The AI Reality Check
1400 visits from AI assistants in three months
Christopher Kemper is co-founder of EMILY Revolutionary Marketing Group, a South Carolina agency that blends creative work, operations and analytics for clients that range from small businesses to state agencies. What makes his account worth reading is the practical shift behind it: the firm has moved from local small-business work into sectors where AI has changed how buyers search, qualify vendors and arrive at a first conversation.
The useful AI work is not broad automation but narrow, repetitive tasks with clear rules: qualifying government RFPs, speeding up SEO reviews and drafting routine content. He is far less interested in handing over email, where the back-and-forth still needs a human ear, and says any AI plan starts with the problem, the data and the end state – not the tool.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
We got started almost 8 years ago. My business partner was a one-woman show owning her own company and overwhelmed. We started talking about bringing our talents together (her – creative, me – operations and analytics) to help small businesses grow in the digital space.
Our mascot is a 16 year old girl from the Revolutionary War from our area who helped deliver a message that turned the tide in South Carolina for the Patriots. Like her, we help our Clients deliver their messages!
In SC, there are 3 types of firms: creative, web design, and PR. We wanted to being all of that together to serve our Clients. And, we do different things than our competition. We are SEO and Ai search experts and are helping businesses with AI implementation as well.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
In the beginning, it was all small businesses and that was brutal. We quickly realized that 1-man and a truck businesses are not where we need to be to pay the bills. We pivoted and started working events and conferences of different businesses that we thought were good targets.
Then, in the past 2 years, with the rise of AI, digital marketing has become more commoditized. Most B2B businesses below $1m in revenue are using these tools and their nieces or wives are running their social media and digital marketing. So we pivoted again.
Most of our business now comes from state government agencies, manufacturing, warehousing and logistics. This is where we want to be for sure.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
All of our writing for blogs and our website is done with a tool we trained on Chat GPT. All of our government RFPs get read and qualified by a tool before we even look at them. It gives us a thumbs down or thumbs up for every RFP. Thumbs down and we don’t even look at it. Thumbs up and it goes in a cue to review. This has saved us 3 hours every Monday morning.
We have built a number of tools for internal use over the last 6 months. We can do an SEO assessment of a website in a fraction of the time it used to take (savings of almost 2 hrs per website). We’ve even built our own curriculum on how to teach AI use for employees, entrepreneurs, and business owners.
I tried it on my inbox, but have gone back to answering my inbox myself. It is too hard to hand individual emails to a tool and expect it to have the nuance of a conversation.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes. Potential clients are so much more prepared to talk about their needs from the research they have done.
Yes, potential clients are arriving through AI assistants. This is a measurable metric now. Our site has seen over 1400 visits in the last 3 months from AI assistants. For a small brand, this is amazing and helps us build brand recognition.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
If you are looking to implement AI in your organization, you have to start with: 1.) the problem you are trying to solve, 2.) an understanding of how the AI tool "thinks" and how you have to think in relation to the tool, 3.) clean data, and 4.) an expected end state of what you are trying to achieve. Then you can put a plan in place to begin this process. If you have not thought through these 4 points, go ahead and just hand me the money you would have wasted on that project. I will spend it for you! LOL
Thank you to Christopher Kemper and the team at EMILY Revolutionary Marketing Group for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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Leaders Perception publishes founder and operator interviews every week. A few questions, about five minutes, no calls. It is free and everyone we accept gets published.