# Position yourself as 'AI and automation', not just 'AI' | Gareth B. Davies

Source: https://garethbdavies.com/articles/positioning-ai-automation/

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# Position yourself as 'AI and automation', not just 'AI'

 By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026

 AI alone gets outsourced to a chatbot subscription, but the client only pays when you show up as the person who rewires how their business actually runs.

 The instinct makes sense on paper. You have built something with AI, so you call yourself an AI company. Everyone in the accelerator does the same thing, and the market rewards the label because it is the word getting all the attention right now. The problem shows up later, in the sales call, when a prospect hears "AI" and pictures a chatbot widget they could buy off a shelf for twenty dollars a month. You have just spent three sentences convincing them your $10,000 project is a commodity.

## The word AI sets the wrong expectation

 A prospect who hears "AI solutions" does not think about the weeks of discovery, the integration work, the edge cases you handled, or the workflow redesign that made the tool actually useful. They think about ChatGPT. That association is not your fault, but it is your problem, because it means you are competing on the wrong axis before the call even starts.

 One agency working in hospitality kept leading with "we build AI" and got the same objection on every discovery call: "can't I just use ChatGPT for that?" The fix was not a better AI demo. It was dropping the word AI from the opening pitch entirely and talking instead about the missed calls, the after-hours leads, and the staff hours that disappeared once the system ran the intake process end to end. Same build. Different frame. The objection stopped coming up.

## Automation is the part they are actually buying

 What clients pay for is not intelligence, it is throughput. They want fewer missed calls, faster lead response, less manual data entry, and a process that runs the same way at 2am as it does at 2pm. AI is the component that makes some of that possible, but the automation, meaning the workflow that connects a lead coming in to a booked appointment going out with no human touching it in between, is the actual deliverable. Position yourself as the automation layer and the AI becomes one ingredient among several: the CRM update, the calendar sync, the follow-up sequence, the escalation rule when something needs a human. Position yourself as only AI and you have described a feature, not a system, and features get compared on price.

 There is a second reason this matters, and it is about who else is in the room. Every freelancer with a ChatGPT wrapper is also calling themselves an AI company right now. That crowd is racing to the bottom on price because a wrapper is easy to copy. Automation work is harder to copy because it requires understanding the client's actual operations, not just prompting a model well. When you position as AI and automation, you are quietly excluding the wrapper crowd from the comparison set, because most of them have never touched an API integration or a multi-step workflow tool in their life.

## Say it in outcomes, not architecture

 None of this means leading with the word "automation" instead, as if swapping labels solves it. The actual fix is to stop leading with either word and start leading with what changes for the client. A construction-industry agency owner with a background inside the trade found this out directly: prospects trusted him faster than outside vendors precisely because he described the after-hours quoting delay and the callback backlog before he ever mentioned what was running behind the scenes. He was disrupting the industry as an insider, not pitching it as a tech vendor. That ordering, problem first, mechanism second, is what separates positioning that lands from positioning that triggers a shrug and a "we already have a chatbot."

 When the mechanism does come up, describe it as a system with parts, not a single AI action. A voice agent that answers the phone. A workflow that checks availability and books the slot. A rule that flags anything unusual for a human to review. That is automation with AI inside it, and it reads as infrastructure. A single sentence about "AI that handles your calls" reads as a gadget, and gadgets get shopped on price every time.

 The principle to keep: never let AI stand alone as your category. It is the ingredient, automation is the dish, and the client is buying the meal, not the spice rack.

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