Kit, RightMessage, HubSpot All Have AI MCP Now. Do You Still Need a Pro?

A client asked me the other day, genuinely, whether the new AI tools were putting me out of a job. Kit has an MCP now. So does RightMessage. HubSpot, most web design platforms, all of it. You can sit in Claude Cowork or ChatGPT and just describe what you want, and it builds it. So is there any reason left to hire a professional? Or could you just do it yourself?

In this one I work through the actual answer, which has less to do with the tools and more to do with who you are. Whether you’re a DIYer who wants to own the doing, or someone who’d rather hand the doing to a pro and get back to running your business. The tool didn’t create that split. It just made it impossible to ignore.

Every tool I use now has an AI layer

Here’s a question for you. Now that AI can build it, do you still need me? That’s something that I ask myself, and that I have people ask me. I even had a client ask that just the other day.

Every tool I use to do client work in my agency just grew an AI layer. For example, Kit recently launched an MCP, which allows you to sit inside your Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to build you a whole stack of things: sequences, broadcasts, data. There’s a whole bunch that it can do in the email automation space within its tool. RightMessage also has an MCP. HubSpot has an AI built in that makes it really easy to move through the data and even learn the platform as you go. Most of the web design and web building tools plug into MCPs now as well.

So the pattern is the same everywhere. You can just chat with your AI until you get some sort of result. A client asked me the other day, genuinely, whether all of this was putting me at risk of losing clients, or maybe not even getting them in the first place. Because why would they hire you if they could just do this themselves now? Everybody’s using Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever tool is the trendy AI tool of the week, whoever’s got the best model at the time.

It’s a fair question, so let me try to answer it. Does that mean you don’t need a professional anymore? That you don’t need me or my agency or whomever you were thinking about hiring? That you could just do it yourself? Maybe. But the real question, I think, isn’t whether you can do it yourself or not. It’s whether or not you should do it yourself. And that comes down to who you actually are.

AI amplifies your decisions, good or bad

DIY has always been an option. I’m thinking about the time decades ago, maybe even a century ago, when the Sears catalogues came out, and you could buy home kits, and the train would ship the materials, and you could build it yourself. So DIY has always been an option. The tool didn’t create the DIYer. It just made DIY faster and more accurate or efficient.

That’s something worth being honest about, because AI doesn’t change your decision, it just amplifies it. It speeds it up. It compounds it. So if you’re really good at deciding what your business actually needs, you now have a really powerful way to execute it. If you’re stuck on the decision, you now have a really powerful way to execute the wrong decision. A bad decision delivered faster and bigger is still a bad decision, but now it’s just a really big bad decision.

What’s left is judgment

What is left, I think, is judgment. So if AI can replace the labour and the work and speed up time, can it replace judgment? Probably not. What is the actual definition of judgment? The ability to form a careful opinion or make a decision after considering facts and evidence. It usually means good decision-making or discernment. For example, someone with good judgment thinks things through instead of acting impulsively.

So can AI replace judgment? I don’t think so. I’m under the impression that it can’t. You can ask it for judgment, and it will hand you an answer and a decision with total confidence. But you already know how good that judgment actually is. You’ve asked your ChatGPT or your Claude if you should do this or do that, and you’ve taken its answer as gospel, and you’ve probably confused yourself or created some serious issues.

You may have heard of the AI delusion spiral, the sycophancy where you’re just blindly trusting the AI. That can lead you astray. That could be pretty dangerous, I think, especially if you’re asking for certain types of decisions. So it’ll hand you a confident answer, but does that actually mean it’s good judgment?

Judgment, I think, is a human thing. Being a judge of a decision, a judge of character, discerning whether something should be done at all, and not just whether it can be done. And then standing behind the outcome and owning it once it’s out there. That’s the part that I don’t think gets cheaper. I think that gets more expensive and more valuable.

