Our group runs two ecommerce agencies, PureNet on Shopify, Adobe Commerce and bespoke platforms, and Agency51 on BigCommerce, so the question of where AI pays back for an agency is not theoretical for us. We answered it on our own helpdesk first. The pattern that emerged is simple: an agency’s hours go on workflows that each have a codebase, a documentation store or a data source behind them, and that is exactly the shape of work tailored AI fits.
Support: the biggest queue
Tickets about bespoke builds are hard because the answer is in the client’s code, not in the platform’s documentation. Our support agent at Agency51 reads each client’s repository and documentation, classifies the ticket, drafts the reply and escalates to a developer when its confidence is low, with its reasoning attached. Around a hundred tickets a week; first-response time from hours to minutes; developers starting each ticket with the first twenty minutes already done. It is the use case we would start with at any agency, because the queue is where the pain and the data both live.
Knowledge: what the agency knows and cannot find
A code-aware knowledge assistant over the agency’s builds, platform documentation and past tickets, for developers and account managers. The same indexing as the support agent, turned inward: “how did we handle the courier integration for that client?”, answered with the file and the ticket.
Content and merchandising at scale
Product descriptions, category content and variants grounded in the catalogue and the brand’s tone, drafted for review before publish. The agency’s value is the review and the brand judgement; the drafting is where the hours were going.
Reporting
Monthly performance reports compiled from analytics, ads and commerce platforms into the agency’s template, drafted for the account manager to finish. Every agency has an account manager who spends the first week of the month building decks from dashboards.
Search, including AI search
SEO and now AI-search optimisation: structuring content so that AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity cite it alongside conventional rankings. An agency that can do this for its clients has a new service line; the workflows behind it, content structuring, schema, monitoring, are automatable.
Conversion optimisation
Behaviour-data analysis, hypothesis generation and reporting automation for CRO programmes, grounded in the client’s own analytics.
What an agency should know
The frameworks are platform-independent: what they read is the agency’s repositories, documentation and ticket history, so Shopify, BigCommerce and Adobe Commerce agencies are all the same case. Client code and data stay in the agency’s environment or in enterprise services with no-training terms. Every answer the support agent gives is logged with its sources, customers are told an AI assistant drafts first responses, and generated content is reviewed before it carries a client’s brand. And an agency can white-label several of these, customer-facing assistants and content generation among them, to its own clients with the frameworks underneath.
Our agency work is described under AI for ecommerce and digital agencies, and the support agent in the Agency51 case study.