Scaling With AI Agents: Automation Secrets for Agencies and Business Leaders with Alane Boyd

Linda: Welcome to the B2B Brand180 podcast where we share dynamic strategies to help you make a 180-degree shift in your branding and growth strategies. I'm Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency and host today. Today's guest is Alane Boyd. She is an expert in scaling social media agencies and SaaS companies through intelligent automation and, in other words, AI agents.

Alane builds and deploys AI agents that transform operations across industries including podcast agents and content repurposing as well as ICP agents that drive precise lead engagement. Welcome, Alane. It's great to have you here today. I am looking forward to talking about AI agents.

Alane: Me too, Linda. Thanks for having me. And we're going to have some fun talking about all this automation. Linda: That's awesome.

So for the audience today, you will have definitely by the time we're done, three takeaways. You'll learn how AI agents automate repetitive tasks to free teams for high impact work. You'll learn proven strategies for using AI and lead generation, customer onboarding, and also content creation. And lastly, when and how to integrate AI tools into your existing sales and marketing stacks to just to maximize your ROI.

So we'll get started, Alane. So my first question to you is, what do you think the biggest mistakes leaders make when they're trying to scale agencies or SaaS companies without AI automation? Alane: There's definitely a technical learning that you have to do and even just to understand it, not even that you need to build it, but what I'm seeing now, and so I sold my company, my agency in 2018, and I wrote our first automations in 2016, and that was without AI, and it was already saving so much time.

One day, I was just so mad that day that it was taking so long to onboard new clients. And I've got my salesperson on a call with our admin to do everything and then a call with the account manager. And I was just like, there's got to be a way to get all of this information from the sales call and get it to the team to execute onboarding and to the account manager. So I wrote our very first ones using Zapier .

Linda: That's great. Alane: And that was almost 10 years ago now. Gosh, that's so scary. But I see even those just operational simple automations not being utilized at companies.

And now with an AI agent 10 years forward, an AI agent is really a digital employee where they have a little bit of a brain, and they can see things coming through. So an example is before in old automation, it was very mapped out like, this happens, then this happens. And so there was nothing where somebody could go, oh, they bought these products, so we're going to send it to this type of automation. Well, the agent can look at what was purchased and go, oh, okay, well, I know what needs to happen here and I'm going to send it over this way.

And so it has its own little brain to make decisions because we told it. We still need the human there, but that's where I see is just these really underutilized automations, even on a simple upfront like Zapier Automation. Linda: Yeah, that's great. That's great.

So companies that are sort of starting with AI agents, and I think some companies out there still don't even know what that is. They're just digesting chat and some of the other AI tools that are out there. But there must be some foundational elements that need to get implemented first in order to be successful. Alane: You took the words right out of my mouth, Linda.

A couple of foundational things is, really utilize a project management system because that is still where your work is being done. So like a Clickup , Asana , Monday , Workamajig , something where that work is your hub because the agent can take that trigger, do what it needs to do, and then it can send the output there for your team to execute on, let it get you 80% of the way there, knowing your workflows, understanding them, doing the process manually, and then process mapping it.

It is like the least sexy thing to get you to an automated sequence with an AI agent, but knowing your process and being able to write it down is 90% of the work. Building the agent, if you have all that, is a much simpler process and very quick to execute. If you can articulate the actual process. And I always say there's no yeah, but's.

like, “Yeah, I've got it, but I don't have this, this, or this.” There's no yeah, buts. You have it documented. End of sentence.

Linda: That's the way it is. That's black or white. It's very simple. Clean cut.

That's great. That's helpful. So as long as you have the process, your workflow, what needs to get executed, the data that it needs to know in order to do that, then that part becomes easier. Is that accurate?

Alane: You nailed it. Linda: Awesome. So how long does it take to see measurable results if you're going to deploy an agent, maybe in sales or marketing or operations? And I'll double key up that question.

And what are some kind of key milestones that indicate success? Alane: Some of them can be instant. So a popular one that we do is proposal generation, taking from a transcript, using your CRM, moving it to proposal stage, and then using your templates, your proposal templates, to create a proposal. That is something instant that gives two to four hours back to the sales team.

Or sometimes in an agency, the founder is the one that's creating those proposals. So you're instantly getting that time back. And I think we have a hard time kind of understanding sometimes is the AI can digest so much more information than we can in seconds versus a week for us. So taking a call transcript and it can digest the pain points they're having, simplify it, summarize it, can do it in seconds versus, you know, it could take us four hours to comb through that.

So in those instances, those things are instant. Other ones could be a longer-term benefit. If you're looking at content marketing where you're trying to build up you or your company as a thought leader, well, you're not going to see, oh, I just had this automated marketing workflow, got this blog out, and now leads are rolling in. That's going to be something where it takes time and also you have to put effort into it.

None of this is really like a magic wand. You have to know your topics, you have to feed it with good information, and then the outputs become better and more utilized. So a lot of times we do see those instant wins, and that's what we always say with clients, what is low effort, big impact. The least amount of work for your team to build this agent to give you a huge impact.

And I always see new client onboarding. No client sees the hours of work you're putting in behind the scenes to get them onboarded. They just see the time it took you to do it. Linda: Right.

