Intro, Leaderboard & Easter Egg Announcements we are back guys uh what an amazing session by Ariel uh give it up for him in in the chat show him some love i think it was very insightful i think uh the session was very practical and I’m sure a lot of SMBs and agencies will take a lot of uh good things back from that session also show some love to Brent as well our superstar host who has endless energy and uh he just keeps on going and going right so now we are sort of taking you moving this event forward and taking you through another insightful session uh for which we have two amazing speakers but before we move on just a few quick announcements uh first is of the leaderboard so we have an engagement leaderboard for this event the more you engage the more you move up to the leaderboard the more points you will have and uh the more chances you have of winning amazing prizes and then we also have uh the Easter egg activity that you have to submit by 2 p.m easter time today so make sure that you fill in that document with all the Easter eggs that you can find on the stage on the lobby and all the different sections of the event so make sure that you fill that document as quickly as possible and submit that by 2:00 p.m eastern time uh and apart from that yeah just keep on engaging in the in the comment section ask questions uh uh let us know what you think about the event about the sessions uh and your feedback is obviously highly appreciated moving on to the session uh 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 hi Miriam and then accompanying her is Oz Nimrod who is head of marketing at suite uh and he has been passionately involved with WordPress and in products and and and element as well so thank you so much Oz and Medium and the topic that we are going to cover today is the agencies of tomorrow and how AI is sort of shaping how we manage our businesses going forward uh in the future so Oz the floor is yours Miriam uh best of luck so thanks thank you so much uh hello everybody thanks for joining us for uh this session where we are going to talk about the agency of tomorrow and how AI Meet the Speakers: Miriam Schwab & Oz Nimrod is reshaping the way that agencies um are managing and will manage uh their business before we dive in with your permission a short introduction um together with me I have Miriam Schwab head of WordPress at Elementor miriam hi everyone um so yes uh my name is Mir Schwab i’m head of WordPress at Elementor uh my position means that I’m a liazison between Elementor and the broader WordPress community but in the past uh as part of my career path I actually founded and managed a WordPress development agency for 13 years so I experienced a lot well basically everything that you can experience as an agency owner um you know from client communications from the challenges of building from invoicing from sales and uh 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 thank you Miriam and my name is Oz i’m the head of marketing of Suite by Elementor uh just a few words about for you to uh get to know because you haven’t heard of it before suite is a new product being built by Elementor suite is dedicated to understanding uh the businesses of web creators and solving their challenges um and as such we have been asking ourselves for the past few months what’s keeping web creators up at night really to understand not only their business processes but what their challenges are and do we have a way to help them and we didn’t al only uh sorry ask ourselves that question but we also took action and we actually interviewed 200 over 200 global web creators uh to understand their challenges during their business processes and management and really to see um what are their components and what are they um perhaps suffering from so um in order for us uh before I pass it to Miriam to understand the agency of tomorrow we need to understand better the agency of today miriam so where are agencies at today uh when you are providing services for your clients and building websites or other digital properties for them what what does that mean for you so again I can totally relate to this it’s very challenging as an agency owner to Challenges Facing Agencies Today to scale your agency and to build it in a sustainable way um 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 um a lot of you know security in terms of what will the revenue be next month and things like that and what what are the what are the causes of this kind of like instability or insecurity around uh managing and and building a web agency so first of all scaling again 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 that doesn’t give us we don’t have we have very limited time and resources to invest in marketing and sales um and that of course leads to financial uncertainty because it’s you know one project after the other there’s not recurring or there is recurring revenue but the let’s say the core of the business is these ones off projects often there’s hassles facing clients so I know in my agency days it was very important for us to finish our projects in a timely manner why because then payment came in at predictable times however if payment was tied to milestones and the client was you know uh taking their time or or even they also have limited resources and they couldn’t be as responsive as we wanted then our financial this again affects financial uncertainty and you know we want to streamline that as much as possible and I spent so much time working on processes and workflows to improve that and got to a pretty good point and yet still you’re always in this kind of cycle of trying to keep the project moving forward as smoothly as possible as quickly as possible to get that revenue in to move on to the next project and give it the attention it needs um and that also comes to workflow inefficiencies um agencies unless they’re are very very large scale ones which I would say that’s like uh you know there’s a spectrum of agencies there’s like the soloreneurs up to the very large