Host: We are back, guys. What an amazing session by Ariel, give it up for him in the chat, show him some love. I think it was very insightful and very practical, and I’m sure a lot of SMBs and agencies will take a lot of good things back from that session. Also show some love to Brent as well, our superstar host who has endless energy and just keeps on going and going.

So now we’re moving this event forward and taking you through another insightful session, for which we have two amazing speakers. But before we move on, just a few quick announcements. First is the leaderboard. We have an engagement leaderboard for this event: the more you engage, the more you move up the leaderboard, the more points you’ll have, and the more chances you have of winning amazing prizes. And then we also have the Easter egg activity that you have to submit by 2 p.m. Eastern time today, so make sure that you fill in that document with all the Easter eggs that you can find on the stage, in the lobby, and in all the different sections of the event, and submit it by 2 p.m. Eastern time. And apart from that, just keep on engaging in the comment section, ask questions, let us know what you think about the event and the sessions, your feedback is highly appreciated.

Moving on to the session, we have first of all Miriam Schwab, who was here yesterday as well, so welcome back Miriam, who is the Head of WordPress at Elementor. And accompanying her is Oz Nimrod, who is Head of Marketing at Suite, and he has been passionately involved with WordPress and with products and Elementor as well. So thank you so much, Oz and Miriam. The topic that we are going to cover today is the agency of tomorrow and how AI is shaping how we manage our businesses going forward. So Oz, the floor is yours. Miriam, best of luck.

Oz Nimrod: Thank you so much. Hello everybody, thanks for joining us for this session where we are going to talk about the agency of tomorrow and how AI is reshaping the way that agencies are managing and will manage their business. Before we dive in, with your permission, a short introduction. Together with me I have Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor. Miriam?

Miriam Schwab: Hi everyone. So yes, my name is Miriam Schwab, I’m Head of WordPress at Elementor. My position means that I’m a liaison between Elementor and the broader WordPress community. But in the past, as part of my career path, I actually founded and managed a WordPress development agency for 13 years. So I experienced basically everything that you can experience as an agency owner, from client communications, to the challenges of building, to invoicing, to sales. I have a lot of empathy for agencies, and I’m excited to talk about where agencies are at today and also what the future holds for agencies in this era of AI. And that’s what me and Oz are going to be speaking with you about today.

Oz Nimrod: Thank you, Miriam. My name is Oz, I’m the Head of Marketing of Suite by Elementor. Just a few words for you to get to know it, because you haven’t heard of it before. Suite is a new product being built by Elementor. Suite is dedicated to understanding the businesses of web creators and solving their challenges. As such, we have been asking ourselves for the past few months what’s keeping web creators up at night, to understand not only their business processes but what their challenges are, and whether we have a way to help them. And we didn’t only ask ourselves that question, we also took action and interviewed over 200 global web creators to understand their challenges during their business processes and management, and to see what they’re perhaps suffering from.

So before I pass it to Miriam, in order to understand the agency of tomorrow we need to understand better the agency of today. Miriam, where are agencies at today? When you are providing services for your clients and building websites or other digital properties for them, what does that mean for you?

Miriam Schwab: I can totally relate to this. It’s very challenging as an agency owner to scale your agency and build it in a sustainable way, because we’re all running after the next project and trying to get it in the door while also building the current projects, and there’s not a lot of security in terms of what the revenue will be next month.

And what are the causes of this instability? First of all, scaling. Because we have to spend so much time trying to get that next project in order to maintain the business while also working on the current projects, we have very limited time and resources to invest in marketing and sales. And that leads to financial uncertainty, because it’s one project after the other. There is recurring revenue, but the core of the business is these one-off projects. Often there are hassles facing clients. In my agency days it was very important for us to finish our projects in a timely manner, because then payment came in at predictable times. However, if payment was tied to milestones and the client was taking their time, or they also had limited resources and couldn’t be as responsive as we wanted, then that again affects financial uncertainty.

And that also comes to workflow inefficiencies. Unless agencies are very large scale, if you’re somewhere in between, then you’re trying to be everything when it might not be your skill set. You end up as the agency owner wearing many hats: the sales hat, the marketing hat, the project management hat, even if you have a team, and I had a team in my agency. You’re trying to keep the processes smooth, but maybe you’re using different tools that don’t necessarily work together so well, and there can be workflow inefficiencies. It’s also hard to invest in that, again because of the lack of time and resources, in marketing, sales, but also even internal processes. So running an agency is an amazing thing, and I did it for 13 years because it was amazing and I was always learning and developing, but it is challenging to scale an agency just because of the structure of most agencies. And it’s no one’s fault, it just is what it is.

