Don’t Fall for the Fear. Don’t Fall for the Hype.

Earlier this year, I moved one of our team members in Colombia into a full-time tech role. His only job is AI and technology.

That’s a big reason we’re probably one of the most AI-forward agencies I know. Not the most, but up there.

Take a regular call. A client calls, we talk, make the change and send the confirmation email. AI transcribes the call, adds a summary to HawkSoft, and saves the audio and full transcript to SharePoint. The confirmation email gets added to both. My team just has to communicate. AI puts it where it needs to go. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough. If we miss the call, during or after business hours, our AI receptionist answers it.

Our shared inbox runs over 150 automations. Not all of them are AI. Every email that comes in gets tagged by topic, like a vehicle change, cancellation, certificate or claim, and routed to the right person. Carrier notices, new leads from our website, missed calls and text messages all get sorted the same way. We’ve cut way down on the manual routing we used to do in our old shared inbox.

Claude is our main system, and every employee has a seat. Inside our team account we built a second brain with all of our SOPs, so Claude already knows how we do things. Claude also has connectors now, so it pulls from our SharePoint, email, Help Scout, even our Wispr Flow notes.

The impact is hard to quantify. I can see the quality of the work improve. Better emails. AI showed us what we weren’t doing. When we went through about 6,100 of our call transcripts, we were almost never asking for a referral, asking for a Google review or offering life insurance. Before AI, spot-checking that many calls would have been nearly impossible. Guess what? Now we’re fixing it.

Has it made our work life easier? Yes. Do we do a lot more? Probably. But I don’t see a big jump in output overnight.

The part that humbled me is adoption. We track AI usage, and even with their own Claude seat, the average person on my team uses AI less than an hour a week. I don’t know the perfect number, but it should be more than that. That’s where the opportunity is for most agencies. Building AI into the company is one thing. Getting your employees to use it and find ways to improve their own day is the hard part.

If you do one thing, set up a Claude Team account and pay for a seat for every employee. Most people are using the free version, and unless they turn it off, their conversations can be used to train the models. Under Anthropic’s terms, the Team version doesn’t train on your data. When you give them the paid version, they get your shared knowledge, and they can use the connectors to connect to the tools they already use. And put them on the desktop version. It’s a lot more powerful than the web version.

Will AI replace people? Maybe one day, but not anytime soon. I’m very bullish on human-to-human. As more people automate, clients will crave talking to a real person with expertise and an opinion.

AI made our work better. It didn’t make our team smaller. Don’t fall for the fear. Don’t fall for the hype. Take it at your pace.