How We’re Using AI

This is the million-dollar question these days! At Colophon, we’re transparent about how we’re using AI in each of our processes and deliverables for our customers. One of our core values is A Partnership Approach to everything we do – and we believe that your understanding of how AI is built into our processes is a key piece of working together.

Most Recent Update: 09/08/2026

Customer Service

People are the most important part of what we do – whether it’s your team or our own. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting trapped in a customer support loop with a bot when you just need to talk with a human being. Our team prides itself on answering maintenance requests, strategy questions, or general inquiries like people. We limit AI interactions in customer service to triaging and serving requests to the right people. 

At Colophon, your request is always answered by a live, human person familiar with your account to ensure you get the best quality of service. 

Design

Simply put, we don’t use AI to generate designs. We may use it to research an industry, conceptualize certain ideas, blocks or wireframes, or audit the user experience & journey, but our website designs are crafted by humans in a program called Figma.

In our opinion, AI designs are “OK”. (If you are reading this, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about). They all look pretty much the same, they’re far too wordy, and are rarely visually appealing to the point that you “feel something”.

We are probably a good fit to work together if you want to blaze past “OK” for your website’s design.

We believe that gorgeous custom website designs are crucial for separating your brand from the rest. This is especially important for businesses that need to immediately invoke trust and showcase their expertise for goods and services that are on the higher end of the price point. As of writing, this can only be done by humans, so we do not use AI to generate your website design.

Website Development and Maintenance

Our programming team is incredibly proficient with AI. We have built exceptional proprietary agents, workflows, and skills that let us accelerate programming speed without compromising the high-quality standards we’ve built over 20+ years in business. In order to provide you with the best product, we have always utilized custom coding over page builder platforms and unnecessary plugins to maximize performance and minimize your website’s reliability on other softwares.

What’s most impressive about our use case is not the agents, workflows, or intelligence engines we’re using, though – it’s the people behind it!

Fully relying on AI to generate code is great for prototyping and straightforward codebase edits, but unwise for building complex assets with a long-term time horizon (like most websites). AI does what it’s told, so if you’re not an experienced developer, this often bloats code, creates redundancies, and exposes critical maintenance and security errors that you have no way of knowing about.

When a senior, experienced programmer treats AI like a junior developer, he or she can guide the bot to create what they need at speed, with the expertise to actually review the codebase for errors, redundancies, and gaps.

Every Colophon website is built and maintained by an experienced developer, armed with the best tools in the marketplace.

Content Creation and Strategy

AI-created content is slowly becoming a very good way to save time and a very bad way to showcase your brand. Put plainly, based on our tests, search engines do not like AI-generated content.

Using an AI LLM to generate photos, posts, or website copy is a losing battle. At the time of writing, search engines and LLMs alike are deeming masses of AI-generated copy as the opposite of “trust signals” and dinging websites that showcase this in their recommendations. While AI-generated content has been shown to work in the short-term, it is not a strategy we suggest for the long-term benefits based on Google’s behavior and outlook on stopping and preventing “AI slop”.

At Colophon, we believe that AI is fantastic at many things in the copywriting and content strategy and generation process:

• Coming up with prompts for potential blog posts based on the data from our keyword research
• Helping organize thoughts or ideas clearly
• Identifying opportunities to “bake in” keywords

What is it not good at? Actually generating the writing in a way that appeals to people.

For our Local SEO and Website Copywriting services, we use AI to help us stay organized and grammatically correct and trust experienced human marketers to focus on the branding, storytelling, and content strategy.

Paid Media (Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc.)

I’ve heard horror stories about companies hooking up their favorite LLM to their Google Ads account and telling it to optimize it for them. (Please do not do this).

At Colophon, we use AI to:

• Come up with potential ideas for ad headlines and call-to-actions based on your focus keywords, demographics, and overall strategy
• Analyze lots of data quickly to provide potential trends and opportunities
• Perform QA scans for campaigns

These outputs are never blindly trusted. All advertising strategies & campaigns are created, optimized, and managed by an experienced marketer with over a decade of experience running ads on Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and more platforms. Outputs are reviewed, edited, and optimized by these marketers with the context of your business, industry, location, and target customer, and the judgment of a professional.

Summary

Overall, we’re encouraged by the advent of AI and what we are able to accomplish. We have truly never been as efficient as we are right now, but that comes with caveats.

Our duty as your partner is to empower experienced humans with the best tools to deliver excellent results for your website and marketing. This responsibility means that we use AI where it’s useful and we do not use AI where it isn’t.

The humans that make Colophon the best digital marketing agency in South Carolina are the humans that make those judgment calls, fill the gaps AI can’t yet bridge, and are ultimately responsible for your business’s website and marketing success.