We weren't pitching AI. We were using it. Clients noticed.
For ten years, Method Garage has run design workshops for B2B SaaS companies. Journey mapping. Customer onboarding. Digital customer success. The kind of work where you fill rooms with sticky notes, synthesize customer pain points, and help teams see their business clearly.
Somewhere along the way, we started building tools for ourselves.
The Tools We Built
It started with interviews.
Before every workshop, we conduct dozens of interviews with employees and customers. The synthesis used to take forever: listen to recordings, pull quotes, identify themes, surface the biggest problems. Hours and hours of work before we could even plan the session.
So we automated it. Transcription, speaker identification, theme extraction, problem prioritization. What used to take days now took minutes. We walked into workshop planning with synthesized insights already in hand.
Then we got more ambitious.
We built a workshop agent with a RAG database pre-loaded with all that pre-workshop synthesis. The agent already knew the painful problem areas. When participants brainstormed solutions, the agent had context. It could help them craft powerful problem statements and concept narratives grounded in real customer and employee pain points. A set of agent tools took those statements and automatically generated presentation slides.
These weren't demos. These were tools we used every day to run our own business faster.
The Moment in the Room
We started bringing these tools into client workshops.
Picture this: a room full of cross-functional stakeholders, executives down to the front line. Sales, Engineering, Support, CS, Marketing, Finance. They're halfway through a design sprint. They've just finished a brainstorming exercise. Sticky notes everywhere. Ideas scattered across whiteboards.
We had them feed their outputs into the agent themselves. 30 people in the room, all generating pitch decks in realtime. Workshops that used to span several days now took a half day. And we walked out of the room with concept finalists, already beautifully crafted in slides.
The reaction was always the same.
"Wait. What just happened?"
"I had no idea this could be automated."
"Can you build this for our team?"
The Pattern
This kept happening. Workshop after workshop. Different clients, different industries, same reaction.
They weren't impressed by a pitch deck about AI capabilities. They were watching automation work in real time, on their own content, solving their actual problem.
And then the asks started coming.
Past clients reached out. "We saw what you were using in our sessions. Can you build something like that for us?"
Current clients extended engagements. "Forget the next phase of journey mapping. Can you help us automate the insights we just uncovered?"
We said yes.
Why We Could Say Yes
Here's the thing: we'd already done the hard part.
Ten years of mapping customer journeys meant we knew exactly where the friction lived. We'd documented the handoffs, the tribal knowledge, the processes that only existed in someone's head. We knew which workflows were automation-ready and which ones were theater.
And we'd been building AI tools internally for over a year. Not experiments. Production tools we relied on daily. We knew what worked, what failed, and how to get from prototype to something people actually use.
When clients asked if we could build for them, we weren't starting from zero. We were extending what we'd already proven.
What Changed
We didn't make a strategic decision to pivot. Clients pulled us here.
Every brainstorm session, AI kept surfacing as "the solution" to whatever problem we were mapping. Meanwhile, we were using our own AI tools to run those very sessions. The gap between "advisor who recommends AI" and "builder who ships AI" was shrinking with every workshop.
So we closed it.
Method Garage still does design work. We still map journeys and run workshops (now with better tools). But increasingly, clients want more than the map. They want the thing. The agent. The automation. Working code that delivers outcomes.
That's what we build now.
The Lesson
If you're a consultancy wondering whether to add AI capabilities: stop wondering. Start building for yourself first.
Use your own tools in client work. Let them see automation in action. The best pitch for AI services isn't a pitch at all. It's the moment a client watches something happen that they didn't know was possible.
They'll ask. And when they do, you'll be ready.
Next up: Once we committed to building AI for clients, we made a decision: be 100% AI-native from day one. Automate everything. No exceptions. Here's how we rebuilt Method Garage from the ground up.
Method Garage is a design and engineering firm building AI agents for B2B Customer Success teams. We spent 10 years mapping workflows. Now we automate what we mapped.
If your team is stuck between "AI strategy" and "AI in production," let's talk: saul@methodgarage.com