agencies but if you’re somewhere in between then you’re trying to be everything when it might not be your skill set right you end up as the agency owner wearing many hats you’re wearing the sales hat and the marketing hat and the project management had even if you have a team and I had a team in my agency you know you end up doing a lot of things a lot of the time and you’re trying to keep the processes smooth but like maybe you’re using different tools that don’t necessarily work together so well and just there’s there can be workflow inefficiencies and it’s it’s Workflow Inefficiencies & Fragmented Tools also hard to invest in that again because of the lack of time and resources to invest in I mentioned 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 it you know 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 and but that’s where it is today um AFMA is not just your small business problem it’s it’s everyone’s problem it’s very common and like O said um the sweet team interviewed over 200 agency owners and these this what I’m describing it wasn’t you know I also thought is it just me it wasn’t just me it’s not just you it’s recurring story and let’s look at some of the stories that people shared with us so here’s these are just some these are real testimonies from or like quotes from people that were interviewed uh keeping their uh private personal details you know private to to protect their privacy but um these are direct quotes so this particular agency has four clients that are recurring which is amazing right as an agency you want that but four clients still isn’t a lot and it’s it’s hard to sustain a business based on that and and uh 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 down new projects chasing down existing clients to get back to us when we need them to get back to us chasing them down to make their payment again something I learned running the agency it’s not necessarily that they didn’t mean to pay but they also you know you have to 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 much 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 so here’s another example of when income uh lacks the pred predictability that we would want in like a sustainable scalable business if your business is seasonal if you work for let’s say I don’t know fashion lines and there’s particular seasons where they’re you know they have new collections I’m guessing yeah but this is an example or hotels and they you know so so those types of customers are going to be more active around the seasons where they have peak business but then when they don’t or when everyone goes on vacation let’s say in August and you know July and August in Europe very often that’s the case or around Christmas New Year’s business slows down and that means as an agency you have to take into account that though there are going to be months where you have very low business and very low revenue and then that just again makes it challenging to sustain the business so another angle to the challenges of running an agency are the fragmented tools and workflow inefficiencies which I kind of touched on but let’s look at it further scaling further means more tools more complexity it’s hard to keep Why Most Tools Aren’t Built for Web Creators everything running smoothly so I remember my agency I loved finding tools that helped us run things more efficiently and there were they were amazing tools but what happened was you’re piling one tool on top of the other i think at one point I analyzed like all of the different like SAS types tools communication tools you know sales tools whatever it was that we were using and it was like 20 and we were like a small agency every additional tool needs additional head space right you want to learn how to use it in the optimum way so that’s another thing you want to try to invest in again which is challenging and also you want to make sure that the information that you’re gathering across these tools is unified and you have like a a holistic picture of what’s going on in the business with your customers and that means tying tools together which is sometimes challenging and sometimes clunky and so you know you’re trying to create better workflows you’re using these tools which help but the more tools you’re using you actually add certain level of complexity uh which which adds a different type of challenge juggling multiple disconnected tools for project management client comms billing and site ops lease inefficiency and wasted time so this is another example of someone saying that again they’re trying to run their business in the best way possible trying to provide the best service possible finding tools that help deliver on that for them and yet even if a tool’s amazing it’s another tool it’s another thing it’s more head space more complexity more potential points of failure um and more fragmented information um across the business which uh creates kind of a weakness in the business 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 so I think most of us or all of us here at this event we’re in the web creation space in some way whether we’re building websites managing websites hosting websites you know um but we’re we’re in this space and if you’ve been looked out there for tools you’ll find a lot of tools that are great that um serve a lot of needs but they’re not specifically built for web creators you know in other industries there are tools that are specifically created for for that vertical so you have like real estate you know uh CRM and for investors and different types of verticals they have their own tools tooling but really it’s far as we can tell there aren’t tools specifically dedicated to web creators that totally understand and empathize with the needs of of web creators which are unique across businesses there are there are a lot of commonalities and a lot of things that are very much the same and so these types of generic tools can help but then there are certain things that aren’t when you’re providing a service like web