“When I stop being on your ass, that is when you know I’ve given up on you, because I know the ceiling to your potential”
–Greg Luzinski (Former Philadelphia Philie) to 16yo Wil
In high school I had a baseball coach who used to be a star on the Phillies, Greg Luzinski, better known as, “The Bull,” in Philly circles. His son Ryan went to my high school and I was on the team.
One day, “The Bull” took me into the cages and said, let’s work on the “curveball.” Here I was. Being trained by a PRO, teaching me to hit the curve!
After 2 long sessions, he stopped spending that time, and it was the right call. I struggled to “hang in” on the curve. I was a curveball hitting “laggard”.
AI is the curveball for many of us, and I want to build the “Greg Luzinski” of agencies. Many of us are business owners of “pre-ai” companies, and we have to ask ourselves one question…
“What is my sorry but you can’t work here anymore cutoff for my AI laggards?”
Four guys got drafted from that team, in large part their lives were made better because my coach got the time back to coach them by reducing his time spent on me.
Agency leaders are secretly talking about AI laggards, and how to manage them, but almost nobody’s talking about it publicly with how to think about it.
In WRITER’s survey, 75% of executives say their AI strategy is more for show than real internal guidance. Same survey: 60% plan to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI.
Read those two numbers together. A lot of leaders are planning consequences for a standard they never actually set.
So here’s my argument: before you hold people accountable for AI, make sure you’ve earned the right to.
That means setting a clear standard, investing in getting people there, and measuring contribution by value, not volume. Then be honest about the consequences.
The first three are on you. Only the fourth is on them.
1. Did your managers ever SET the standard?
Here’s a test I love, from the book How Google Works:
Are there people on your team who, if they told you they were leaving, you would not fight hard to keep?
If there are, ask the harder question: did anyone ever tell them what it takes to be someone you’d fight for?
Chadd Wright, former Navy SEAL, from his creed: “Professionals have standards.” In his talk, he adds that you have to have a standard to measure your actions against.
I’m extremely AI-forward as a CEO. That’s pretty obvious.
I don’t run the business though, so this shows up in how I advise my leaders: have you set a standard for the behaviors required to be on your team?
Can your team repeat your standards if I walk by them in a hall and ask?
When I ran teams, being on my team meant certain things: we volunteered, we wrote what we thought and shared it publicly, and we looked for people who were down to challenge the status quo, and a bunch of other stuff.
Did it create a ton of chaos? Absolutely.
It also built a brand as a company that innovates, and we’re still reaping the benefits today.
CONSISTENCY: Have I said it long enough?
My earliest AI posts are three years old, saying “this is it.” I said the same in our all-hands. Go back through your all-hands and team comms, and run prompts to see if you’ve been consistent for months.
Example: earlier this year I wrote that I’ll never again ask a web analyst to pull Google Analytics for me, I will ask them to help poke holes in my assumptions, that’s the value.
Steal this prompt!
Run this on your own all-hands transcripts: “List every time I talked about AI in an all-hands, oldest to newest, with my exact words. Flag when I first said AI was a big deal, when I set expectations, when I offered help, and any all-hands where I didn’t mention AI at all.”
Is your team “killing it” today on a task list made 3 years ago?
I’ve written a lot about the stages of AI maturity. Outlining the stages is one thing. Saying who actually stays and who goes based on them is another.
Here are 3 posts on marketing AI maturity:
- The 5 Stages of AI Marketing Maturity (2026)
- 4 types of AI marketers (2025)
- AI Marketer Survival kit (2024)
2. Look within FIRST! You might be the problem!
I was taught in 5th grade when you point fingers at others to blame them, that is one finger pointing at them, and 3 fingers back at you.
Spend 3x as long looking at yourself before blaming others. This section is for you to point at yourself, that is where learning and growth comes from anyway.
Looking internal: Take something you wanted to be better at, has blaming someone else ever miraculously made you better at that thing?
Peter Drucker, in The Effective Executive said this: “If you want the average performance of those around you to go up, you must first improve your own performance.”