That's a great point. So there must be a lot of different processes for me, just as an example, I can think of so many things I would love to just cut the time in half or not have to do. When it comes to working with companies, what would be some examples of what you're referring to that you think, oh, these have been just huge wins, like proposals? Are there any other examples you could share?

Alane: Yeah, I mean a podcast, if you have a podcast, you're already probably using AI to help you with some pieces of it, but you're manually using it. So for myself, I have a podcast where it's just myself and my co-founder. We don't have any guests, it's just the two of us. And so we have a person on our team that was spending about 40 hours a week doing the production of it.

And once we did the process manually, we knew what the process was, we put that into place. So then it was like the Dropbox folder automatically gets created for the new episode for us to upload the images to. A ClickUp doc gets created with newsletter writeup, then a description gets created and title suggestions, and it automatically pushes a draft for the blog to Webflow our website. And so it was able to decrease the time by 30 hours a week.

So our team member could really just focus on how could we improve this rather than all those data pieces, just consuming time. So that's one example. And then something to look at when you're thinking about, okay, what is our low effort, high impact would be does it recur? New mistakes often happen, does it get done inconsistently?

And that happens a lot in an agency. The way that Linda does something, the way that Alane does something, we're all a little bit different, but we want a company way of doing it. And so that an AI agent, an automated workflow, helps make that process consistent. So you have every customer experience is the same thing, and your employees also have less to figure out on their own, which sometimes can be a good thing.

They can focus on more creative, strategic work. Mistakes, that consistency, does it recur? Those are things that you're looking for that you would want to spend the time to look at. Does this make sense to automate?

Linda: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there's plenty of companies out there who have SOPs that they've built out that they can really take a look at and say, okay, is there something here that we could really drill down on and simplify. Sometimes it gets a little more overcomplicated when you have a lot of people involved or it could just be executed.

That's great. That's super helpful. So how does strategic AI integration help companies scale faster, like close larger deals, maybe they're attracting talent, improve customer relations. I mean, we talked about the proposal process, the podcast process.

Are there ways that maybe an agent could help with attracting top talent? Maybe they are scanning resumes, maybe there's a process on customer retention to send out surveys. So I'd love to just maybe dig down into that because customer retention I think will become more and more important as we become less human and maybe a little bit more AI driven. But I would love to talk a bit about that.

Get your feedback. Alane: Yeah. Gosh. I mean, we could talk about each one of those pieces in there, but we'll talk about the hiring piece.

You do want to attract top talent. The issue that I'm seeing is that the companies are using AI to help with job descriptions and to help with the hiring process, but so is the applicant. The applicant is using your job description and their resume and saying, Hey, can you help me with this, make my resume fit this job description. So when you have that happening and you do, then everybody looks the same.

Everybody looks top notch. So you're hiring and interview process is even more vital to get to the candidates that can actually do the work that you need. And so we developed, and it's a free tool. I'll send it to you and we can link to it in the description.

It's a free hiring tool. You put in the information about what you're trying to hire for and it'll create the job description, but it also creates a multilevel interview process for that role that you can hand to anybody that's part of the hiring process that really drills down into the role and finding out if they can do it. A lot of times with hiring with, sometimes they hire the people they like, not the people that can do the job. And so we really need to drill down and find out can this person do the job because their resume looks stellar.

And then the last part that is in this little hiring toolkit that we developed is skills assessments. Something that you can make part of your interview process to send them and say, Hey, can you really do this job? Here's a 20-minute interview process. We call it an interview process, but it's really just a skills assessment and it gives you ideas for, I think it gives you three ideas for skills assessments.

Linda: That's great. That's awesome. So what's the biggest myths executives believe about implementing AI or AI agents in their business? Alane: How long it'll take.

Linda: Right. Okay. And one non-negotiable AI tool or platform for scaling in 2026 that you could recommend. Alane: n8n .

Linda: Okay. Awesome. And what's the fastest way to de-roll trust when rolling out AI to teams or customers Alane: Not having a plan and letting them figure it out themselves. Linda: Who should own the AI strategy within a growing agency or a SaaS company, or just any company whatsoever?

Alane: You have to have buy-in from leadership. Linda: Okay. And what's one immediate action today that boosts efficiency and positions you as an AI forward leader? Alane: Using agents and looking at n8n.

That's awesome. Linda: Oh, well, thank you, Alane. That was awesome. You gave some great feedback on AI agents, especially leveraging them to scale smarter and faster.

So I appreciate all the feedback that you've shared today. So I'd love for you to tell the audience how they can connect with you directly and maybe learn more about you and your business. Alane: So for me personally, I'm Alane Boyd, and you can find me on LinkedIn . I'm very active, so I love connecting with people that have listened to our podcast episode.

And my company is biggestgoal.ai , and there's a ton of free resources on there as well. And Linda, I'll share that hiring toolkit that's free. Linda: Great.

We'll put that in the toolkit. So if anybody needs to reach out to Alane Boyd just directly through LinkedIn or visit her site for details on AI solutions. And if you enjoyed this episode, please hit like share, comment, or subscribe, and let's keep elevating B2B branding together. And if you're ready for your own brand 180, please visit us at mill.

agency or lindafanaras.com . We will see you at the next episode.