How We Run Glide on AI

Most agencies did the same thing when AI arrived. They took the operation they were already running in 2019, bolted a chatbot onto the contact page, mentioned ChatGPT in the pitch deck, and relabelled themselves “AI-powered”. The timelines didn't change. The prices didn't change. The same overstretched account manager was still juggling the same ten clients, just with a new line in the footer.

We went the other way at Glide. Instead of adding AI around the edges, we rebuilt the production line itself. AI agents do the heavy lifting: research, first drafts, website builds, reporting, monitoring, and the overnight publishing runs. Humans do the things that genuinely need a human: strategy, quality control, client relationships, and accountability when something matters. Nothing reaches a client without a person signing it off, and that person is usually me.

This page is the hub for the full story. The five posts below cover how the whole operation works, who the agents are, what AI speed means for your website build, and the honest list of things we still don't trust AI to do. Everything in them is real: actual commit logs, actual builds shipped for actual clients, and the actual tools named. Nothing hypothetical, nothing borrowed from someone else's LinkedIn post.

Why publish any of this? Two reasons. If you're about to trust an agency with your website and your search visibility, you deserve to know how the thing you're buying gets made. And the way we work is the single biggest reason we can deliver faster, and charge a sensible monthly subscription instead of a five-figure build fee, while agencies running the 2019 playbook can't.

Who actually does the work

Glide runs on five AI department heads plus a small human team. The agents cover Chief of Staff, Business Development, Marketing, Finance and Operations. Each one has its own remit, its own memory, and its own scheduled runs. While I sleep, they fan out across the business: the finance agent reconciles the numbers, the marketing agent drafts and publishes content, the ops agent checks client sites are healthy, and the chief of staff pulls it all together into a brief that's sitting in my inbox before 6am. I read it over coffee and make the decisions that need a human.

The humans sit on top of that. I set direction, handle sales and own every client relationship. Matt leads delivery and quality. Nothing an agent produces goes anywhere near a client without one of us reviewing it first. That rule is not negotiable, and the fourth post below explains exactly why.

The agent roster. Five departments, each with its own remit, memory and overnight schedule.

None of this appeared overnight, ironically. It took months of building, breaking and correcting. The important part is the feedback loop: every time an agent gets something wrong, the correction gets written into its memory, so the same mistake doesn't happen twice. The operation gets a little sharper every single week, which is something you can't say about most agency processes.

The other principle that makes it work is legibility. Everything the agents do gets recorded: every decision, every draft, every published page sits in a log a human can read. That's why I can review a whole night's work in twenty minutes over coffee, and it's why mistakes get caught before a client ever sees them rather than three weeks later in a report.

What stays human

The fastest way to lose your trust would be to pretend AI does everything here. It doesn't, and honestly, I wouldn't want it to. There's a line we hold, and it doesn't move:

• Strategy and positioning. Deciding what your business should say, who it should target and where it should compete is judgement work. A human does it.
• Client relationships. You will never be account-managed by a bot. Calls, emails and awkward conversations are handled by me or Matt.
• Pricing, promises and scope. Nothing gets quoted or committed to without a human signing it off. An agent cannot promise you anything.
• Final quality control. Every page, post and build gets human eyes before it ships. That's the accountability you're actually paying for.

The fourth post in the series goes much deeper on this, including the failures that taught us where the line belongs.

What this means if you hire us

All of the above is interesting if you like this sort of thing. But if you're a founder weighing up agencies, here's what it actually changes for you.

Faster delivery, without the corner-cutting. A website that would sit in a traditional agency's queue for three months gets designed, written and built here in days. Not because we rush, but because the production work happens in parallel and around the clock. You spend the saved time reviewing and refining, which is where a client's input is genuinely valuable.

Sensible monthly pricing instead of five-figure builds. When the production cost drops, the price should too. Our websites run on a monthly subscription rather than a big one-off invoice, so you're not gambling thousands up front on an agency you've just met. The exact numbers are on our pricing page, in plain English, with nothing hidden behind a discovery call.

Senior humans on every account. Because the agents handle the production grind, the humans you deal with aren't juniors learning on your budget. You talk to me or to Matt, the people who actually set the strategy and check the work. Most agencies can't afford that structure. Ours is built for it.

Proven AI-search expertise, not just claims. Running an agency on AI also means we understand how AI search engines read websites, because we live in that world every day. One of our clients has been cited over 1,200 times in Microsoft Copilot answers, and we build every client site to earn the same kind of visibility. The full breakdown is in our guide to AI search optimisation.

And if what you actually want is AI working inside your own business, not just behind your website, we've productised that too. Have a look at our AI services page for what we build for clients.

One honest caveat to finish on: AI hasn't made agencies obsolete, and it hasn't made judgement optional. It has made the production side of this industry dramatically cheaper and faster, and the agencies that admit that, and pass the benefit on to their clients, are the ones worth hiring. That's the bet we've made with Glide. The posts above show our working.