An AI stack for digital agencies that survives the kickoff

Stop hiding the stack in the appendix

Agency pitches still treat AI as acceleration: faster copy, cheaper production, a chatbot “if useful”. That language does not survive a client who asked for a bot because a competitor has one.

The agency–client journey is the right canvas. Brief, propose, kickoff, deliver, measure, retain. AI belongs on specific squares: the public site that won the work, the discovery notes that feed the proposal, the kickoff questionnaire, the weekly review.

A stack you can put in the SOW

• Website conversation — a governed agent when the site should answer from the client’s knowledge (HEA-World is one option). A helpdesk agent when the site is really a support door.
• Content — Claude or ChatGPT for drafts the strategist still owns; Gemini when the team lives in Workspace; Mistral when residency or open weights is the constraint; HubSpot Breeze when the client already runs HubSpot (Content Agent and Copilot from the CRM); Jasper when the content factory is the product.
• Meetings — Fireflies so the proposal quotes the client.
• Automation — Make to move a form into Slack and the CRM without a sprint.
• Build — Lovable, v0, Bolt or Replit Agent for a contained site or prototype; Cursor when engineers own the codebase.

Write the owner next to each line: who trains it, who reviews weekly, who the visitor reaches when the machine should stop.

The workshop

Use the agency audience hub. Ninety minutes, one journey, two leaky touchpoints, one primary tool each. That is a stack. A forty-logo landscape is a stall.