A Chief AI Officer on why AI won't replace your agency

Listening is always free — watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

What this episode is about

Graeme Stiles is CEO and Chief AI Officer at Algorithm Agency. He is the first CAIO we have had on the show, so we asked the obvious thing first: what does the job actually involve. The agency is building a second arm in AI transformation and capability training, which means his week goes into working out what is genuinely worth selling other businesses about AI, and what is noise.

Almost nothing in his answer is about tools.

Three things we took away

• The replacement story is the biggest misconception, and the expensive one. Algorithm has run coffee events on exactly this question — can it replace your agency — and his answer comes with a caveat rather than a flat no. "It can be a significant productivity enhancer, can give you essentially superpowers in your space, but you still have to be the expert. You still have to know what you're doing." The businesses rolling their AI spend back, he reckons, are the ones that treated it as "a plug and play technology": here it is, go use it. He sees two gaps opening, and the second is the one that matters. "There's the massive divide between people who are using it and people who aren't using it. And then there's an even bigger divide between people who are using it and people who are using it well." That second gap is where the slop comes from — a strategy that arrives as fifty pages out of Claude and stops holding up the moment you dig into it. His antidote is to start small rather than wait for perfect conditions: the data everyone already has, Google Analytics and Search Console, then layer a CRM on when it arrives.
• Don't give it permission to think for you. The practical version is to map the job out yourself before you hand it over — what the steps are, which tools you would use, what a good answer looks like. "Give it that context, give it that download of your brain. And that's where you start getting the value." Then the line the episode turns on: "Don't give it permission to think for you. Don't be lazy is kind of a good way to say it." The split is that you keep the strategy and the process, and the grunt work goes to the model. The same test applies before you build anything: how would you do it as a user, before you get your AI to do it or get your team to do it?
• Optimise for the system, not the platform of the month. He does not think Google disappears, but he does think it drops from "95 plus percent market share" to one building block among several, and that the ten links we grew up on will not survive. What he refuses to do about it is invoice for the acronym: "We're not going to try sell you GEO as a new service, because we can then add a line item to the invoice and charge you more." Done properly, organic optimisation already covers SEO, GEO and the whole system underneath both. The foundations "tick the box of each of those platforms, but it's going to outlive the individual platform" — so build around what the person at the other end actually wants, because platforms rise and drop off. And the measure he ends on is not a campaign metric at all: six or twelve months into a rollout, is the business problem solved that you went out to solve?

Our guest: Graeme Stiles, founder, CEO and Chief AI Officer of Algorithm Agency — on LinkedIn.