AI for Account Retention & Growth

Context

More agency leaders are experimenting with AI. But many haven’t thought through how it changes their business model and value they offer clients.

AI skills are important for account managers too because according to LinkedIn and Microsoft in 2024, 66% of leaders won’t hire people without AI skills. This is likely to grow as AI matures.

And according to Gartner in 2025 73% of clients already use GenAI in their marketing - so this is a trend about clients beginning to consider ‘in-housing’ marketing (because they have the AI tools to do a lot themselves).

So clients are moving fast and if you as an account manager can’t talk about AI confidently you’ll be playing catch-up.

The webinar shared two frameworks:

• How clients see your value - a four-level value model: Responder, Servicer, Challenger, Futurist. The goal? Help account teams shift from delivery to being more proficient with commercial conversations.

• The Four Ps of AI strategy: Productive, Personalise, Prescribe, Predict. Each one points to practical ways account managers can add more value, more often.

Real examples included:

• Using AI to speed up workflows and identify client sentiment using the right prompt and tools like Zapier and AI-generated meetings transcripts

• Understanding your client’s in more depth using tools like Humantic

• Using AI tools like ChatGPT to speed up research, competitor analysis and meeting prep

• An Invisalign case study showing how you can reduce time on strategic planning and uncover valuable insights and account growth ideas using Perplexity

• A reminder that most AI tools give you 50% of the answer - and you still need human judgement to finish the job

One final note: there are legal grey areas. Especially around using AI note-takers in client meetings. If your agency hasn’t got a clear AI policy yet, now’s the time.

Three things to check:

• Have we trained account managers to talk confidently about AI and have a conversation with clients about their AI policy?

• Do we know how AI fits into our client growth model?

• Have we got clear boundaries and permissions in place - for internal teams and with clients (do all your MSAs and client contracts reflect the agency’s AI usage)?

Hope you find this valuable - and if you’d like to have a conversation about AI-enabled client retention and account growth training for your agency team, let’s have a short 20 min call.