I have reviewed over 75 proposals and sat in a couple dozen meetings over the past two weeks on behalf of a big name fashion brand trying to hire an AI agency to lead their AI implementation. This will be their 4th agency since they started opening up to AI back in March 2025. They reached out to me from a referral because they need help finding a good agency that won’t overpromise and underdeliver. I provide the guidance, oversee the training of employees, and ensure the agency is capable of supporting a full organization wide transformation process. Not just marketing, not just ops, not just one little workflow. The whole company. I have time for agencies that are trying to do right by their clients and know when they need help. The markdown agencies selling expertise they can’t explain and expecting Claude to make every decision for them are the first to be tossed to the side. Some gaps that keep coming up in proposals and meetings with me and the CTO as we interviewed the agencies: - You can explain the tech stack and demo for PDF data extraction on Purchase Orders, but what happens when an approved order changes? Who needs to act on it, and what gets updated downstream? - You quote three months to the first build and pitch another audit. What can you reuse from the last three agencies, and what still needs checking? - You send every artifact to AI with minimal guidance, so it is easy to tell that we are communicating through Claude. But when we ask them to explain their recommendations in the meeting, they can’t. They run the meeting transcript through AI and send us next steps that are all redundant, but when we ask them in a meeting for specific insights they say they'll get back to us. - You sell hours saved as ROI by multiplying time by salaries. Those salaries aren’t automatically going away. What work can those employees take on now, and how does that benefit the company? - You claim to sell "outcomes", but the outcomes you describe provide observability, not actionable steps and proven systems. An AI agent that gathers all the data and lets you query on it is useless compared to a system that uses that data to get more customers and provide more throughput all on its own. A good agency needs to be able to pick up where they were at, check what actually works, and make better decisions based on that information, and re-assess as they go. A good agency would come prepared with the ordering, fulfillment, and sales processes they expect to see. Explain where they think the bottleneck is and ask, “Is that accurate?” We can confirm or deny, but at least it shows where they are thinking and the expertise they would provide... then the agency can explain how automating one part leads to the next improvement or depends on a previous step. For example, you automate the orders coming in and get all of the data extracted, nice and good to go. The people working with it afterward are reconciling it, confirming it, and connecting those orders to fulfillment and cash flow. Once we’ve proved which numbers we can trust, they can spend more of their time doing predictions, testing, analysis, and bigger scope items that can actually drive revenue. Now we can start pulling levers. Say an item was successful at a certain time last year. Let’s put a marketing plan in place, test how it does with different traffic, see how the cost changes, and test new prices. Check the margin and whether we have the inventory to support it. Those are all steps that will eventually be automated, and a good agency would need to know how to support that pathway or at least have a strategy to explore. I've done this whole process at over 200 companies and even if you're at your 1st or 10th implementation, it is possible to know these things and come prepared with it. A lot of bad agencies, aka "markdown agencies", are trying to get away with doing the bare minimum by pitching "AI audits", "AI Enablement training", and "maintenance fees" to help sustain the systems... but what they actually deliver are roadmaps generated by Claude, a weak AI guide as they help setup a Claude Team setup for an org whose identity and governance requirements it doesn’t meet (bad for any org that needs to take security seriously), and the maintenance fees are often met with bad service long term. The last two agencies that have been considered for this opportunity both pitched $75k-$150k per month, but they could easily get $250k per month from an org this size if they just came prepared with the right items and momentum behind their builds. As of today, I finally hit 250 companies where I have led, implemented, or consulted for full, org wide, "AI transformation". All while maintaining a full time job, what a blessing. Rewarding myself with a three day weekend goodnight.