When Clients Try to "Help" With AI

I've been hearing the same story a lot lately from agency leaders. You send a client an early round of ideas, and a day later it comes back reworked by an AI tool. New headlines, a new layout, maybe even new functionality.

The first reaction is to get defensive. But I think we need to take a breath and recognize that we're in a new era. If clients are excited about the work and engaged enough to experiment, we should lean into that instead of trying to tamp it down.

How often have we felt like clients didn't care about the work? Well, now they do! So what are we gonna do about it?

When Clients Bring AI to the Meeting

If clients are excited, I think we should lean into it. What's the alternative? Trying to ban them from using the tools? That won't change the behavior. It will just make us look scared and bring up new questions for them.

Clients want things to move quickly, and most of them genuinely want to be helpful. Telling them to stop without explaining why is like scolding a little kid who makes a mess because they were excited to help with dinner. I don't know what kind of parent you were, but I always laughed and thought it was awesome when my kids wanted to help.

And clients are going to do it anyway. They'll just stop telling us. I'd rather have their AI suggestions out in the open than have them show up dressed as their own opinions.

If I were running an agency today, I'd start with a kickoff that makes AI part of the initial brainstorming. Why not encourage clients to use it? That's probably your best chance of keeping them from going off and doing it on their own. Lord knows they never do what we ask.

But when we do encourage them, and the ideas do show up, whether they're designs, copy, personas, feature sets, or anything else, they arrive as ideas to discuss instead of revisions to execute.

We also need to get better at reading the signals. When a client brings us AI output, that's feedback. It often represents something they couldn't put into words, and some clients may actually communicate better with the help of a visual AI tool. Our job is to read through to the intent of what they want. That's the expertise they hired us for, and AI can't do it for them.

I encourage you to sit down with the client and look at their AI explorations side by side with the original work. Talk through what's working, what drifts away from the strategy, and why. You'll learn what they're trying to communicate, and you'll get to help shape how the output is interpreted. Clients leave feeling heard, and you leave with your judgment on full display.

I still think structure matters, though. Our agreements can say that we consider all feedback, AI-assisted ideas included, but that everything gets measured against the project's agreed-upon goals. Let clients brainstorm on their own, but make sure every decision gets made in a conversation between humans. If AI starts pushing the project over budget or behind schedule, call that out. Say, "Hey, we've done a lot of good work here. Let's move forward."

Ultimately, trust is the real project. Friction isn't always about money. Often it's the energy spent defending the work, or watching the creative shift toward something that feels weaker while we all lose a little faith, and eventually stop caring.

Does the client value our understanding of their business and category more than what a large language model produces? Telling them they can't use it will never build that trust. Showing up as the partner who uses the tools better than they do, who can explain the flaws in certain models and why some ideas will make the work stronger while others won't, builds it every time.

Every shift in our industry, and there have been a lot of them, brings a moment when clients get their hands on tools we used to feel like we owned. Way back in the day it was desktop publishing, then content management systems, then website builders and now AI tools. The agencies that thrived stopped guarding and started guiding. We're at that same moment with AI. It's just moving faster. If our clients are this excited, let's get excited with them and show them where it can really take us.