AI didn’t kill the agency. It killed the ones not paying attention.

All jokes aside, the truth is that in the right hands, a suite of AI tools can produce an almost half decent website over a long weekend.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Let’s be honest, we’ve got to the point where AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Generating rough layouts, writing first-draft copy, producing UI variants, building prototypes. Drafting campaign concepts, generating ad variants, writing landing pages. Outputs are far from perfect but in some cases they are not bad, and for some ‘good enough’. Anyone in the industry might be freaking out reading this but bear with me.

A website, or a campaign, is the sum of thousands of small calls – micro-decisions. Which button gets the visual weight. What’s pre-selected. Where the eye lands first. Which word goes on the CTA. Which audience to target. Which channel to lead with. Which line in the brief is the one to build everything around.

And they compound. Get the small decisions right and the whole thing works. Get them wrong and you’ve got a site that looks fine but converts badly. Or a campaign that hits all the metrics except the one that matters.

Agencies are not in the business of just banging out campaigns or websites with little or no real thought or context, a good agency is in the business of understanding your business goals and commercial constraints so they can first carefully define the problem and use decision making, curation, guardrails and taste to solve it. In essence agencies are in the business of judgement calls based on expertise and experience to come up with correct answers – not just the plausible ones.

A good agency will offer something that is differentiated to be effective and not just generic.

Where is the Value?

AI has freed designers and marketers up to focus on the work that actually needs them. Their actual craft and expertise. Take research analysis. Summarising hundreds of survey responses. Clustering qualitative feedback. Spotting outliers. Cross-referencing analytics with session recordings. A team doing this by hand takes days and still misses things. AI does it in minutes and catches more.

Same with campaign performance. AI can read across thousands of impressions, clicks and conversions and might be able to tell you what’s working. It can’t tell you why it’s working, whether it’ll keep working, or what to do next. Not to the certainty that real world experience can, anyway.

Humans are better at deciding what to gather, what’s missing, and what to ignore. And only humans can tell you what any of it means for the decision in front of you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Clients are no longer paying us by the hour to make things. They are paying us to decide what to make, they’re paying for strategy, judgment, taste and outcomes. The work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just shifted.

There is no value in a skilled designer changing the colour of a button 25 times across a UI and design system. The value is in the decision to make the change and what colour to change it to. The same goes for a marketer producing the fortieth variant of a headline. The work is in deciding which one is the right one and why.

The Future of the Agency

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, most get it wrong, but I will say this, we won’t win by using AI to do the same old work faster. We’re using it to deliver better outcomes and sharper judgement, then pricing for the value, not the time.

Clients work with us because of our expertise, experience, trust and strong relationships, that remains. Work has to be expert led, anything else is a race to the bottom and nobody wins that race.