creation like we The Real Cost of Client Communication Bottlenecks talked about there’s the one-soft projects there’s the ongoing communication there’s the invoicing is anyone really addressing those needs with a tool not not really so we’re kind of all kind of cobbling together our own solutions from many fragmented tools which can be pretty good but it’s it’s not ideal and of course client communication which is a big challenge um I remember that uh in in my web agency days I would say that uh like I’m I’m part I was the CEO of the agency i’m part CEO part sales part marketing part therapist i don’t know if you uh if any of you can relate to that but you’re you often have to talk your clients through things like the blue color yes you’ll be okay with the blue things like that though is a lot around client communication and really like ident being able to communicate in general but also the practicalities and logistics of client communication it needs a lot of attention it needs a significant amount 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 so um let’s say here’s here’s another quote it takes two days to build a website good job e by the way this really fast but two weeks with the client slow response this bottleneck means I can’t take on new projects quickly which affects my ability to scale so this comes to workflow inefficiencies but here the cause is client communication then of course that has an impact on revenue and the scalability and the sustainability of the business um it’s hard to overcome that because the client communication needs time and attention so that you can get to the end of the project so that you can take on the next project but it’s very time consuming and like we said in the beginning agency owners they just have limited time and resources so it’s hard to give it the attention that it needs to help scale a business i send proposals through word invoices through like X not X Twitter like whatever and client feedback is either through email or Google Docs it’s all over the place right um I don’t know how many people can identify with this but um 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 uh have a system that puts it all in one place um and so that that also again affects scalability sustainability etc yeah yep thank you so so after all of those pain points now O uh we’ll talk about what does Okay so now we all I think can more or less identify with what’s going on today with agencies doing amazing work but facing a lot of challenges and How AI Is Reshaping Agency Operations struggles what will this look like tomorrow in this era of AI so let’s hear from you yeah I appreciate it you know we highly we cherrypicked um the quotes um that we uh brought here but there were many more and I can say that the pain is real right um and this is uh these are the pains of web creators their day-to-day um and they’re not able to really go beyond them they’re not able to release them without the proper solution in place and we were wondering um at suite and elementor how will these pain points of today look tomorrow considering technology considering all the uh latest trends that are happening and this is what uh we would like to talk about and in order to understand that I would like to um discuss the timeline for a second if we look at 2022 when Chad GPT and other LLMs uh bursted into our lives and really changed uh everything that was a big shift and then between 2022 to 2025 we saw the rise of AI agents serving SMBs and solopreneurs and really a lot of AI tools uh with the aim uh to facilitate and automate and streamline processes and really make work much easier um and this trend is ever growing and ever evolving and it’s part of the reason we’re here um today we have what’s called the Vibe movement um I can only assume some of you heard of Vibe coding Vibe marketing and there are other Vibe categories uh that are uh coming in and what we can say is that digital presence is evolving but it’s still professionalled so with all this movement and with all these changes that I bet make some of you uh professionals think of the future and what’s going to From Vibe Coding to Vibe Entrepreneurship happen we still see and we still predict that the uh professional landscape um digital landscape sorry is going to be um uh still professionalled and what we also predict is that between 2025 to 2030 uh 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 in relations to the vibe movement and in general if today we have vibe coding and vibe marketing and really all of these AI tools and agents that are supposed to make our work seamless uh streamlined and autonomous tomorrow we expect it to be vibe entrepreneurship and vibe business scene uh which is basically managing your business uh at the comfort of your own own home um and this is something that we’re seeing even being built at the moment um basically the vibe movement just for those who are u not very familiar with it allowing creators to focus on the vibe or the intent of the creation and not necessarily the operational hassle of it um and this is what it’s about so the agency of tomorrow uh will enable solo professionals to operate with the efficiency and capabilities of a 10erson agency and how uh will it look like so um The Agency of Tomorrow: Tools, Roles & Scaling solopreneurs are basically tomorrow’s agencies scaling with tools advanced automation and autonomous um and autonomous AI employees business processes matter and more than ever because competition is going to be fierce and everything needs to be in order um professionals need to scale revenue upsales uh and other revenue streams and technology will empower agencies to operate with excellence tool must be purposebuilt intuitive and futureproof how does it look like today well there are some uh tools out there today that um do serve the purpose of the agency of tomorrow like notion and ENSO in case of uh some of you are using those and these AI tools are built to facilitate and streamline some of the processes uh work processes