeframe.

But if we, if we do that constantly, you know, we’re gonna be constantly chasing ourselves and, and working crazy hours.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And it will destroy our morale. It’ll destroy team morale. And, and it will only continue to feed itself to the point where at some point, even if you are doing all those things, you’re still not gonna meet the expectations that the client has.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think this is, this goes to any sort of unrealistic expectation that the client has. And to your point earlier, most clients do have unrealistic expectations. It’s setting your boundaries and setting the expectations, and setting the realistic expectations upfront.

Because when you do that, it’s a lot less painful six months from now. It’s a lot less painful a year from now because you’re not having to have those conversations and everybody’s excited with new clients. Everybody wants to put their best foot forward, of course, but set those boundaries upfront to say, this is what you can expect.

Realistically. Sometimes you might over deliver in, in the case of getting things done sooner or things like that. But those should be like delight and surprise kinds of experiences, not an all the, all the time kind of thing.

Chip Griffin: Right. Now. At the same time, I, I think we need to be careful that we don’t, the pendulum doesn’t swing too far in the opposite direction as it sometimes does.

Yes. And we have to understand that AI and, and other related technology. absolutely will allow us to turn some things around faster and with less work. And so we, we shouldn’t pretend that it doesn’t simply to protect ourselves or to protect our profit margins. We need to, you know, we need to, we don’t need to run to the client and say, oh, by the way, you know, we can, we can now edit these pieces in, you know, a quarter of the time because, you know, the AI gets us there faster or whatever, but, you know, we, we can’t just sit there and sit on it.

For a couple of extra days just to, to, to make the client think that it’s taking longer than it is.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, no, please don’t do that. Geez.

Chip Griffin: Right. So, you know, we need to, if, if we are able to become more efficient and more productive with these things, we should figure out how to leverage that increased efficiency and productivity.

We shouldn’t just try to, to hide it and harvest it for our own benefit. Because

Gini Dietrich: That’s a really great point.

Chip Griffin: Because if we want them to believe us when we say it’s not really going to speed it up as much as you think. Then, we have to be honest when it does, because otherwise we’re not credible.

Right? Right. Because everybody knows that there are places and there are things that AI and related technology will help us do better, more efficient, cheaper, whatever. Take advantage of that. Be honest about it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I, yeah, please do

Chip Griffin: Fight the battle’s worth fighting,

Gini Dietrich: please. Yes, please don’t do that.

Chip Griffin: But, but I mean, but I see it a lot and I, and I’ve seen that advice given too, right? You know, that, you know it, that, you know, we, we need to, we need to protect, our revenue. And so if it, if it’s gonna take half the time, we need to keep charging this the same amount. Well, if it’s gonna take you half the time to do it.

I, I would be looking for how I can leverage that to do something else and produce even better results.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: For the client. I wouldn’t just be saying, no, I, I know it, it only takes half the time for me to do this work, but I’m gonna keep charging you the same. Yeah. Because that may work for you in the short term, but it does not work in the long term.

Gini Dietrich: It does not work. No, it does not. I know I’ve said this before, but we, we’ve always, since I was a young whipper snapper. I had a boss who called it the popcorn list. So it was the list of things that you wish you could get to that aren’t strategically like they don’t matter from a strategic standpoint, but they’re things that, that could be done. Maybe it’s like reoptimizing the website or changing content on certain pages or developing a new piece of lead magnet or something like things that you would like to get to but maybe haven’t been able to. Have that list so that now that you are more efficient because of AI, you can go to those things because that’s the surprise and delight thing I mentioned earlier.

The things that you can do for the client that you weren’t able to before because of time, resources, or, budget resource constraints. Now you can do it because you have, have some of that time and budget available. Absolutely. They will be so happy with you doing those kinds of things.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And so why, why not surprise and delight them? But there also is a piece of education here, right? Because a lot of times clients expect because they’ve seen particular examples. Either maybe someone on their team showed them something that that AI was able to do, or they’ve seen someone post about it on LinkedIn or something like that.

We need to help educate them about what the limits of AI are for the specific things that we’re doing for them. And I think one of the, the challenges that a lot of clients have is they will see something that’s just amazing that AI has done and helped produce. At the same time, my experience is a lot of the generative AI is fairly inconsistent in the quality of the output. Whether that’s written or visual or audio or whatever.

And so part of it is to help them to understand, sure. You know, we can have, for your website, we can have all of the images generated by AI. Some of them may be great, some of them may not.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And, and there may be a lot less consistency across them than if we had a human designer doing it. Now I expect that will continue to improve over time.

But we need to help our clients understand what some of the trade offs are, if we are going to rely more on these things to turn things around more quickly. And so there may be a lack of consistency in writing style and things like that. There may be a lack of consistency in the visual imagery.

