The Future of AI Agencies
If someone wanted to sell AI services in 2026, they wouldn’t start with a flashy AI agency, at least not in a traditional sense. They wouldn’t sell automation as a vague promise, and they definitely wouldn’t build workflows just because they look impressive in a demo. They’d focus on one boring skill that businesses already pay for, they already understand and already actually want. Because the reality is most AI agencies that start will fail this year, and they’ll fail because they sell things that sit too far away from revenue. This breakdown covers what makes an AI service worth selling, why the most popular AI service offerings like workflows and automation will struggle, and the AI skill to build around if the goal is to make as much money as possible for as long as possible.
Jordan has been running agencies for a long time, 8 years, and one of them, Affluent.co, has done over $10 million in revenue. Jordan has also mentored thousands of agency owners across pretty much every model and now AI. Since being in the game for a long time, there’s no emotional attachment to the labels that people make up. It’s just about knowing what makes an agency good and more importantly, what makes one easier to run.
Why Service Selection Matters
Lessons from the Hype Cycle
Right now, AI agency is just a label people hide behind when they don’t really know what they’re selling. There have been lots of agency service trends rise and fall during the past eight years in this space, whether that’s social media marketing agencies, otherwise known as SMMA, or even short form content agencies. So, let’s talk about service as a whole. Because at the end of the day, an agency lives or dies by the service that it sells. And a good service isn’t just one that’s got the most hype right now.
The results need to be obvious and it needs to still be desirable when any hype dies down around that topic. An example of this would be social media marketing in 2017. That’s when Jordan first started the agency, affluent.co. Companies all over the globe were scared that they would fall behind if they weren’t advertising on platforms like Facebook. It was a gold rush and people could capitalize on that gold rush.
But 8 years later, the agency still makes over $250,000 every single month. Even now, the hype around social media has died down and everyone is now focused on hyping up AI. Why? Because the service is directly tied to money, to revenue. And when you’re not close to revenue, everything becomes harder than it needs to be. Here’s a simple way to think about it. Imagine two agencies reach out to the same business. One says, “We’ll make your business more efficient using AI automation.” The other says we’ll make your business more revenue using AI sales systems. Which one do you think that the average business owner is going to be paying more attention to?
The Concept of Revenue Proximity
Why Efficiency-Based Services Struggle
This idea is what big consulting firms like McKenzie call revenue proximity. The closer your service sits to revenue, the more valuable it feels, the less resistance there is in the sale and the less likely the client is to cancel when things get uncomfortable. Because when things get uncomfortable, the first things to get the chop are those nice to haves. And this is where a lot of AI agency services start to fall apart. If you’ve ever struggled to sell an AI service, this is probably why, even if you didn’t realize it yet.
Chatbot agencies were the first big wave. It was creating support bots and FAQs to save communication internally. And these can be useful, but the value is indirect. You’re saving time and you’re reducing tickets within the business, which is fine, but when a business has a slow month, nobody’s thinking, well, at least our chatbot is working well, they’re wondering where the money’s at.
The Pitfalls of Automation Agencies
On top of that, SAS has wiped out a huge chunk of that market already. Businesses can now buy these tools off the shelf for a fraction of the cost, which puts constant pressure on pricing for agency owners. Then you’ve got automation and you got workflow agencies, which are kind of the same thing. And this space has exploded recently over the past six months, especially around tools like NA10 and before that it was make and before that it was zapia.com.
And it’s important to be absolutely clear, automation has its place. It’s used in businesses across various different functions. But what you see online is often disconnected from the reality. A lot of workflow content is built for the sake of content, not for businesses. And creators need new ideas every single week. So they invent automations that look clever, but they aren’t solving urgent problems in business.
And if you’ve ever owned a business and tried to implement half of these things, you’ll know exactly what it means. If you don’t own a business, just ask a business owner that you know if they’d ever use some of these workflows that you’ve seen. The answer is likely no or maybe for the vast majority of the workflows that you will find. And because of this, as an agency, you will always end up in this awkward position where you’re constantly explaining why your client should care. You’re selling solutions to pains that do not run deep enough, and you’re making it harder for yourself than it needs to be.
The Shift to AI Lead Generation
Bridging the Gap in Conversion
But if you follow the logic all the way through here, there’s really only one place this lands, and that’s AI lead generation. Call it whatever you want. What you’re actually doing for your clients is all that matters here. You’re using AI to bring them more revenue. You start by generating new leads, which are new potential customers, usually through paid traffic or outbound sales. That part isn’t new. Businesses have been paying agencies to generate them new leads for years. What’s new is after you have generated new leads, you use AI to convert them into revenue because this is where most businesses struggle the most. They simply do not have the time or the team able to convert new inquiries properly.