- PATIENCE: Have I given people time to get there? I might be extremely AI-forward, but I need the patience to let others catch up. How many months or years can someone be in your company before you decide to fire them for being disconnected from the vision?
- My job is purely innovation: no internal meetings, kickoffs or QBRs. Compare the time you have for AI research vs the time your people have. Maybe them being heads down is the goal, so you can be freed up. Are you sweating it and working a 70 hour week that feels like 40 because you “LOVE” this moment? Well maybe they are working 40 and it feels like 70. You could be comparing apples to bananas.
- TRAINING: Did we invest in training. If so, how much, what % of my revenue is on training, what % of their hours? A lot of us learned by trial and error. Not everybody learns that way, and you’ve got to respect it.
- Some people learn at a different pace and are still bought in. Did you buy the trainings? We now have people building agents in their first week at Seer as part of onboarding. We give them the week “off” with the job to be done is to spend week 1 just getting up on AI.
- TEACHING: Did I hire AI forward people who love helping others become AI forward? People need peers at every level who are AI-forward AND education-forward. Without them, you may have brilliant people building scalable agents and skills who just don’t love helping others level up.
- Stripe created a “Forward Deployed AI Accelerator” role. One AI-native person per cohort of 20 marketers, coaching each one until they’re self-sufficient. That might be the investment you need.
- SHARING: Is learning in public part of the culture? Our AI Slack thread has thousands of messages, people bantering, testing, sharing, etc. Our Monday pulse check asks “what are you proud of from last week?” it has run for seven or eight years, and two or three years ago we added “how are you using AI?” Give people more than one place to share their journey, but don’t blindly accept “trust me, it’s happening in places you can’t see.”
- TOOLS: Did I give them what they need? Robin Ross has a framework I love: Mindset, Skillset, Dataset, Toolset.
- Mindset: what does a post-AI person think that a pre-AI person doesn’t, how are you cultivating more people with that mindset in your company today?
- Skillset: what responsibility do we have to get them the skills? Covered this above in training
- Dataset: have we done the IT work so they can give clients truly unique consulting, in a world where everyone have the same data? Do we make our data available easily, reliably, and consistently? Do we blend our data in ways that are unique, are we trying to build unique data to help our consultants win?
- Toolset: are we investing to make these tools accessible, if someone wants a subscription to something, how easy is it for them to get it? Do you have a fund for each employee where they can get access on their own, right when they are having the problem? Or will it be a 2 month process?
- My TIME: Can they get my time to build? I told the team I’m always available for “build” meetings. Anything else, I’m a lot harder to get. That signals where my time goes, have you signaled where your time is best spent to your team?
- Receipt: in January 2025, I cancelled almost all my non-build 1:1s. Non-build time moved to two Fridays a month, since then I got more flexible, but announcing that allowed people to know where my time shofted and how to get it.
None of this is about getting everything right. This is about signaling long enough and consistently enough that when you have tough conversations with someone about being behind, you have done the work to look at yourself, you need to feel like you gave them more than enough chances to show they were leaned into where your say your company is going.
3. Then go find who’s adding VALUE, not volume
“Check yo self before you riggity wreck yo self. “
You’ve given yourself the tough self talk above, if there’s a ton of holes in your accountability mirror, you need patience and you need to fix your stuff.
Once you’ve checked yourself and feel good… Proceed.
Go looking for Leaders and Laggards.
Leaders are able to predict the job they’ll need in the future and they are doing real stuff today, to help your company be prepared for that future, have you set that as a standard?
EXPONENTIAL value is driven by AI forward leaders. Linear value is driven by laggards.
When I look at AI leaders versus AI laggards, the leaders contribute in ways that create exponential value for the organization.
I recorded a video for my team in july on the difference between an AI-forward person and one who isn’t, and what it does to the business and to our clients. Here’s how I explained it.
Two people – Same level – Same smarts: Different Outcomes for the company – 2 MILLION dollars worth!
Picture two people at the exact same level. Same smarts, same client retention. Person A does a great job for their clients but rarely shares.
Imposter syndrome, doesn’t think their stuff is worthy, whatever it is, their ideas never get a chance to inspire anyone.
