Telling Clients You Used It

The question is what they are paying for

A client buying a website is buying a working website, and how you edited the code is your business.

A client buying twelve articles written by an expert in their field is buying the expertise, and where that came from is the thing itself.

So the test is not whether a tool was used but whether its use changed what the client is receiving.

Which produces different answers for different work rather than one policy.

Where no disclosure is needed

• Drafting your own emails faster.
• Checking your grammar.
• Generating options you then chose from.
• Summarising material for yourself.
• Debugging your own code.
• Getting unstuck on a structure.

These are all tools helping you do work you are doing, in the same category as a spelling checker or a reference book, and announcing them would be strange rather than transparent.

Where it should be said

The other end of the same scale.

Where a deliverable was substantially produced by the tool and lightly edited.

Where the client is paying specifically for original writing or original thinking.

Where their content, data, or documents were sent to a third-party service.

Where they have asked, in a contract or in conversation, which some now do.

And where the client's own policy, industry, or clients would care, which is increasingly common in regulated sectors.

The third is the one people forget and the one most likely to matter to them.

The awkward middle

Which is where most actual work sits.

A page drafted with the tool from material you gathered, then rewritten by you, is neither purely yours nor substantially generated.

The honest position is that you used it as part of your process and the judgement, the facts, and the final wording are yours.

That is worth saying once, in general terms, rather than per deliverable.

A line in your proposal describing how you work covers everything afterwards and avoids the awkward per-item conversation.

It also gets the conversation over before there is anything at stake in it.

A worked example

A supplier delivered a set of pages drafted this way and said nothing.

The client, who had begun using the same tool himself, recognised the structure and asked directly.

The supplier's answer was accurate and arrived after the question rather than before it, which is what made it a problem.

The relationship survived and the client's confidence in everything else did not fully recover.

On the next engagement the supplier put a sentence in the proposal describing his process, including the tools.

Nobody has raised it since, which is the usual outcome when it is said first.

Say it in the proposal

Since timing matters more than wording.

A sentence describing how you work, including that you use these tools for drafting and that all output is checked and rewritten, is easy to write and easy to read.

Said before the work, it is a description of your process.

Said after a client asks, it is an admission, regardless of it being the same sentence.

That difference is entirely about sequence and costs nothing to get right.

Add it to your standard proposal once and it is handled permanently, for every client, without you having to judge each engagement separately.

What the client actually wants to know

Which is usually not what the disclosure debate is about.

They want to know that somebody who understands their business looked at it.

They want to know that facts were checked and that the work is not something they could have produced in an afternoon.

And they want to know their information was handled properly.

Address those three directly and the tool question mostly resolves itself, because it was standing in for those concerns.

A supplier who says the figures were verified against provincial sources has answered the real question.

Price it honestly

The related question nobody wants to raise.

If a tool has halved the time something takes, the client is buying the outcome rather than the hours, and the price can stay the same.

What is not sustainable is charging for expertise while delivering something generic, since that is the arrangement that produces the resentment when it surfaces.

Use the time saved to make the work better rather than to do more of it, which is the version that survives the client finding out.

That is also the only answer that will still be true in two years, once clients have their own experience of what these tools produce unaided.

Ask what your own suppliers are doing

The same question from the other side, and it is a fair one to put.

Whoever writes your content, builds your site, or handles your marketing is facing this decision about you.

Ask them plainly how they use these tools and what happens to anything you send them, which is a reasonable question and tells you a lot about how they work.

A supplier with a clear answer is easier to trust than one who has not thought about it, whichever answer they give.

And if you would want to be told about something, that is a good guide to what your own clients would want from you.

The counter-case

Over-disclosure has costs.

Announcing every tool invites a conversation the client did not want and had not thought about, and can suggest the work is less valuable than it is.

Nobody discloses their word processor, their reference materials, or the colleague they asked, and these tools are on that spectrum somewhere.

And some clients will react badly to information that would not have troubled them if not raised.

Put one sentence in the proposal, disclose anything substantially generated, and always say if their material was sent to a service.

The position

1. Ask what they are paying for.
2. Say nothing about tools that help you work.
3. Disclose anything substantially generated.
4. Always disclose sending their material out.
5. Put a sentence in the proposal.
6. Answer the real concerns directly.
7. Spend the saved time on the work.

Step five is what makes all of this easy, since the same sentence is a process description before the work and an admission afterwards.

Where these tools genuinely help is covered in where this might actually save you time.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.