Playbook AI Partners
Welcome to Playbook AI Partners Podcast—the show that turns AI from overwhelming into actionable.
Your host Sandy Kibling, is the Chief Playmaker, helping business owners and teams stop chasing shiny tools and start using AI in a way that actually moves the numbers—saving time, reducing busywork, and driving growth.
Each episode features industry experts and real-world tactics providing clear “do-this-next” plays,” simple AI workflows, and practical guardrails so you can use AI safely, execute with confidence, and get results.
Let’s run the play.
Playbook AI Partners
Episode 17: GROAS: The Secret Scaling Engine Behind Smarter Agencies and Businesses
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What if your business could improve its Google Ads performance without paying thousands of dollars each month for a traditional marketing agency?
In this episode, Sandy Kibling speaks with David Pourquery, founder of GROAS AI, about how autonomous AI agents are transforming digital advertising and helping businesses scale without adding more employees or agency overhead.
David shares how GROAS evolved from a simple Google Ads recommendation tool into a fully managed service powered by autonomous AI. He explains the problems he observed in the traditional agency model, how AI can continuously optimize campaigns, and why experienced account managers and human oversight remain essential for understanding business goals, auditing accounts, and ensuring the right foundations are in place.
The conversation also explores what business owners should know before trusting AI with their advertising budgets, including conversion tracking, website performance, campaign strategy, and clear success metrics.
Whether you are a business owner looking for better marketing results or an agency searching for a scalable white-label solution, this episode offers a compelling look at how AI is changing the future of advertising.
Resources:
Playbook AI Partners - AI Solutions without Overwhelm
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Typically an agency might charge a customer, I don't know, five to ten K a month to run their ads, and they're outsourcing all of that to somewhere else where they're paying that person maybe a hundred dollars a month, two hundred dollars a month to do the actual work. And they're just a friendly face that shows up on the client calls. That's the case for the majority of agencies, right? 90-95%. It's ultimately like uh an arbitrage on the labor rather than trying to get the best results for the customers.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Playbook AI Partners Podcast, the show that turns AI from overwhelming into actionable.
SPEAKER_01Your host, Andy Kibling, is the chief playmaker, helping business owners and teams stop chasing shiny tools and start using AI in a way that actually moves the numbers, saving time, reducing busy work, and driving growth.
SPEAKER_02Each episode features industry experts and real-world tactics, providing clear to the plays, simple AI workflows, and practical guardrails. So you can use AI safely, speak with confidence, and get results. Let's run the play.
SPEAKER_03What would you do with 5, 10, or even 15 extra hours each week? Maybe spend time growing your business, finally finishing that project, or maybe just closing the laptop before dinner for once. At Playbook AI Partners, we believe that AI should give you time back, not give you one more complicated thing to figure out. That's why we created the AI Solution Locker, a growing collection of practical, bite-sized solutions designed to help you solve real problems quickly. In 20 minutes or less, you've heard right, 20 minutes or less, you can learn how to streamline those repetitive tasks, create content faster, organize information, build simple automations, and get more accomplished without becoming a technology expert. And here's a bonus. No endless or outdated courses, no confusing tech talk, just open the AI solution locker, choose the solution you need, and put it to work. And here's another bonus. You don't have to do it alone. And in this current wave of AI, I don't think you should. Inside the Huddle, our Playbook AI Partners community, you'll connect with other curious business owners and professionals who are learning, experimenting, and building with AI. Join live sessions, quarterly training boot camps, ask questions, access helpful resources, and get the support you need to move from AI overwhelm to confident action. So stop spending those hours trying to piece everything together on your own. Get the solution. Let's run the play together and get your time back. I would love to have you join the Huddle and get to meet you and help you on this journey. So visit Playbook AI Partners and step into the AI Solution Locker and the Huddle today. And now on with the show. Well, hello everyone and welcome to the show. GrowAS, the secret scaling engine behind smarter agencies and businesses. What if you could replace the traditional agency model or scale your client book without adding more headcount? Today we are going to unpack how GrowAs helps businesses grow smarter and gives agencies a behind-the-scenes way to scale with speed, strategy, and efficiency. To help us get into this topic, I have David ProQuery on the show. David is the founder of GrowAs AI, creator of the world's first fully autonomous AI agents that outperform human Google Ads marketers. David's solution is not another AI powered tool. It is GrowAs, fully autonomous AI agents that replace the need for human marketers entirely. David brings a unique perspective to the intersection of AI, advertising, and entrepreneurship with hard-won lessons from both the operator seat and the investor's chair. Welcome to the show, David.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Sandy. It's a pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_03Oh, what a great bio. I'm looking so forward to our conversation. So let's start with you sharing your experience and how it led you on the journey that you're on today, especially with AI.