Person B (Leader Lucy) puts their half-baked shit out there. AI leaders invite scrutiny; AI laggards (Lagging Linus) stay quiet so they “don’t look stupid.” I’ve had everyone from interns to absolute geniuses make my stuff better because I put it out there.
Then it ripples, Leader Lucy posts, 3 people see it and make it better. 10 more people read it, and some straight up copy Lucy’s transcript and turn it into their own version. 4 use it on their clients. 2 go hard and rebuild it as a skill that fires for every client.
Linus has smarts but they stay trapped in 5 clients, linearly. Lucy’s idea reached 25 people, plus every client that skill touches. None of that happens if Lucy doesn’t share.
And because Lucy keeps building, she carries MORE clients in the same hours.
Linus waits for the company to fix or build,
Lucy is like: “I’m automating the parts of my role that don’t create the most value, so I can take on another two clients right now.” At $100K an account, 5 clients vs. 7 is a very different person.
It’s NOT about saving time. If your value from AI is saving time, somebody might as well send the work to the cheapest outsource provider.
The biggest value comes from doing things we could never do before.
The math (and the asset)
All of that assumes what they put out isn’t workslop, and that people actually take it, use it, improve it and use it for their clients. If so, the economics of those two people are just different.
Judging laggards volume vs value
As a leader, you have to be really sharp at assessing value vs. volume. Volume is the loudmouth who posts everything they think, and none of it gets implemented.
It’s your job to not overvalue the talkers
The top post on our website was written by Aichlee Bushnell (great co-worker, strong endorsement, hire her). It was our Screaming Frog guide, it was the ONLY post she wrote in 2.5-3 years of being at Seer, it created 10 more years of value.
That’s a lot more value than someone who might have written 30 posts in the same time.
3 great reads:
- Zapier now hires on an AI fluency trendline: specifically saying someone who plateaued eight months ago on the same three tools is a different candidate from someone still experimenting.
- Jordan DiPietro’s substack is a banger, recent post quotes Netflix’s Mckenzie Lock, fall in love with the job to be done, not how we do it.
- Ethan Mollick’s dropped this question: what useful thing you do is no longer valuable?
AI Leaders moat is their IMAGINATION, where does imagination come from and is your org an imagination machine?
Here’s a question I’d ask in an interview today, imagine that three years from now, someone open-sources a tool that writes all your [titles and meta descriptions], does all your [on-page] and [technical SEO], and gives you every recommendation to [speed up the site].
As an SEO or content marketer, what would you do to look into that vision and help the client succeed?
Ask your current employees too. It’s a very hard question, and the answer shows you how they think.
AI-forward people have already started. They’ve freed up their brains, and in a world where information is now table stakes, they need to create new ways to build value.
Who you spend time with impacts what you can imagine, check Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is easily one of the most innovative people of our time. When you backtrack how he met the people around him, he was aggressive about who he got to spend time with. That expanded his imagination…
- Bill Hewlett. At 12, Jobs found him in the phone book and called his home. That one call got him parts and a summer job at HP.
- Regis McKenna. Jobs saw an Intel ad he loved, called Intel to find out who made it, then called McKenna’s office several times a day until he got the meeting. McKenna shaped Apple’s early positioning.
- Robert Noyce. Jobs called him and showed up at his house uninvited. Noyce took his late-night calls in the early ’80s.
- Bill Campbell. Long walks most weekends for years. A 28-year friendship.
- Andy Grove. Jobs called him for advice for decades. In 1997, when Jobs was dithering about going back to Apple, Grove told him he didn’t give a shit about Apple and to make up his mind.
- Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Zen teacher, and Robert Friedland, whom he met selling a typewriter at Reed.
Look at the diversity of his circle, too: a retired Intel marketer, a Zen teacher, a PR guy, chip founders and a commune leader.
If AI becomes the thing you spend the most time with, it’s the most average company you can keep, because it’s trained on consensus.
AI can execute what you imagine. The humans around you shape what you imagine in the first place.
So being intentional about your human circle matters more now, not less.
What are you intentionally doing to put people who help you imagine into your circle? You calling them 10 times?