A Real-World Example of Intent Decay
Imagine this for a second. It’s a Monday morning. You’re going about your usual routine. You pick up your phone, You doom scroll social media for a little bit. You see a Facebook ad for a New Year’s offer from a personal trainer and it’s a no-brainer. Think to yourself, you know what? I’ve been thinking about getting back in the gym. Maybe this is the right time. You click on the ad, you fill in the form on the website, and then nothing happens. You don’t hear from the business. 10 minutes goes by, you’re back in your routine, maybe you’re getting ready for work. 1 hour goes by, still nothing. At this point, you’re at work in a completely different mindset. Two hours go by, you get a missed call and a text message from the trainer, but you’re busy chatting away to a colleague and you’re distracted.
You get home from work, you’re tired, you can’t be asked to call back or respond. Maybe at this point even thinking, well, I’ll just wait until next week to get back in the gym properly. Next week never comes. Or maybe you see an even better ad with an even better offer a few days later and you go for that instead. Now, the original personal trainer just lost your business, probably worth a good few hundred to them. This is a daily occurrence for literally hundreds of thousands of people a day, maybe even more than that. And it won’t always go like that, of course. For some, they’ll be distracted by their kids or their wife or just their priority shifted for whatever reason. But either way, with every minute that passed, they lost the motivation to buy whatever it is they were originally motivated to buy.
Fixing the Leaky Bucket
Speed to Lead and Qualification
This is called intent decay. In fact, Harvard Business Review published a study that said contacting a lead in over five minutes makes you 21 times less likely to make contact with them versus contacting them in 30 minutes. Yet over 50% of companies take over 1 hour to respond to new leads and 43% take over 24 hours. The reason is pretty simple. Of course, business owners are busy actually running their business. The personal trainer is busy doing the personal training and even the bigger companies cannot rely on their team to take speed to lead seriously. This is what we call a leaky bucket in the sales world. Doesn’t matter how much effort is put into filling the opportunity bucket. If the bucket has holes in it that keep leaking, it’ll never stay full. Now AI solves that exact problem.
If a business has an AI sales system, the moment a lead comes in, AI reaches out immediately. It starts a conversation. It’s trained to ask the right questions to qualify the lead to make sure that they’re a good fit. And if everything aligns, it books them into the company’s calendar so they can be sold to. So now, the business owner can focus their time on actually running the company without having to worry about their leaky bucket. If we zoom out right now, an agency selling AI lead generation isn’t really selling AI at all. What they’re selling is a stress-free, faster way to grow their revenue. And not just new revenue from new leads, but they’ll make more revenue from their existing leads, too.
Creating a Repeatable System
And because the result is so clear, the service becomes incredibly easy to sell, to price, and to package. These business owners don’t need to understand large language models, LLMs, or workflows or agents. They already understand leads, and they already understand revenue. So, just by speaking their language and not having to explain your value proposition, your chances of closing deals will increase drastically compared to other AI services that need a full-on demo to explain what is going on. And because the delivery of the service is so simple, the agency model itself becomes repeatable. You’re not reinventing the wheel for every client and offering something that is highly bespoke. The structure stays the same. Traffic goes in, AI handles the conversation, qualified appointments come out.
You’ll of course tweak the messaging and the offers for each client that you work with, but the core system doesn’t change. Compare that to selling automations or workflows where every client is a brand new build and quite frankly, a brand new headache. That’s why so many automation agencies burn out. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it isn’t a very repeatable service, but AI lead genen is. That doesn’t mean that it’ll be easy. It will, of course, come with its own headaches around delivery and client expectations and eventually building a team. That’s agency life. But it’s simple. It’s repeatable. And it is directly tied to revenue.
Looking Ahead to 2026
The Evolution of Sales Conversations
And despite all of this, there is one particular reason why this model is especially exciting going into 2026. It’s a gateway into something bigger. Today, AI lead genen is booking qualified appointments, but over time, it’ll start to handle more of the sales conversation. Eventually, it’ll move closer and closer to actually selling on behalf of the business and collecting money without their input at all. We’re not fully there yet. Psychology takes time to catch up. We’re not quite in a place where people, the general public, are comfortable being sold to by AI yet. And there’s probably a bunch of compliance concerns that would need to be addressed as well.
But the tech is improving fast and the direction we’re moving is pretty obvious. And if you’re positioned in AI lead genen right now, you are naturally moving in that direction as the market sophisticates. And that’s why this AI skill has longevity. It’s an evolution of something businesses have already been paying for for centuries. It solves a boring yet very painful problem. And if you want to build an AI business that actually lasts and not just rides the hype, this framework provides a foundation for getting started.