SPEAKER_00Woof, sure. I mean, look, where do I start, right? Um so yeah, before before doing Grass, I was I was working a full-time job in private equity. Um, and before that, actually at a venture capital firm. So got to see businesses of all sorts of scales, sizes, uh, learned a lot, obviously, during my time there. But I think I quickly saw I wanted to leave uh and do something myself. Spend my evenings building e-commerce stores at night, right? In private equity. It's pretty, it's pretty full-on. You typically don't have much time to yourself. So I was building out these stores overnight, um, not making enough money to leave a full-time job. Then somehow, whatever, grass came into the picture, uh, and then here we are. But yeah, the the exact details are are quite something.
SPEAKER_03So amazed because you do have quite the journey. Let's start with what is the fundamental flaw in marketing agencies that cost businesses millions?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, look, I came into the industry as a complete outsider, right? Um, never worked at a m at an agency before. I'd run a lot of Google Ads for myself, had friends uh who would run Google Ads for themselves, but never worked in an agency. But that basically gave, I think, us as a team and we're all outsiders really to the industry, but it gave us, I guess, a very non-biased way of s of of seeing how things get done and thinking this is just not right. Just to give you context, typically an agency might charge a customer, I don't know, five to tenk a month to run their ads, and they're outsourcing all of that to somewhere else where they're paying that person maybe a hundred dollars a month, two hundred dollars a month to do the actual work, and they're just a friendly face that shows up on the client calls. Um that's the case for the majority of agencies, right? 90, 95%. Which seemed wrong, right? Because then you uh it's ultimately like uh an arbitrage on the labor um rather than trying to get the best results for the customers. So that was like the number one thing I think we saw coming in uh that we wanted to change up.
SPEAKER_03I had no idea by the way that that was that much was spent on that, but I'm glad that you you level set on that. But can you take us maybe through a client success story, kind of just where they were at and and the transformation they experienced using GrowAs?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean look, there's at this point there's there's probably hundreds we can speak to. Um typically, uh just to say one off the top of my head, I mean, one of them maybe was paying an agency, I think six or seven K dollars a month, came to us, is paying less than a thousand dollars a month, and we like two or three X their business in a couple months, right? But this happens constantly. Um reason is that there's a few reasons, right? Anyone in the world can set up a marketing agency. Anyone can buy a domain, set up our put up some fake case studies on their website, and then find businesses to target. But you don't need any like certification, you don't need any special licensing that allows you to do this. And what that means is again, the majority of the industry, there's a lot of people who I don't think should be running these marketing agencies. The reason we say this is because, like I said, 50 to 60 of our customers are people who have fired their agency. We see the bad work that they've done through their customers' accounts, and we have to come in and clean stuff up to get it in the right place. Happens all of the time. Um, so I think, yeah, the way we've evolved as a company has definitely evolved from that frustration that we've seen amongst businesses.
SPEAKER_03What would you tell people who are out there that saying, okay, well, what how exactly do you do that? So you talk talk about eliminating the marketing agency in general. So it sounds like behind the scenes you're using AI to do this in a place where people I think are more obviously embracing AI, uh, but there are still some skeptics out there. So how do you take an organization from depending upon that marketing agency to completely embracing AI? I mean, how do you do that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, look, let me give you some context on the grass journey, right? Um, grass did not start off as like this fully autonomous thing that can just run people's campaigns. Okay. It started off as a very basic little SaaS tool, right? Little recommendations tool that would plug into people's campaigns and give some recommendations, right? So you actually had to use GRASS. You had to come in and approve the things they might say, like, oh, you should add this keyword, you should remove this keyword. Very basic stuff. Um, and the entry price was like super cheap. It was like $99 for up to 2k bat spent through grass. Um but that again, when I started putting grass, I never thought we would get to fill autonomy. But through doing that, we inadvertently got there because we ended up getting so many different users across so many different niches, locations, etc. etc. that we started to think, huh, is this full autonomy thing even possible? And then based off all those users, we started to train our own custom models. And that's really where Grass sort of started to really take shape is we basically spent six months rebuilding everything from scratch, uh, and then launched full autonomy in January of this year, and have been with that uh so far. But basically, it was a transition, right? We didn't just build this AI thing, put on people's campaigns and say okay, you can go away. No, it took a lot, a lot of work and a lot of data to get to the point where people could trust it. Because that's another big thing. It's like you're giving AI my campaigns, like what if it goes and like causes a mess, spends all my budget stupidly? Um so yeah, it was a lot of hard engineering work to make sure that that doesn't happen at all.