Sometimes it may not even be usable, and so it might actually take longer. Yeah, I’ve certainly seen a number of examples in working with clients where they used AI for I don’t mean to keep beating on imagery, but imagery seems to be one of the places where it is the most inconsistent. Yeah. And sometimes you’ll look at something and be like, this is fantastic.

I’m so excited about this. And then you’ll work on something similar and you’ll go through seven or eight iterations and it’s just all rubbish.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And you’re like, I can’t use any of this.

Gini Dietrich: Any, yeah.

Chip Griffin: And then maybe you finally get something that’s decent, but it, it doesn’t look anything like the other one.

So now you don’t have brand consistency. Across the, the different elements that you’re using. So you really need to, to help your clients to understand where are their limits, where can it help and, and why it is that, that you’re telling them it’s not going to shave off as much time as, as they might think.

Gini Dietrich: I’m laughing as you’re talking about this because we had a client maybe three or four months ago who decided that the positioning, key messages, vision and mission work that we did along with the new, with their web development firm for their new website was not adequate because it hadn’t been run through AI.

It actually had, but okay. And so he redid it. And he sent it over and the team lead for that client called me and it was probably like seven or eight o’clock on a a weeknight. And he was so angry and he’s like, I’m gonna send this to you. I need you to look at it. And so I looked at it and the AI didn’t even spell the company name wrong.

He didn’t like check anything. It talked about a mission for some other company that wasn’t their mission. And the two of us were like, what? And so I called the CEO and I was like, dude. Really? And he goes, oh, I’m embarrassed. I didn’t even look at it. Yeah. I was like, come on. Like, geez. Yeah. So, yes, and, and in images to your point, especially if there’s text, that text is never correct.

Ever. Yeah. Ever. So please, like, you’re right, it could actually take more time in the long run.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I mean, and, and there are these services out there that say, oh, you know, we’ll build a PowerPoint deck with the AI. You just kind of tell it what you need. And, and I’ve tried some of them and, and some of them occasionally come up with something that’s, that’s, you know, pretty good, decent. And some of them are just awful and they look like a two year-old put them together.

Gini Dietrich: Right? Yes.

Chip Griffin: And, and so it’s, to me, one of the biggest challenges is, is that lack of consistency. Or the, the flip side is sometimes excessive consistency. Right? Particularly when it comes to text. And you know, lack of, even though you may tell the AI to, to think critically, it often doesn’t. And, and so it will end up just saying, oh, you’re so brilliant.

You’re so smart. This is, you’re right on. I’m so glad you suggested this. I’m like, well, but what, where’s the contrary point of view? And I’ve seen some people with, you know, some prompts that they claim helps the AI to, to be a little bit more constructively critical. And maybe, but, but it, it does seem to generally love its operator in most cases.

It does. Yes, it does. And so you have to be careful about mm-hmm. What that can mean, particularly if you’re using it to edit things or, or those kinds of things because it might, it might not steer you down the right path. And so again, you need to help your clients understand Absolutely. We can use AI to short circuit some of these things, but, but just know that it sometimes it’s gonna help and sometimes it’s not. So sometimes we may need a little extra time, so we’re gonna build that cushion into our schedules so that if the AI doesn’t come through, in the way that we would like it to, we still have room to clean up after it as necessary with humans.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Yeah. I, I think that setting realistic expectations, setting your boundaries, and being very clear about what that all means is, is the right approach. And that doesn’t change, right? It doesn’t change. If we have AI, it doesn’t change. If we have whatever’s next is to come. We always need to set realistic expectations and then, and then hold to it.

Like if you say we don’t answer emails after 5:00 PM don’t answer emails after 5:00 PM.

Chip Griffin: Right. Yeah. And, and I think, I think that is, to me, the point I would underscore is nothing has really changed, right? With AI. Everything has changed with AI and yet nothing has changed. Yes, right. We still need to focus on education and expectations with our clients no matter what tools or technology we’re using.

And if we do that we’ll, we will be in a better position. And obviously that will be an ongoing process. It’s not like we just do that when we sell the contract, we have to continuously educate. Right. And measure expectations. Yes. And adjust expectations.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: As circumstances warrant.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, indeed.

Chip Griffin: So with that, clearly the AI didn’t help us enough.

We didn’t finish everything here in one minute.

Gini Dietrich: Shoot. Oh, well.

Chip Griffin: But hopefully you enjoyed the journey in listening to us and we shared a few points that you might actually appreciate, might even help your business. You just never know.

Gini Dietrich: Maybe. Hopefully.

Chip Griffin: And if not, feel free to stick this into AI and see what it comes up with.

Gini Dietrich: Now I’m kind of tempted.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, there you go. So on that note, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.