You’ve seen it. We have all seen it. The LinkedIn post from an accountant that opens with “In today’s fast-paced business landscape.” The blog that says a lot of words yet nothing at all. Five paragraphs, neat little headers, and a distinct lack of opinion. You just know that no human was harmed in the creation of that blog.
The risk of beige accounting content is so high right now as firm owners put their faith in agencies that are still optimising for words without context. In other words, Old Skool SEO.
So, how are marketing agencies actually using AI?
In this article, I am going to explain how we get the best out of AI at Neesh and give my perspective on how that value benefits our clients and us. Questions like ‘When the work that used to take a day now takes an hour, what happens to the difference?’ ‘Does the work really get better, or does the agency just take on more clients, produce more of the same, and pocket the saving?’
Because as we learn to adapt to the AI generation, these are valid questions.
Here is how it works at Neesh, in full, so you have something honest to compare other answers against.
Most marketing agencies use AI. Shocker
I imagine most use it every day. It would be strange not to. You might get some agencies suggesting that not using AI is their USP, but it makes me wonder why they continue to use horses in the age of the car. And, perhaps morbidly, if they are lying.
The research, structuring and drafting work that used to take a day or more now takes an hour, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Content has got quick.
But how an agency uses AI matters far more than whether it does. There are two broad models in the market right now. One uses AI to produce more content, faster, for more clients at once. The other uses it to go deeper for the clients it already has. They look identical on a proposal. They produce completely different results. Can you guess which one we use here?
AI only works if it has context on your firm and clients
The reason most AI content is so obviously hollow is not the technology. It is that the technology was given nothing to work with. Ask a tool to “write a post about Making Tax Digital for accountants” and you get the average of everything ever written on the subject. Accurate-ish. Specific to nobody. Indistinguishable from the other forty posts published that morning. In other words .. YAWN!
At Neesh, we do something different. For every client, we build what I think of as a collective brain. Your positioning. Your audience and what they are actually worried about. Your voice, taken from how you really speak, not how a template thinks an accountant should speak. Your existing content, your client stories, and the insights from every conversation we have with you.
That is the asset. AI sitting on top of it stops guessing and starts working from the evidence we have assembled. We create a contextual environment before we consider producing anything. We analyse what you have already published, recognise the gaps, and draft content that sounds like you because it was built from you. Without that foundation, AI is a content mill. With it, AI is leverage.
This is also why we are careful about where that material lives. Client information only goes into approved platforms with proper data protections, never free public tools, and we tell every client exactly how their material is used at onboarding. We have published our full AI Use Policy because we think you should be able to read it, not take our word for it.
Where the time saving goes
Here is the part that separates a modern agency from those trying to escape the legacy trap.
AI could let us produce ten times the content for the same fee. We deliberately do not. The market is already drowning in volume, and volume is precisely why most accounting firm marketing fails. Another twelve generic posts a month does not make you more visible. It makes you wallpaper.
So the hours AI gives back go into depth. More time understanding your clients and prospects. More time on strategy, the part no tool can do, because no tool knows that your best referrals come from one corner of your client base or that the work you find easiest is the work you should be building around. More time making one piece of content genuinely useful to the specific person you want reading it, instead of making five pieces that are useful to nobody.
Focused effort compounds. Unfocused effort compounds too, just into chaos. I wrote a whole book about this, so I won’t relitigate it here, but AI does not change the rule. AI does not change that rule. It only raises the stakes because now everyone can produce chaos at scale. What a world we live in, right? Compounded chaos.
Nothing gets published without your eyes on it
You know your niche. We know marketing. AI knows neither. So every piece of client content starts and ends with a human, and we make sure you are fully happy before it is published. Not as a courtesy. As a required step. This way, we remove the risk of publishing AI hallucinations and inaccuracies. It also allows you the opportunity to weigh in with perspective, which is gold dust in today’s search algorithms.
As one of our clients said ‘if something reads like a five-paragraph eighth-grade essay, it goes back. If the technical detail is off, even slightly, it goes back’. You are the expert in your field, and your sign-off is what guarantees the content reaching your audience is accurate, specific and worth their time. Our clients regularly catch the things only a practitioner would catch, and that is the system working exactly as designed. This is true collaboration. We would rather get some things wrong than be beige and 100% correct all of the time.
This is also why we focus on cadence. Because you are busy, we know that you need a routine so you don’t become the bottleneck.
Questions to ask your marketing agency about AI
If you are choosing an agency, or wondering about the one you have, ask them how they use AI. Not whether. How.
Then listen for specifics. Where does my information go, and is it ever entered into free public tools? Who reviews AI-assisted work before I see it? Do I sign off before anything is published? And the big one: now that the production work is faster, where does that time go?
If the answers are vague, assume the savings are going into their margin, not your marketing. If the answer is “we don’t use AI at all,” be equally sceptical, because they are either behind or not being straight with you.
The honest answer looks something like this: a small team, good tools used intelligently, a strategist at the front who knows your market, and a client at the end who knows their stuff and signs off on everything.
If you want volume without substance, we are not your agency. If you want content that compounds over time because it is genuinely useful to the right people, that is what we are building.
You can read the full Neesh AI Use Policy . If you want to talk about how this would work for your firm, you know where to find us.
AI will make your marketing faster. It will not tell you whether it is pointed in the right direction. That part is still on you.
If you are not sure where your firm’s marketing really stands, the Accounting Marketing Index will show you. Ten minutes, an instant score across Strategy, Execution, Performance and Mindset, and a clear picture of where the friction actually sits. Free, confidential, and built specifically for accounting firms.
Get your score at neesh.agency/marketingmaturity
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash