I walked into a meeting recently with a client's Chief Revenue Officer. Only our third conversation. Instead of talking strategy, we ended up workshopping how she should write an email to her own boss.
That's where a lot of client conversations are right now. Not "what's our AI strategy," but "how do I even get the people above and around me to acknowledge this is happening." Every conversation I'm having with senior stakeholders right now is, underneath the talk of technology, deeply human. People are asking us to get down to their level and help them understand, not because they're not smart, but because nobody has had the time to build real fluency yet and admitting that out loud still feels risky for a lot of executives. Everyone is in the same boat. The only real difference is which shade of frustration or overwhelm someone happens to be experiencing on a given day.
I think that's actually reduced a lot of ego in our industry and honestly, it had to. When nobody genuinely knows how to navigate this, the only way through is to be open about it and accept help. I've watched it level a lot of rooms that, a few years ago, would have been much more defensive and performative. People aren't posturing about their AI maturity in the way they might once have postured about their martech stack. They're mostly just asking for someone to help them get unstuck.
Here's the part that took me longer to name: the reason deals stall, the reason projects slow down even when everyone in the room has nodded along and said "green light, let's go" — it's rarely a strategy problem. There's almost always one person, somewhere in the workflow, with an unspoken fear that this will take their job, expose that they don't understand it or shift the ground under a role they've held for years. The moment you hit that person in the chain, everything stops. Not because they say no. Usually because they say nothing at all and silence is a much harder thing to work with than a direct objection.
I had a client recently who didn't even need a yes or a no from a senior stakeholder — she just needed acknowledgment so the work could move forward. She pushed, she emailed, she tried every collaborative approach to support that person and bring them along. None of it landed, because the resistance was never really about the plan on the page. It was about something unspoken that no meeting agenda would surface on its own. Eventually, the only way forward was to build enough momentum around that person, with everyone else who was ready to move, rather than waiting for them to move first.
This is where I think our industry has a real choice to make about how it shows up for clients. There's an old model of agency leadership, the one that walks in and says, "We've figured it out. This is the way. Here's exactly how it's done and here's exactly how you'll do it with us." I understand the appeal of that posture. It's reassuring, in theory, especially to a client who's exhausted and just wants someone to tell them it's handled.
But right now, in AI, in almost every category that's moving this fast, if someone tells you they've fully figured it out, that should be your first warning sign, not your reassurance. Clients can sniff that out almost immediately and I think they respect us more for not pretending otherwise.
Our advantage, the reason we get pulled into rooms with genuinely enterprise-scale brands who could work with anyone, isn't that we have all the answers. It's that we don't claim to and we say that to clients directly, in the first conversation, not after we've been caught out. What we do know and know well is the foundation: the things that hold regardless of which tool or platform is trending this quarter. We build the rest with the client, in the room, together, in real time. And what we build this week may look genuinely different in six weeks, because the ground is still moving. That's not a weakness in the process. That's the honest shape of the process right now and pretending otherwise just delays the moment the client finds out anyway.
Trust used to be inherited. You worked with Coca-Cola, so a new client assumed you could handle their brand too, without much scrutiny — a kind of referred trust that came from the logo on your case study slide.
That kind of trust still exists in pockets, but it's not what's winning new business anymore and it's certainly not what's holding relationships together through a period like this one. Trust today is earned, meeting by meeting, by being honest about what you don't yet know and showing up prepared anyway.
So if you're a marketer walking into a hard conversation this quarter, with your own leadership, with a client, with a partner who's dug in and gone quiet, my honest advice is this: don't perform certainty you don't have. Name the uncertainty specifically and bring a real plan for working through it together, not a polished deck pretending the uncertainty isn't there.
This is the only pitch that actually holds up under pressure.
