  We investigate how the holographic correspondence can be reformulated as a
generalisation of Wilsonian RG flow in a strongly interacting large $N$ quantum
field theory. We firstly define a \textit{highly efficient RG flow} as one in
which the Ward identities related to local conservation of energy, momentum and
charges preserve the same form at each scale -- to achieve this it is necessary
to redefine the background metric and external sources at each scale as
functionals of the effective single trace operators. These redefinitions also
absorb the contributions of the multi-trace operators to these effective Ward
identities. Thus the background metric and external sources become effectively
dynamical reproducing the dual classical gravity equations in one higher
dimension. Here, we focus on reconstructing the pure gravity sector as a highly
efficient RG flow of the energy-momentum tensor operator, leaving the explicit
constructive field theory approach for generating such RG flows to the second
part of the work. We show that special symmetries of the highly efficient RG
flows carry information through which we can decode the gauge fixing of bulk
diffeomorphisms in the corresponding gravity equations. We also show that the
highly efficient RG flow which reproduces a given classical gravity theory in a
given gauge is \textit{unique} provided the endpoint can be transformed to a
non-relativistic fixed point with a finite number of parameters under a
universal rescaling. The results obtained here are used in the second part of
this work, where we do an explicit field-theoretic construction of the RG flow,
and obtain the dual classical gravity theory.
