Fiona Menzies has a story that every CMO running an RFP process this year will recognize, even if they haven’t said it out loud yet. Eden House’s marketing head put a straightforward brief out to ten agencies, real estate territory, a beautifully written RFP the team had put real work into. Three of the shortlisted responses that came back weren’t just similar. They were the same font, the same AI-generated hero image, near-identical strategic language.
“Same font, same image, AI-generated images,” she said. “And it’s fairly obvious, I think, once I think AI generated, right?” Her read on what happened isn’t complicated: three agencies with genuine track records had run her brief through Claude and handed back whatever it produced. “I think they had pretty much just put it into Claude and said, give me something back,” she said.
What stung wasn’t that AI had been used. It was what the sameness implied. “If AI is giving everybody the same direction, then I could be any developer and it would potentially have given all my competitors, they’d have known what we were doing, as well,” she said. Her rule for the next pitch cycle is already written in her head: “No AI to be used in the creation of any ideas or copy.” Research and desk work, fine. Ideation, off limits. “It really devalues the brains, the experience, the taste,” she said. “Taste is something that’s completely missing, you know, that’s still a very human thing.”
Put that same scenario to Tarek Miknas, CEO of FP7 McCann, and the reaction was closer to genuine surprise. “I’ve never had that,” he said, when told about agencies submitting near-identical AI-generated pitches. His verdict wasn’t a defence of the practice so much as an acknowledgment of the pressure behind it. “I think that’s a bit lazy,” he said. “But I get it, you know, everybody is being squeezed financially. Produce more with less people. Margins are shrinking globally. It’s not something that’s unique to our part of the world.”
That’s the tension running through this whole story: two senior, credible voices on opposite sides of the table, one who’s lived the exact failure mode, one who insists it’s not how serious shops operate, and both agree on where the line should sit. For Miknas, AI belongs in the room as “almost as a third person,” a sounding board for a copywriter and art director bouncing ideas back and forth, or handling “adaptations,” the grunt work of reformatting one master ad into dozens of ratio and language variants. What it isn’t, in his account, is a replacement for the brief-to-idea leap that used to be the entire point of hiring an agency. “You still need human oversight to make sure that at the end of the day this is our brand and we need to make sure that it’s protected by humans,” he said.
The Editor-in-Chief of Arab News, Faisal Abbas, watching all of this from the newsroom rather than the pitch room, offered the most pointed diagnosis of why agencies reach for AI shortcuts in daily production versus in showcase moments. “Most of these remain one-off novelty stunts,” he said of viral AI ad moments. “They win short-term tech coverage but rarely represent a scalable, repeatable agency business model.” The deeper pressure, in his telling, has nothing to do with creative ambition and everything to do with client expectations catching up to the tool: “Clients now expect a 30% reduction in timelines and fees because they know the agency is using AI to handle the heavy lifting.”
That’s the real fault line in this story, and it isn’t creative versus technology. It’s a widening gap between what AI actually does well inside agencies right now, adaptation, variation, speed on execution, and what clients now assume it should be doing to their invoice. Menzies’ agencies got caught because they let AI do the one thing everyone agrees it shouldn’t: think. Miknas’s shops, by his account, haven’t been caught because they’ve kept it on adaptation duty. Whether that distinction holds up under margin pressure that Miknas himself admits is “not unique to our part of the world” is the question the next twelve months will actually answer.
