Your clients have started asking for something your team cannot yet deliver.
For a lot of agencies that arrived as links. Clients wanted coverage, then they wanted the coverage to do something for search, and the conversation moved onto ground the team had never been trained on. Now the same thing is happening again with AI, faster, and with less warning.
You have three options. Outsource it and hand a relationship to somebody else. Hire for it, which is slow and expensive and assumes you can assess the hire. Or train the people you already have, who already know the client, the sector and the account.
The third one is usually right, and it is the only one where the capability stays with you.
What this actually is
A working session for your team, built around your clients rather than a syllabus.
I have run this most often for PR and communications agencies, where the team is strong on story and audience and has simply never been taught the mechanics underneath. That is not a knowledge gap to be embarrassed about. It is a different discipline that got bolted onto the brief without anybody funding the training.
The same shape works for marketing, creative and media agencies whose accounts have started asking search and AI questions. If the team you are thinking of is client-side rather than agency-side, the in-house version is AI and AI search training for marketing teams.
What we cover
Agreed with you beforehand, but the usual spine:
The mechanics your team is missing. How search actually decides, in plain terms, so your people can hold a client conversation without hedging.
Where PR and search meet. Coverage, mentions, entity signals and authority. What genuinely moves the needle for a client and what is theatre. Your team will already have instincts here; mostly this session confirms some and kills others.
What AI changed. Why an AI answer names three providers, what gets a client into that set, and how to talk about it to a client who has read one article and is anxious.
Live on your own accounts. We take two or three real clients into the room and work on them. This is the part teams remember.
What you can sell on Monday. Where the capability turns into a line on a retainer, and where it does not. I will tell you honestly which parts are worth building in-house and which are still better bought in.
Why I am the person to do this
I have spent 27 years on the technical side of this while working almost entirely with businesses rather than for platforms, and a meaningful part of that has been alongside agencies rather than in competition with them.
Recent and current agency work includes SEO and AI visibility training for a London-based behaviour change and communications agency, and strategic digital consultancy for a London PR agency running digital campaigns across a retail and consumer portfolio.
I am not looking to take your clients. I have said no to that arrangement before and I will say it plainly on the call if it helps. My own agency work sits under a separate brand and a separate kind of engagement, and the training relationship only works if the line is clear from the start.
If what you want is the thinking rather than the training for your own team, that is the fractional CMO seat, and it is a different conversation.
How it runs
A half day for a focused team on one topic.
A full day where we work through your real accounts properly. This is the one most agencies end up choosing.
A short programme across several weeks, where the team applies it to live client work between sessions and brings the problems back. This is where the capability actually lands rather than being enjoyed and forgotten.
In your office, or remote. Quoted per engagement, because a five person team and a 40 person agency are not the same job. The full range of sessions sits on the training hub.
The awkward question, answered
Yes, your team will be able to do some of what an SEO supplier currently charges you for. That is the point, and it is worth saying out loud rather than pretending the maths does not exist.
What it will not do is turn your team into technical specialists overnight. There is work that still belongs with a specialist. Part of my job in the session is to show your people where that line sits, so they stop over-promising to clients and stop under-selling what they can genuinely do.
If you want to work out whether this is a training conversation or a different one, send me two client names and what they have started asking for. I will tell you which of the three options is right, including when the answer is not me.