Is AI Convincing Your Agency Clients They Don't Need You? with Devon MacDonald | Ep #924

AI hasn't replaced agencies but it has changed the client relationship.

More clients are showing up convinced they're marketing experts after spending an afternoon with ChatGPT. Instead of trusting strategy, they're questioning it with AI-generated recommendations that often lack context, experience, and sound judgment.

In this episode, Devon MacDonald, President of Cairns Oneil, explains why the marketing agencies that thrive won't be the ones using AI the fastest, they'll be the ones combining AI with strategic thinking. He shares why the marketing funnel isn't dead, how AI is reshaping search and discovery, and why protecting your team's ability to think critically may become your greatest competitive advantage.

What You'll Learn

• Why AI-generated advice is creating more informed-looking—but often misguided—clients.
• How to educate clients without undermining the relationship or your expertise.
• Why the traditional marketing funnel hasn't disappeared—it has simply accelerated.
• What LLM optimization means and why digital agencies need to prepare for AI-driven search.
• How over-reliance on AI can weaken your team's strategic thinking over time.
• Why the best AI teams combine technical expertise with human insight, creativity, and consumer understanding.

Key Takeaways

• AI is making strategy more accessible, but not necessarily more accurate.
• Agencies create value through judgment, context, and decision-making—not just execution.
• Clients still need strategic frameworks to separate useful AI outputs from noise.
• Search behavior is shifting toward AI assistants, making LLM visibility an emerging competitive advantage.
• Critical thinking is a skill that weakens when teams rely on AI for every first draft.
• The agencies that win will use AI to amplify human expertise—not replace it.

Do your clients show up to calls with AI-generated strategies that are mostly wrong, and you then spend half the engagement correcting their assumptions instead of doing the work? Have you had clients who used to trust your expertise now question everything, armed with a chatbot and a YouTube video?

Today’s featured guest is an agency owner who came up through programming, crossed into digital strategy, ran creative and media operations inside major holding company networks, and eventually went independent in search of the entrepreneurial freedom that corporate agency life could not offer. He goes into what AI is actually doing to the client relationship and what it means to train a team that can think rather than one that just produces faster.

Devon MacDonald is the president of Cairns Oneil, a Canadian media agency serving clients across North America. His career began in computer programming in the 1990s, working in HTML and SQL for clients in sales and marketing before moving into digital strategy and eventually running a creative agency and then a media agency network inside major holding company structures.

Five years ago, he went independent. He built a cross-functional AI team at his agency that includes both technical and non-technical members, operating from the belief that consumer insight and cultural understanding matter as much as data fluency in how AI gets applied.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

• Clients who have decided AI makes them the expert

• Is the funnel dead because of AI?

• Will this skill disappear once we’ve completely stopped using it?

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions:Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

The Problem With Clients Who Have Decided AI Makes Them the Expert

Devon knows there was already an education deficit in marketing before AI arrived. A generation of performance marketers came into positions of influence having skipped foundational thinking around brand, audience, and strategy. AI compounded that gap by giving them the ability to produce high volumes of output that look credible but are built on faulty premises. As a result, clients now show up with hundred-question emails generated by a chatbot, convinced they have done the strategic work when they have not done any of it.

The agency response to this cannot be frustration alone. It requires teaching. Devon's approach is to build client literacy around an abductive strategy: start with the vision, align everything to it, and use that alignment as the filter for which AI-generated inputs are worth pursuing and which are distractions.

That kind of structured thinking is precisely what a client who watched one YouTube video about replacing their agency does not have. And it is exactly what keeps the agency relationship valuable even when the client has access to the same tools.

Why the Funnel Is Not Dead, It Has Just Accelerated

Devon once heard at a conference that the funnel is dead because of AI. He pushes back on this claim saying that the path to purchase has changed. The speed of it has changed. The surfaces where awareness, attraction, and acquisition happen have shifted. But the underlying logic, that a buyer needs to become aware of something before they can want it, and want it before they can buy it, has not changed and will not.

The practical implication for agencies is that LLM optimization and branded search strategy are now front-line service offerings, not future considerations. Devon describes seeing this in RFPs already: clients are asking explicitly about model optimization and how agencies will help them show up in AI-generated answers. The agencies that can answer that question with a coherent framework are in a different conversation than the ones still positioning around traditional search rankings alone.

The Skill That Disappears When You Stop Using It

Devon shows genuine concern about what happens when a team stops doing the critical thinking and starts outsourcing it to AI. For instance, nobody knows how to navigate without Google Maps anymore. The skill atrophied because the tool made it unnecessary. The same thing happens to strategic thinking inside an agency when AI handles every first-order question without the team being required to form their own answer first.

Devon's response to this is to build the AI team cross-functionally, including people whose value is not technical. The consumer insight person, the culture reader, the account lead who understands what a client actually means when they say something: those perspectives shape how AI gets applied. Removing them from the process in favor of pure technical fluency produces faster output that misses the point. Let’s not forget that human judgment is embedded in the workflow, not bypassed by it.

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