The labour got cheaper for you, and even for me. I can take AI agents, or a person with good AI literacy, arm them with really good AI tools, and then have them build an implementation while I spend my time on the thinking, the discernment, and the relationship with the people who trust me to own a result. To actually move the revenue, to lift conversion rates, to improve their ad spend, or to turn more visitors into a donor base that funds the work that they care about. So these are my clients.

Why I still pay an accountant

But here’s how I think about it for myself. I pay an accountant to do my corporate year-end and personal taxes. So I do taxes personally and taxes for my Alberta, Canada corporation. I could just use TurboTax, but I pay an accountant probably 10 times the amount I would pay in a TurboTax fee. I think it’s worth it every time.

Here are a few reasons. I’ve got a team of professionals making sure that I’m tax efficient as an Alberta, Canada corporation. They know exactly which decisions to make around profit and loss, paying in dividends, salary, and tax strategy, so I’m not overpaying my taxes and leaving money on the table. So if I paid $500 for an AI-powered DIY tax tool, but I end up overpaying thousands in taxes, was that really worth it? Am I making a good judgment call? I just amplified my bad decision and paid for it. I thought I paid 500, but maybe I paid an extra 5,000 in taxes.

So I could do that myself. But I’m time-poor. I don’t have time to DIY. And even if TurboTax shipped an incredibly powerful AI tool, which they might have, to do my taxes for me or to help me speed up my taxes, I still wouldn’t use it. My tax situation is too complicated. If I make a bad tax decision, I can pay a lot more in taxes than if I paid thousands for an accountant, an accounting firm, to do my taxes for me and save me those taxes.

I’m still better off. I paid more for the accountant to make good calls and give me some good judgment, but I pay less in taxes. Now, I probably lose quite a bit of that to paying the fee for an accountant, but I think at the end of the day, I will still end up saving on the taxes. But even more, I’m not spending five or 10 or more hours, or losing a full week of my business schedule, trying to figure out my taxes and being stressed and hating myself because of it. I’d rather not.

I’d rather have a professional who has access to those same AI tools use them safely and be even better at their job. Arm them with the power tools, not me. I don’t know what to look for. I don’t know what I don’t know. And I don’t care to. I’d rather do my business. I’d rather get clients and deliver our work to them. I’d rather build client relationships, do my own marketing, and deliver my own products and services.

Are you the DIYer or the person who hires a pro?

But some people who have been paying an accountant are going to realize they can just do it themselves now. And that’s fine. That’s them telling you which one they are: the DIYer, or the person who hires a professional because they have better things to do.

So sort yourself honestly. Which bucket are you? Are you the DIYer who wants to own the doing, who likes building it yourself, and now has a tool that makes it better? Good. Genuinely, go build it. If you have time and you can afford to spend that time doing it yourself, just maybe a little more efficiently now, that’s perfect. You probably don’t need to pay someone to do it for you, whether that’s me or whomever. You can do it yourself. That’s excellent.

Or do you care more about your business than you do about doing this one part of it? Do you still want to be buried in the DIY, even if it’s just faster and more amplified? Or do you want to spend the little time you have focused on higher executive function and thinking while someone owns that part for you? Do you want someone to own this so that you can get back to the thing that only you can do?

I like to tell my clients a lot of the time, when you hire my agency, let us do what we do best, so you can do what you do better. That’s your thing, whether you’re a nonprofit creating value and resources for your reader base and your donors, or you’re an executive consultant trying to deliver value to your audience and get more higher ticket clients. Do you want to be stopping what you’re doing to go and chat with Claude, to create a sequence, and to figure out what automations you should put together, and whether RightMessage should do this, or Kit should do this, or HubSpot should do this? Is that what you want to be doing? Or would you rather have someone who knows what they’re doing own that, with access to those same power tools, but with good judgment, so you could be even more efficient?

Neither answer is wrong. Are you DIY, or are you going to hire someone with good decision-making because you don’t have the time to DIY? They’re just two different people in two completely different stages of their business, or their life. And the tool didn’t decide which one you are. You already did that a long time ago. So I want you to think about that.