Sometime over the last few months, AI stopped being a pet project for most businesses. It’s in budgets and boardroom conversations, and it’s hard to sit through a vendor demo or sales pitch these days without it coming up. AI has shifted from a novelty to a necessity and there is a widening gap between competent and incompetent AI agencies.
The former can take a year of manual work and solve it in a matter of weeks. The latter burn through your runway and leave you with another tool your team doesn’t trust. Here’s a guide to understanding the AI agency landscape.
Translation for business owners and ops leaders: the partner you choose matters more than the software itself. It’s easy for an agency to stack one chatbot wrapper on another and call itself “AI-competent.” The real question is what separates the agencies that can deliver from the ones that can’t.
Industry analysts predict that 40% or more of agentic AI projects will be quietly scrapped within two years due to unclear ROI, spiraling costs, or data and governance problems. The biggest factor within your control is the agency you hire.
Set Yourself Up for Success
If you’re a business owner or ops leader considering an [AI solution ](https://techlensmedia.com/ai-latest-news) for your company, the agency you choose will have a huge impact on the success of the solution.
Unfortunately, plenty of agencies are calling themselves “AI-competent.” that aren’t up to the task. Many do little more than add another wrapper around one or another chatbot. Here’s how to make sure you’re hiring an AI agency that can deliver a solution that makes sense for your organization.
Start with clear use cases
Before reaching out to agencies, figure out which workflows you want to target with AI, and the ways that you’ll be able to determine whether you’ve been successful.
Being able to articulate that will help agencies come up with a quote that doesn’t try to solve every problem under the sun. If you’re not clear on what you want to solve, agencies will be forced to guess about team composition, tech stack and system integration, and the difficulty of the project, all of which affects the quote, yielding decks loaded with “proprietary algorithms” and “advanced machine learning,” but thin on substance.
- Good: “Reduce average response time on tier-one support tickets from four hours to thirty minutes”
- Bad: “Use AI to modernize customer experience.”
Find an agency you can vet
Once you start reaching out to AI agencies, here are some questions to ask and red flags to watch out for:
Be able to explain how it works. The agency should be able to walk you through the solution, including how it’ll collect and use data, how it’ll be monitored, and how you’ll be notified if something goes wrong, without relying on buzzwords to obscure the details. Ask for 2-3 references in your space.
Understands security. Ask about data controls, including data retention, access, and compliance such as GDPR, SOC 2, and HIPAA as applicable. By 2026, most businesses using AI agents will be missing security policies around AI, with many reporting agents taking unauthorized actions in other systems.
Can be integrated. Agents should be able to plug into existing systems like ticketing, CRM, and databases, not just work in isolation or a demo environment. Ask about integrations and APIs.
Reasonably priced. Watch out for open-ended monthly retainers that lack clear deliverables, and be wary of suspiciously cheap solutions, because there are likely off-the-shelf components, with costs recouped in scope creep/change orders.
Maintenance. AI solutions aren’t fire-and-forgetting, especially as you start using them and encounter edge cases, business processes evolve, and models decay. Ask about next steps after go-live.
The key to finding an AI solution that sticks is hiring an agency that can build it well and maintain it over time.
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