and day-to-day processes um there are even more fierce examples um like Artisan if some of you um saw this uh advertisement uh somewhere on social media or even live it’s even more bold um and basically what they’re saying is hire AI and not humans uh we’re at the beginning of the trend so just imagine where would this evolve to and where exactly is the word going to and this is exactly the point we want to be ahead of the curve right we want to make sure that we are on top and utilize technology to our benefit amazing um we did gather a case study with one of uh the people we interviewed that uh accepted our invitation to follow his business process uh this is everything you see is a real case of course the name and uh identity were manipulated to keep their privacy uh Miriam would you like to jump in sorry I muted um so yes let’s uh let’s look at uh Rafael who’s obviously not his name uh an agency owner and uh take a look at how he manages a lead that Case Study: Losing a Lead Due to Inefficient Workflows comes into his agency which by the way already getting a lead into your agency is a great thing uh they’re coming with intent and you want to really capture this lead in the best way possible and impress them and answer their needs so uh so Rafael got a lead through his website i’m interested in building a website can you please help me and uh he and the client had a first discovery call where he gathered information what is the context uh what is the pain that they’re trying to solve 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 as much as possible what are their goals etc um he gathered all that information and had a good call but then sent a proposal that confused the lead uh he said a proposal he said here it is and the lead said thanks but this doesn’t I don’t remember us discussing what’s in this proposal on our call but the client took the time the lead cl took the time shared all this information which could have led to a very robust um solutionsoriented proposal and instead what happened because of Rafll’s lack of time and resources he sent a pretty cookie cutter templ plate type of proposal to this lead not specifically addressing their pains not specifically uh addressing how to solve them uh but rather one sizefits-all and one sizefits-all can kind of work to a certain extent but if you as an agency want to really optimize your business have a higher closure rate for leads um and have more successful businesses then you need to communicate with the client the lead um and address their needs and really listen to them and show that you’re listening to them and that didn’t happen here and unfortunately this is relatively common again because of lack of resources and so the lead kind of fizzled out uh you know and also what happened here was that Rafael again he’s not a salesperson necessarily he’s a web creator he that’s what he’s in it to do he’s a great he he’s amazing at building websites but he didn’t follow up which a lot of agency owners are uh uncomfortable about you know they don’t want to like bother the lead but like you need to follow up to increase your chances of winning the lead but again if you’re not a salesperson and your time and resources are limited then it’s uh you know this can often happen and then a really good warm lead came through and was lost unfortunately so what can we learn due to lack of time Rafael sent a template it didn’t address the needs um he didn’t follow up even though a week had gone by there’s nothing wrong with following up but he you know lack of time lack of sales I don’t know training raf while Rafael had a potential client with high intent and this deal had a lot of potential revenue potential this lead was lost the time resources it’s very hard to do everything well it is but um but then an agency really has challenge with scaling because of this so yeah that’s a this is a common story 100% um as a as the audience can probably hear we’re not criticizing we come with a lot of empathy uh we’re aware of these problems and we believe there is a solution for them and let’s assume for a moment that Raphael would have been a part of the movement of the agency of tomorrow and he would have the Reimagined Workflow with AI Assistants proper tools um so let’s imagine that for a second and see a flow of what could have uh potentially happened so imagine Raphael would go on a call um with uh his potential client with AI in the background uh eavesdropping documenting all the important key points from that conversation and basically keeping them backstage um for the conversation when the conversation would end and then later on the AI agent that same AI agent processes the information and bas basically transcribing it sorry putting it in a different uh format let me skip back putting it in a different format and very intuitively um reaching out to the same web creator which we will see in a moment following your chat with the client um 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 that they’re fine and he can very intuitively and easily share it with the potential um customer and AI will do everything um afterwards including the follow-ups um you know all the small details that sometimes we don’t feel comfortable until that client has signed the deal and we’re good to go this is how we envision the agency of tomorrow and this is some of the processes that suite is working on for web creators so what we add here actually is uh as a dissection of the process we add a discovery call where the AI agent was taking notes identifying pain points and creating a client brief um making sure that the client’s needs are fulfilled um created a proposal so the sales agent in this case prepares a proposal and contacts the web creator letting him know that it’s them know that it’s ready and they can go over it and then uh the hands-free agentic followup uh that makes sure that uh that same prospect notices the proposal um and gives some type of a reaction and later on the client hopefully signs the offer timeline is