This is not just your small business problem, it’s everyone’s problem, it’s very common. And like Oz said, the Suite team interviewed over 200 agency owners, and what I’m describing, it wasn’t just me. I also thought, is it just me? It wasn’t just me, it’s not just you, it’s a recurring story. Let’s look at some of the stories that people shared with us. These are real testimonies, direct quotes from people that were interviewed, keeping their personal details private to protect their privacy.

So this particular agency has four clients that are recurring, which is amazing, but four clients still isn’t a lot and it’s hard to sustain a business based on that. And M says, “With one-time projects I need to keep finding new clients. I don’t want to be constantly chasing people down.” And that is a lot of our time when running agencies, we’re chasing people down: chasing new projects, chasing existing clients to get back to us, chasing them down to make their payment. Something I learned running the agency, it’s not necessarily that they didn’t mean to pay, but you have to follow up, and all of that takes time.

Let’s look at another testimony: “For almost a month now I don’t have many clients this summer, I have to wait till September.” Sometimes you’ve got gaps in the calendar, so it feels a bit risky and you can’t predict income. If your business is seasonal, if you work for, let’s say, fashion lines and there are particular seasons where they have new collections, or hotels, those types of customers are going to be more active around their peak seasons. But then when everyone goes on vacation, let’s say in August, or July and August in Europe, or around Christmas and New Year’s, business slows down. And that means as an agency you have to take into account that there are going to be months where you have very low business and very low revenue, and that makes it challenging to sustain the business.

Another angle is the fragmented tools and workflow inefficiencies. Scaling further means more tools, more complexity, and it’s hard to keep everything running smoothly. In my agency I loved finding tools that helped us run things more efficiently, and they were amazing tools, but what happened was you’re piling one tool on top of the other. At one point I analyzed all of the different SaaS-type tools, communication tools, sales tools, whatever we were using, and it was like 20, and we were a small agency. Every additional tool needs additional head space, you want to learn how to use it in the optimum way. And you want to make sure that the information you’re gathering across these tools is unified so you have a holistic picture of what’s going on in the business with your customers. That means tying tools together, which is sometimes challenging and clunky. So the more tools you’re using, you actually add a certain level of complexity, which adds a different type of challenge. Juggling multiple disconnected tools for project management, client comms, billing, and site ops breeds inefficiency and wasted time.

The tools I use are okay, but they’re too general and not designed for website creation, so there’s something in the UX that’s missing. Most of us at this event are in the web creation space in some way, whether we’re building, managing, or hosting websites. And if you’ve looked out there for tools, you’ll find a lot of great tools that serve a lot of needs, but they’re not specifically built for web creators. In other industries there are tools specifically created for that vertical, real estate has its own CRM, investors have their own tools. But as far as we can tell, there aren’t tools specifically dedicated to web creators that totally understand and empathize with the needs of web creators. There are a lot of commonalities with generic tools, and they can help, but when you’re providing a service like web creation, there’s the one-off projects, the ongoing communication, the invoicing, is anyone really addressing those needs with a tool? Not really. So we’re all cobbling together our own solutions from many fragmented tools, which can be pretty good, but it’s not ideal.

And of course client communication, which is a big challenge. In my web agency days I would say I’m part CEO, part sales, part marketing, part therapist, I don’t know if any of you can relate to that. You often have to talk your clients through things, like the blue color, “yes, you’ll be okay with the blue.” A lot around client communication needs a lot of attention, because the better you’re communicating through a project, the smoother the project will be and the better the results, and everyone will come out happier. But communication takes time. Here’s another quote: “It takes two days to build a website, good job by the way, this is really fast, but two weeks with the client’s slow response. This bottleneck means I can’t take on new projects quickly, which affects my ability to scale.” So here the cause is client communication, which then has an impact on revenue and scalability.

“I send proposals through Word, invoices through X, like Twitter, and client feedback is either through email or Google Docs, it’s all over the place.” It’s hard to get set up with a workflow around client communication, all of the stages: sending the proposal, approving the proposal, invoicing, the project scope, all of that back and forth. It’s hard to have a system that puts it all in one place, and so that also affects scalability and sustainability.

Oz Nimrod: Thank you. So after all of those pain points, now I think we all can more or less identify with what’s going on today with agencies doing amazing work but facing a lot of challenges and struggles. What will this look like tomorrow in this era of AI? We cherry-picked the quotes we brought here, but there were many more, and I can say the pain is real. These are the pains of web creators, their day-to-day, and they’re not able to release them without the proper solution in place.