SPEAKER_03That's really really good to know. So are there any checks and balances human in the loop in that process, or does it completely run um with autonomy?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so look, now we we were basically have introduced fully dedicated account managers for every account we have on board. Um and actually at the start we didn't have that, and I realized very quickly it was necessary because what happened was people would come to us with accounts that were a complete mess, plug grass into them, and then expect grass to overnight just change everything completely, set up the strategy, etc. etc. The problem is um often maybe they didn't have things like conversion tracking in place, their website was a mess, and that's where human the loop is important in making sure that everything is basically set up correctly from day one. Are you tracking conversions? Is your offer readable? Does it render well on mobile? All these sorts of things, you still need a human touch point for. Um so yeah, the human is still in the loop, but they can effectively just do a lot more, right? So if before you had one agency, one account manager managing five or ten accounts, now with GrowAS they can oversee possibly hundreds. Um so that was the transition.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's awesome. Now you mentioned earlier uh many uh uh industries or niches you support and global. Uh can you tell us more about your your uh customers uh that you support?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I used to be able to do to do this better. Um because I you know at the very start of grass, I had every single customer on my personal WhatsApp, um, which was quite something. Uh obviously that helped us learn and iterate quite quickly, but it was it was hard work. Now I'm a lot less close to it, right? Uh we have hundreds and hundreds of customers at this point, or I think it's over 500. And it's a mix of I would say 60% AI businesses, direct businesses, who we are now their agency of record. And the other 40% is agencies running their clients through Grass without telling them a thing, collecting their retainer, and then happy days for everybody. Um if you include the agencies and clients, then we have thousands and thousands of different customers because they they will typically have maybe 10 to 30 clients each. And if they're connecting all of them to GRASS, then yeah, we we have a lot of data to work with. Uh yeah, it's super diverse. We have c we have customers in countries I can't even name it at this point, to be honest.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. We'll make sure and link to the website, of course, but just kind of help us um elicitors understand the uh the the exact services or process uh in working with GrowAs.
SPEAKER_00Sure. I mean, look, we're really an agency at this point. For businesses, we're we're really an agency, right? Because we take over their entire account, we take over the result. It's been quite hard, I think, to shift people's perception of GrowAs from something that is like a little tool that helps you manage your accounts where we can't own the result to now we actually own your results. That's like the big, I think, shift that's occurred uh in the last in the last few months is that transition from a full to now a tool to now a fully managed service where we actually own the result, right? We don't want people going in and using grass. Um it causes too much confusion. Um so yeah, we're now effectively the the agency of record. And then for agencies, obviously, we're like a white label partner, really, at this point.
SPEAKER_03Oh gosh, no, that's awesome to know. And um and the process is easy. I mean, it's let's say that um if someone says, Boy, I'm interested, uh, you mentioned website earlier, websites were not uh conversion wasn't being tracked, websites were a mess. Do you look at the review of kind of the state of affairs and then implement the process, or how does that work for someone who says I'm interested in getting on board?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's exactly what happens, right? So we have a uh a PPC specialist, right? We typically hire people with at least 10 years experience, not less. So people who really know what they're doing, they will come in and do a very, very in-depth audit of everything. Okay. And then based off that audit, again, we get accounts in some crazy states, uh, some really bad states. So like we come in and suggest next steps, we approve uh as long as they approve the plan, we then go ahead and action everything for them. So it's fully managed, it's fully done for you. As well, the the importance of the human is to understand that person's business goals, right? Everyone has different goals. Some people are like, okay, we just want to get the most amount of brand recognition. We're not necessarily optimizing for the number of conversions, we just want people to know our brand. Well, that's going to require a very different setup to somebody who's purely optimizing for, hey, I need my phone to ring 50 times a day. So again, that's where that human loops matters a lot.
SPEAKER_03No, absolutely. So um in in closing, what would you tell someone who is still sitting on that that spense of of skepticism of this sounds too good to be true and I get AIs here, I need to embrace it, and and you know, but what what would you tell that person that's kind of thinking about that?
SPEAKER_00It's tough. I think we uh whenever there's been a big technological revolution in the past, people always like human nature stays the same, right? People always react in the same way. Uh you had people at the start of the internet saying it was a sham it was a sham, it wouldn't last, and look where we are today. I think AI is probably the biggest revolution in human history. I think what we're seeing now is pretty crazy. Uh its actual abilities to outperform humans at particular tasks is really impressive. Um, so I think I will just give those people a bit of time. I think they will soon realize um that you either get on the train or you get left behind.
SPEAKER_03No, it's well said, and it's so true. And uh I uh hear people say that, but it's it's time to yeah, definitely get off the uh as we say in American football, right? To get off the sidelines, get on the field, and let's let's start, you know, getting out there and running the play and and taking action on it because it absolutely is here. I agree with you 100%. And I'm so impressed with what you're doing with GrowAs. It's really so a great service, and and really you're just taking and and providing a great service and helping people see results and and save money on their marketing budget. So thank you for doing that. And we'll link um to the website so people can access that. And I really appreciate your time and expertise. It's been been awesome. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Sandy. It's been a pleasure.
SPEAKER_03David on the show. What a wealth of information and a great solution with GrowAs. The link is in the show notes, so make sure and check it out. We hear often about how AI in the creative space takes away the creativity. Well, is this a true statement or not? In our next episode, we go beyond hype and explore how AI is changing the path from concept to execution, helping creators, startups, and businesses move faster, reduce any bottlenecks, and bring bold ideas to life. To help us get into this topic, Ryan Vinson will be joining us on the show. Ryan is a fractional CTO and founder of Film Pilot AI, helping filmmakers turn screenplays into full pre-production plans with AI. Don't miss this episode. Until next time, take action, execute, and let's run the play.