Laggards don’t expand your imagination the way leaders do.
We are moving from a world of information asymmetry to a world of inspiration asymmetry.
4. NOW be honest about what happens to your laggards
If you’ve done the first three, you’ve earned the right to this part. Don’t skip it.
“You can’t want to feed someone’s family more than they do.” It was one of my biggest learnings on AI Laggards.
I think many agency leaders are like, this thing is going to change your future employment FOREVER, how am I stressing it this much and you are out here Kanye shoulder shruggin’?
Consulting Agencies – Match your CLIENTS AI readiness to your people needs
Not every client can take advantage of AI-forward people, whether it is vision, legal, or other hurdles.
Index every client on two things: how AI-savvy they are, and how willing they are to let your team use AI.
If you put your AI-forward people on laggard clients, or on clients who won’t sign off on your most innovative work, you’ve built a recipe for frustration for your best adopters.
If 30% of your portfolio can’t take full advantage of AI-forward people, you can technically get away with some really solid laggards on your team, and give them more time to level up, technically; these are your A & B players pre-AI, they are still solid.
High performing AI laggards should have an expiration date that is attached to the size of your AI laggard client revenue
If your portfolio shifts, your tolerance for laggards must shift, or you’ve just inherited a new headache: frustrated clients.
Benchmark client savviness quarterly. I’ve seen lower AI savvy POC’s lose their jobs when an AI-forward exec comes in at the top. Suddenly you’ve got a very AI-forward leader brought in to make change – and your team is an AI laggard, you have to get in front of that – or lose the revenue. Or end up in a LOT of meetings repairing problems you didn’t get in front of.
I told my team this in an all-hands years ago:
The pool of clients who won’t let you use AI isn’t growing, it is ONLY shrinking. Your career prospects will shrink with them too.
I was volunteering with the team at a boston non profit, more than words, helping young people come up and improve their lives, and I saw this sign…
“Your salary is the company’s subscription fee of you”
What happens to the “subscription fee” of laggards in your organization?
- Do they stay?
- Do they get told they’re behind?
- Do they stay and get no raises?
- Do they get raises like everyone else?
- Would we seek to replace them?
- Then the million dollar question… for how long?
Laggards don’t get calls from 3rd WORLD JAIL CELLS
George Mack has a thought experiment in his piece on high agency: you’re stuck in a third-world jail cell and you get one phone call. Who do you call?
You’re handing someone a problem that seems impossible, with no guidebook, and you’re still betting they’ll find a way out. Who is that person for you?
Will Critchlow, asked me a version of this. And then he flipped it
For how many people do you think YOU are that phone call from a 3rd world jail cell, cause for your clients, AI is that moment, are they calling YOU?
64% of CEOs fear they could lose their job if they fail to lead their organization through the AI transition. That is their version of a third-world jail cell. Would they call you?
Agency Owners, you got a shot here…
It’s funny. I’ve talked to so many agency owners who feel mired down with people in their company who aren’t keeping up with the times. A lot of those agency owners are burnt out. You are choosing to keep them in your company.
And they’re worried about the AI-native agency coming for them and their people. Rightfully so. Many of them are behind, and many of their people are too.
But time gives you something extremely valuable that the AI-native agency you’re so worried about doesn’t have yet: a brand.
If you know anything about humans, humans love brands as shortcuts. And that AI-native company isn’t going to show up overnight in AI answers, because AI is a lot like humans in the way it associates brands. This is why we’re seeing brands in query fan-outs.
Lily Ray dropped this gem:
A solo developer, can vibe-code a brilliant feature in a weekend, but incumbents already own the contracts and relationships. It’s the same dynamic for agencies.
So I hope you as an agency owner or a consulting shop, got this far, you have assets, your brand, your relationships, your trust in your industry that the others don’t, but they are gaining – fast.
I’ve seen it in my own industry, Profound has done an amazing job of being everywhere, and getting trust in a lot of spaces. The question is will you leverage your years of experience, trust and relationship building to match the “AI natives” or will you let them eat your lunch?
See you on the other side, cause I’m going out swinging!!!
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