In order to understand that, I would like to discuss the timeline for a second. If we look at 2022, when ChatGPT and other LLMs burst into our lives and really changed everything, that was a big shift. Then between 2022 and 2025 we saw the rise of AI agents serving SMBs and solopreneurs, a lot of AI tools with the aim to facilitate, automate, and streamline processes and make work much easier. And this trend is ever-growing. Today we have what’s called the Vibe movement. I can only assume some of you have heard of Vibe coding, Vibe marketing, and there are other Vibe categories coming in. Digital presence is evolving, but it’s still professionalled. So with all this movement, we still predict that the professional digital landscape is going to be still professionalled. And what we also predict is that between 2025 and 2030 we’re going to see the rise of purpose-built AI with autonomous agents, and what we would like to call the agency of tomorrow.

So if today we have Vibe coding and Vibe marketing and all of these AI tools and agents that are supposed to make our work seamless, streamlined, and autonomous, tomorrow we expect it to be Vibe entrepreneurship and Vibe business, which is basically managing your business at the comfort of your own home. The Vibe movement, for those not very familiar with it, is about allowing creators to focus on the vibe or the intent of the creation and not necessarily the operational hassle of it.

So the agency of tomorrow will enable solo professionals to operate with the efficiency and capabilities of a 10-person agency. Solopreneurs are basically tomorrow’s agencies, scaling with tools, advanced automation, and autonomous AI employees. Business processes matter more than ever because competition is going to be fierce and everything needs to be in order. Professionals need to scale revenue, upsells, and other revenue streams, and technology will empower agencies to operate with excellence. Tools must be purpose-built, intuitive, and future-proof. How does it look today? There are some tools out there today that do serve the purpose of the agency of tomorrow, like Notion and ENSO, in case some of you are using those, built to facilitate and streamline some of the work and day-to-day processes. There are even more fierce examples like Artisan, if some of you saw that advertisement on social media, it’s even more bold, basically saying hire AI and not humans. We’re at the beginning of the trend, so just imagine where this will evolve to. And this is exactly the point, we want to be ahead of the curve, on top, and utilize technology to our benefit.

We gathered a case study with one of the people we interviewed who accepted our invitation to follow their business process. Everything you see is a real case, of course the name and identity were changed to keep their privacy. Miriam, would you like to jump in?

Miriam Schwab: Sorry, I muted. So let’s look at Rafael, obviously not his name, an agency owner, and take a look at how he manages a lead that comes into his agency. Getting a lead into your agency is already a great thing, they’re coming with intent, and you want to capture this lead in the best way possible, impress them, and answer their needs. So Rafael got a lead through his website: “I’m interested in building a website, can you please help me.” He and the client had a first discovery call where he gathered information, what is the context, what is the pain they’re trying to solve, what are their goals. The pain is a hugely important part of any project because you want to work with the client to solve that pain through their website. He had a good call, but then sent a proposal that confused the lead. The lead said, “Thanks, but I don’t remember us discussing what’s in this proposal on our call.”

The lead took the time to share all this information, which could have led to a very robust, solutions-oriented proposal, and instead, because of Rafael’s lack of time and resources, he sent a pretty cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all proposal not specifically addressing their pains. One-size-fits-all can work to a certain extent, but if you want to really optimize your business, have a higher closure rate for leads, and more successful business, then you need to communicate with the lead, address their needs, and show that you’re listening to them, and that didn’t happen here. Unfortunately this is relatively common because of lack of resources, and so the lead fizzled out. Also, Rafael isn’t a salesperson necessarily, he’s a web creator, that’s what he’s in it to do, he’s amazing at building websites, but he didn’t follow up, which a lot of agency owners are uncomfortable about. They don’t want to bother the lead, but you need to follow up to increase your chances of winning the lead. And so a really good warm lead came through and was lost.

So what can we learn? Due to lack of time, Rafael sent a template that didn’t address the needs, and he didn’t follow up even though a week had gone by. There’s nothing wrong with following up. Rafael had a potential client with high intent and a lot of revenue potential, and this lead was lost. It’s very hard to do everything well. But then an agency really has a challenge with scaling because of this. So this is a common story.

Oz Nimrod: As the audience can probably hear, we’re not criticizing, we come with a lot of empathy. We’re aware of these problems and we believe there is a solution for them. Let’s assume for a moment that Rafael had been a part of the movement of the agency of tomorrow and he had the proper tools. So let’s imagine that and see a flow of what could have happened. Imagine Rafael goes on a call with his potential client with AI in the background, eavesdropping, documenting all the important key points from that conversation and keeping them backstage. When the conversation ends, that same AI agent processes the information, transcribing it and putting it in a different format, and very intuitively reaches out to the same web creator, following your chat with the client: “I made a proposal ready for you.” And all the web creator has to do is go into that proposal, go over it, make sure the details match, and easily share it with the potential customer. AI will do everything afterwards, including the follow-ups, all the small details that sometimes we don’t feel comfortable with until that client has signed the deal.

