If you haven’t thought about what the future holds for agencies in the age of AI, then I envy you.
The rest of us want to be you and live in that stress-free world you occupy.
Let’s keep it simple.
AI is changing things, so let’s have a go at thinking through how this might play out.
The fact
AI will make it faster to deliver pretty much any service.
I don’t have many more ‘facts’ for you.
Will it deliver those services better than us? No idea.
What happens if that happens? Chaos, probably.
It seems pretty unlikely that the only thing AI gets better than humans at is running pay-per-click campaigns, so I guess all bets are off and the world will change a fair bit.
But the world is changing a fair bit anyway.
So let’s stick to: ‘AI will make it faster to deliver pretty much any service’, and let’s keep thinking.
The consequence
The thing people extrapolate from our fact is that this will put pressure on agencies’ prices. And I think that makes sense.
We all try to be efficient, and in some cases that’s a huge business advantage. But in this case, we aren’t talking about proprietary technology owned by the agency. Clients understand it exists and can see the opportunities and capabilities it brings.
Short term, you might be able to make a bit extra, but long term, to be competitive, the savings need to be passed on.
This is a story we’ve seen before.
The industry is full of things that started as an innovative idea and then became a standard solution.
- A developer cranking out websites started making them reusable.
- The website template industry appeared, providing a low-cost solution.
- The website builder company took this and made it into a self-serve solution.
Some agencies adopt this standard solution, and some create a position by offering a bespoke alternative. There are clients that require each.
The question is not ‘should you be experimenting with AI?’ but rather ‘does AI innovation need to be part of your positioning?’.
The pie
We used to meet exciting companies we wanted to work with, but their budget wasn’t big enough. We’d want to do a load of deep expert work, but for the budget they had, we simply couldn’t do enough to be valuable in the time.
If we could have done the strategy and they could have executed, that would have worked.
So is this where we are heading?
Cosmetic treatments used to be expensive and only for the rich and famous. As delivery modernised, tweakments (great word) emerged, and can now be delivered by your dentist.
This didn’t mean that expensive plastic surgeons went out of business. It meant the industry got bigger.
There are things that people will keep spending on.
Status, performance, anything that provides a competitive advantage.
Eventually, these things become so self-serve that they are products, not services.
But there’s always money to be made in the in-between.
The extra value an expert brings on top of that product that people can now afford because they can execute the tactics and expert will suggest.
More people can now do elite design, or marketing, or engineering.
The pie gets bigger.
What does that look like for your agency? Are you going to bring expert strategy to the masses, or will you always be aiming for the bigger clients with the biggest problems?
It’s a choice you are already making.
Your work isn’t going away, but you do need to double down on knowing your place in the world and the value you provide.