autofilled and basically uh kick a kickstart um or kickoff is set in the calendar and everything is done autonomously and that’s it so just to give you a bit of a context and to summarize the agency Strategic vs Operational AI Partners of tomorrow is you powered by AI and we divided into two main buckets one of them the way we see it is the strategic partner the one that helps you grow your revenue provides industry benchmark recommendations for every business action that you take and track tracks and monitors your revenue for you according to your goals on the other hand we have the operational partner uh which is the marketing agent the sales agent and the support agent all of them working for you 24 hours while you sleep uh to make sure that the work is done um and also under the operational partner um the seamless end toend processes so it’s not a CRM you’re not working for it it works for you um and with a click click of a button uh we predict that processes would uh start at one end and finish um automatically at the other uh side and there is a stream like streamlined project flow so all the processes that today you feel that might have been stuck for some time we believe they would be automated seamlessly so a few takeaways uh before we finish so for years now agencies have been struggling with managing and scaling their business efficiently due to lack of time and lack of resources we totally Final Takeaways + Invitation to Join Suite Early Access understand that and basically AI will revolutionize how agencies are managed and operated and we at Swed are excited to be obviously a part of this movement and that’s it we invite you to become uh 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 uh QR code or enter this link to fill up a form and we promise to contact you i just want to add uh one more thing just to wrap it up so 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 um you know 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 so we wish you all lots of scaling and sustainability in your agency businesses well that was uh that was very insightful Miriam and all thank you so much for that amazing presentation let’s move on to some of the questions that we we have on the chat um I can see the first one in the Q&A section let me pin it on screen so any any recommendations for a good AI meeting not tracker understand that people may be using Gemini a bit there on Google Meet but any other any other tools that you would recommend uh as a good AI note taker um yeah sorry 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 Audience Q&A: Best AI Note-Taking Tools & More you have the whole transcript you have the whole audio you also have like uh digestible like bullet points and takeaways so uh so there’s one I personally prefer using Gemini because like we were talking about here like too many tools is too much stuff to handle if we’re already using um you know Google Suite G Suite uh the workspace for everything that we do it’s just great to have it all integrated right there and the notes are you know attached to the meeting and easily accessible within our team and easily sharable with others you know let’s say we’re meeting with outside you partners or whatever so that’s just how uh how I see it um yeah the do you want to share any tools um yeah again I’m sure a lot of them are great um I can recommend Fathom uh for recording uh such conversations but again you know there are a lot of AI tools there such as you mentioned so yes yeah there’s a lot of really good ones out there just try it out and see which one works for you um and then but you don’t even have to try that many try one or two and you’re good all right thank you uh for that response uh we have a question on um on sweet in fact so Nicholas asked that is suite made or owned by Elementor is it like invoicing automation i think if you can give a short brief on what basically suite is so our audience can know better yeah 100% so suite basically is aimed to cover all business processes of web creators start to finish if you think of a funnel and we will gradually solve uh with models each one of these aspects so for example proposal building is something we’re about to release very soon uh it’s revolutionary um one of a kind that really helps you build the best proposal according to the client’s goals and your goals uh this is just uh one example but we plan on expanding to payments to invoicing um project management everything that web creators are dealing with we are about to tackle it all right Mim do you want to add anything to that uh no I think I was described very well all right let’s let’s go through the chat once more to see if there are any comments i think um rather than questions people have left comments ted says that they use order uh for notes um also good yeah and I I think Barzag is in the chat if I’m not wrong he’s engaging with the audience so he’s lurking yeah yeah hey Bar thank you so much for being here and hope you’re fine we definitely missed you but uh but yeah thank you so much for for being on the chat i think this is pretty much it from um from from this session uh Blake says that I use ClickUp’s new notetaker and he says that it’s sweet so yeah maybe we can try that out as well so medium thank you so much for being here again for our agency advantage oz it was a pleasure having you for this uh for this session i think it was extremely insightful and uh we will definitely have a recording of the session available for our viewers who missed this out uh as for you folks uh I would recommend not going anywhere because in just about a couple of minutes we will be back with a very interesting activity it’s a quiz on AI or not AI so you will be given or shown uh different images videos audios on your screen and you will have to determine if they are AI or not AI so don’t go anywhere we have that on queue for you guys and yeah but last time thank you so much medium thank you all have a nice day and as you go we will be back in about 5 minutes thank you so much