This is how we envision the agency of tomorrow, and this is some of the processes that Suite is working on for web creators. As a dissection of the process, we add a discovery call where the AI agent takes notes, identifies pain points, and creates a client brief. Then the sales agent prepares a proposal and contacts the web creator letting them know it’s ready. Then the hands-free agentic follow-up makes sure that same prospect notices the proposal and gives some type of reaction. And later on, the client hopefully signs the offer, the timeline is auto-filled, a kickoff is set in the calendar, and everything is done autonomously.

So to summarize, the agency of tomorrow is you, powered by AI. We divided it into two main buckets. One is the strategic partner, the one that helps you grow your revenue, provides industry benchmark recommendations for every business action you take, and tracks and monitors your revenue according to your goals. On the other hand we have the operational partner, the marketing agent, the sales agent, and the support agent, all working for you 24 hours while you sleep to make sure the work is done. Under the operational partner, seamless end-to-end processes, so it’s not a CRM, you’re not working for it, it works for you. With a click of a button, we predict processes would start at one end and finish automatically at the other, and a streamlined project flow, so all the processes that today feel stuck would be automated seamlessly.

A few takeaways before we finish. For years now, agencies have been struggling with managing and scaling their business efficiently due to lack of time and resources. We totally understand that, and AI will revolutionize how agencies are managed and operated, and we at Suite are excited to be a part of this movement. We invite you to become the agency of tomorrow, and if you would like to participate in early access of some of our models and features, please feel free to scan this QR code or enter this link to fill up a form, and we promise to contact you.

Miriam Schwab: I just want to add one more thing to wrap it up. Suite is coming to address the needs of agencies after us feeling these pain points ourselves and a lot of research. But as you’ve learned during this entire event, there’s a lot of interesting AI tools that you can already test yourselves for your agencies to try to automate parts of it, and we highly encourage you to do that. The only way to learn AI is to get your hands dirty, and there’s a lot of exciting things you can do with it. So test those out, and we’d love to see you testing out Suite as well. We wish you all lots of scaling and sustainability in your agency businesses.

Host: That was very insightful, Miriam and Oz, thank you so much for that amazing presentation. Let’s move on to some of the questions we have in the chat. The first one: any recommendations for a good AI meeting note tracker? I understand people may be using Gemini on Google Meet, but any other tools that you would recommend as a good AI note taker?

Miriam Schwab: I’ll just mention the one that I think a lot of people use, which is Fireflies. It’s really annoying that it always is trying to join meetings, but on the other hand the notes that it takes are really useful, because it gives you the output in a few digestible ways: you have the whole transcript, the whole audio, and also digestible bullet points and takeaways. I personally prefer using Gemini, because like we were talking about, too many tools is too much stuff to handle. If we’re already using Google Workspace for everything that we do, it’s great to have it all integrated right there, the notes are attached to the meeting and easily accessible within our team and easily shareable with others, let’s say we’re meeting with outside partners. Oz, do you want to share any tools?

Oz Nimrod: I’m sure a lot of them are great. I can recommend Fathom for recording such conversations. But there are a lot of AI tools such as you mentioned.

Miriam Schwab: There’s a lot of really good ones out there, just try it out and see which one works for you. You don’t even have to try that many, try one or two and you’re good.

Host: Thank you for that response. We have a question on Suite, in fact. Nicholas asks, is Suite made or owned by Elementor? Is it like invoicing automation? If you can give a short brief on what Suite is so our audience can know better.

Oz Nimrod: 100%. Suite basically is aimed to cover all business processes of web creators, start to finish. If you think of a funnel, we will gradually solve each one of these aspects with models. For example, proposal building is something we’re about to release very soon, it’s revolutionary, one of a kind, that really helps you build the best proposal according to the client’s goals and your goals. This is just one example, but we plan on expanding to payments, to invoicing, to project management, everything that web creators are dealing with, we are about to tackle it.

Host: Miriam, do you want to add anything to that?

Miriam Schwab: No, I think it was described very well.

Host: Let’s go through the chat once more to see if there are any comments. Ted says they use order for notes, also good. And Blake says he uses ClickUp’s new note taker and says it’s sweet, so maybe we can try that out as well. Miriam, thank you so much for being here again for our Agency Advantage. Oz, it was a pleasure having you for this session, it was extremely insightful, and we will have a recording of the session available for viewers who missed it. As for you folks, I would recommend not going anywhere, because in just a couple of minutes we will be back with a very interesting activity, a quiz on AI or not AI, where you’ll be shown different images, videos, and audio on your screen and you’ll have to determine if they are AI or not AI. So don’t go anywhere.