How to Talk About AI Without Sounding Like Everyone Else

Every agency and SaaS company in ecommerce is talking about AI right now. Every single one. And they're all saying the same thing.

"We're investing in AI." "We're exploring how AI can transform [whatever it is they do]." "We've appointed a Head of AI Innovation." That last one is my favourite because it almost always means they've given someone who was already there a new title and a ChatGPT Plus subscription.

I get it. The pressure to say something about AI is enormous. Your clients are asking. Your prospects are asking. Your competitors are posting about it. LinkedIn is wall-to-wall with agency founders sharing their "AI journey" like they've just returned from a spiritual retreat in the Peruvian Andes rather than spent an afternoon playing with Claude.

But here's the problem. When everyone says the same thing in the same way, nobody's saying anything. AI content has become the most acute symptom of the sameness problem in ecommerce marketing. Everything looks the same, sounds the same, disappears the same. It's a masterclass in collective blandness dressed up as innovation.

So how should you actually talk about AI? Let me share what I think, and more importantly, what I'm doing for clients.

Let's start with the one that makes me itch. "We're investing heavily in AI R&D."

No you're not. You've got a clever developer who's built some workflows. Or you've got a founder who's obsessed with n8n and spends their evenings connecting APIs together. That's not R&D. R&D implies a lab, a budget line, a team of researchers in white coats peering at something. What you've actually got is someone tinkering. And tinkering is great, I love tinkering, I do it constantly, but calling it R&D is like me saying I'm investing in fermentation science because I brew my own beer at the weekend.

The agencies and SaaS companies that are being honest about this are the ones I respect. "We're experimenting. We're figuring out what works. Some of it's brilliant. Some of it's shit. We'll tell you what we learn." That's infinitely more credible than the R&D costume.

Your audience; the ecommerce brands, the agencies, the SaaS buyers, they're not stupid. They can smell the bluff. People make decisions about your competence based on tiny signals of honesty, and getting caught inflating your AI credentials does more damage than admitting you're still figuring it out.

Some agencies are opening entire AI service lines. "AI Strategy." "AI Implementation." "AI-Powered [Whatever We Already Did But Now With a Chatbot]."

Should you? Maybe. But probably not yet. And definitely not the way most people are doing it.

The problem with launching an AI service line right now is that you're selling a capability that's changing weekly. The tool you build today might be obsolete in three months. The best practice you codify in January is wrong by April. You're essentially opening a restaurant where the menu changes every time someone walks in, and you're pricing it like a fixed tasting experience.

The smarter play, for most agencies, is to weave AI into existing services rather than creating a new one. You're not selling "AI strategy." You're selling the same content strategy, CRO programme, or retention service you always did, but now you're faster, sharper, or more efficient because of how you're using AI behind the scenes. The AI is the kitchen, not the menu.

There's an exception. If your agency has genuine technical depth, if you've built something proprietary, if you've got actual engineering capability, if you can deliver something that ChatGPT-plus-a-freelancer can't replicate, then yes, a service line might make sense. But be honest about whether that's really you. For most agencies in the ecommerce space, it isn't. And there's no shame in that.

Here's what I think works, and what I'm advising clients to do.

Be specific about what you're actually using AI for. Not vague gestures at "innovation", concrete examples. "We use AI to do the first pass on our competitor analysis, which means we get to the interesting strategic work faster." "We've built an internal tool that monitors our clients' categories weekly and flags changes we'd otherwise miss." "We use it to generate first drafts that our strategists then rewrite, which means you get more thinking for the same budget."

That level of specificity does two things. First, it's credible, nobody doubts you because you've told them exactly what you're doing rather than hiding behind buzzwords. Second, it's useful, your prospect can immediately see how it benefits them, rather than having to decode what "AI-powered solutions" actually means in practice.

This ties back to something I bang on about constantly: most ecommerce agencies and SaaS companies are terrible at explaining what they do in concrete terms. AI makes this problem worse because the temptation is to be even more vague, to use even more abstract language, to retreat further into the comfort of words that sound impressive but communicate nothing. Fight that temptation. Be boringly specific. It's the most differentiated thing you can do right now precisely because nobody else is doing it.

I'll be transparent about my own approach because I think it's useful.

At Waye, AI is in everything we do. It's in the content workflows I've built for clients, automations that pull industry news, generate prompts, and produce first drafts that the team then shapes and sharpens. It's in how I research, how I structure, how I produce at a pace that would be impossible without it. One client input becomes multiple outputs across different audiences and formats, that's the leverage.

But I don't call it an AI service. I call it a content service that's powered by a very particular way of working. The client doesn't care about the plumbing. They care that the content is good, it's on time, it sounds like them, and it's built on a genuine understanding of their market. The AI makes that possible at a level of speed and breadth that it wouldn't be otherwise. That's the pitch. Not "we use AI." That's not a pitch. That's just describing the year we live in.

I have these conversations constantly; at events, on calls, in DMs. And I can tell you now, the agencies and SaaS companies that stand out aren't the ones with the biggest AI claims. They're the ones who can explain, simply and specifically, what they actually do differently because of it. That's the bar. It's not high. Almost nobody's clearing it.

Here's the bit that I think most people are missing in the AI conversation.

The tools are commoditising. Fast. Everyone has access to the same models, the same APIs, the same no-code platforms. If your entire AI story is "we use these tools," you've got about six months before every competitor can say the same thing, because they will, and they'll probably charge less.

The differentiator isn't the tool. It's how you think. It's the strategic layer that sits on top of the automation. It's knowing which questions to ask, which outputs to trust, which first drafts to throw away, and which to develop. It's having a point of view about your client's market that no AI can generate because it comes from years of being in the room, talking to the people, attending the events, and understanding the ecosystem at a level that a language model never will.

This is what I'm building Waye around. Not "we use AI". everyone uses AI. But the thinking, the strategy, the understanding of ecommerce marketing that makes the AI output actually good rather than just fast. Research reports, positioning workshops, content strategy built on years of being embedded in the ecommerce ecosystem, these are things that require a human brain with specific expertise, informed by specific experience, in a specific market. AI makes the execution faster. The thinking is the product.

If you're an agency or SaaS company trying to figure out your AI narrative, start there. Don't lead with the tool. Lead with the thinking. Explain what you understand about your market that nobody else does, and then mention, almost casually, that AI makes you faster at acting on that understanding.

That's a positioning story. "We use AI" is not.

Before you publish your next piece of AI content, the blog post, the LinkedIn update, the capabilities deck, run it through this filter:

Could a competitor swap their logo onto this and publish it unchanged? If yes, it's not saying anything. It's technically present but functionally useless.

Does it contain a single specific example of what you actually do with AI? Not "leverage" or "harness" or "unlock", an actual thing you do, described in enough detail that someone could picture it happening? If no, rewrite it until it does.

Would you say this out loud to a client you respect without feeling slightly embarrassed? If no, don't publish it. The gap between what companies claim about AI on their website and what they'd actually say face-to-face if pushed is enormous. Close that gap. Your audience will thank you for it.

The AI conversation in ecommerce is going to get louder, not quieter. The agencies and SaaS companies that win aren't going to be the ones who shout loudest about it. They're going to be the ones who talk about it like adults, honestly, specifically, and with the confidence that comes from actually knowing what they're doing.

Be that. The bar is underground. Don't limbo.

I'm Will, founder of Waye. We help ecommerce agencies and SaaS companies create marketing that doesn't disappear into the noise, including figuring out how to talk about AI without sounding like a press release. If that sounds useful, you know where to find me.