I moderated a panel at the Communicate AI Conference last month around a fairly provocative question: do you still need an agency?
Honestly, after the discussion, I continued to think about it and questioned the question itself!
In a nutshell, I believe AI isn’t another competitor entering the advertising industry. It’s becoming part of the industry.
And very soon, saying “we use AI” will sound about as impressive as saying “we use the internet.” We are all feeling that!
To be honest, it reminds me of how social media and digital wiped out businesses: digital abolished print media, and social platforms abolished digital media!
Let’s go back to yesterday’s question: what makes your work better than mine if we’re all using the same AI?
For me, the answer is becoming increasingly obvious: “wait for it.” It’s not the tool, by the way, that will give you the advantage anymore.
I mean, AI can already write the brief and the copy, generate the image, make the video, translate it, create 50 versions, etc.
Then analyze the audience and optimize the media. And tomorrow it will do all of those things better than it does today.
So if your agency proposition is simply “we can produce this for you,” I think you have a problem.
Because production, ideas and content are becoming abundant. And more is less, in a way! Abundance doesn’t necessarily create value, just more noise…
Which gives the agency an opportunity here. The agency becomes more interesting, not less important.
The agency shouldn’t be there because it has access to AI that the client doesn’t have. It should be there because it knows what to do with it and creates knowledge and best practices, so that this becomes its product!
What question to ask. Which idea to kill. Which idea to fight for. When the data matters. When culture matters more. When something technically works but creatively feels completely wrong.
And perhaps most importantly, when to tell the client: “don’t do it.”
AI can generate 100 answers, but someone still has to make the call on the right one. We may finally stop selling hours and sell ???
There’s another uncomfortable conversation coming. If something used to take three days and AI helps you do it in three hours, can an agency continue charging for three days? Probably not.
But if you can turn those three hours into a better idea, a better campaign or a better business result, why should the agency be paid only for three hours? Probably YES.
For years, our industry has monetized effort.
Hours.
People.
Deliverables.
Revisions.
Maybe AI finally forces us to monetize value.
That’s not bad news; that’s a new offering! And it could actually be very good news for the good ones.
Smaller teams.
Better people.
More senior thinking.
Faster execution.
More experimentation.
Less time spent doing repetitive work nobody particularly enjoyed doing anyway.
The agency becomes less of a factory and more of an intelligence layer between technology, creativity, culture and business.
But there’s another medium I keep coming back to: audio.
I asked the audience which medium they thought would benefit most from AI. My answer was audio.
And I think we may be underestimating it. Because the more AI creates, the more valuable identity becomes. And few things carry identity like a voice.
Think about podcasts. A podcast isn’t just information. You hear hesitation, confidence, humor, silence, accent, emotion, timing; you hear someone’s personality before you’ve even decided whether you agree with them.
That’s incredibly powerful. Now add AI.
AI can help research the conversation.
Understand audiences; translate and potentially localize content; improve discovery; create shorter formats from longer conversations; help advertisers identify relevant contexts and make huge libraries of spoken content more searchable and commercially useful.
It can potentially take one conversation and help it travel much further than it could before. That’s why I believe audio could become one of AI’s premium media environments.
Not because AI should replace the human voice; almost the opposite. AI can make the human voice more valuable. And podcasts are particularly interesting. Advertising has always interrupted content. Podcast advertising can become part of the conversation.
There is a very different relationship between a listener and a voice they voluntarily spend 30, 45 or 60 minutes with. That’s attention. And more importantly, it’s trust.
Now imagine combining that relationship with better AI-driven contextual understanding, matching, personalization, translation, distribution and measurement.
Suddenly audio isn’t the old medium in an AI world. It could be one of the most interesting new ones.
And maybe that’s the paradox. As AI makes it easier to manufacture content, the things that feel unmistakably human become more premium.
The very things we’ve spent years trying to automate may become the things audiences value most.
So, AI vs. agency? I don’t think so. AI via agency. But only if the agency adds something AI cannot provide on its own–context, culture, taste, responsibility, and judgment.
The same applies to media. AI shouldn’t simply give us more places to put more content.
It should help us understand which medium deserves the message. And increasingly, I think one of those mediums will be audio.
I see a world where almost anything can be generated… hearing someone may become more powerful than seeing something generated about them.
The technology will keep changing. The tools will become available to everyone.
Which brings me back to the question I asked at the conference: if we’re all using the same AI, what makes your work better than mine? Human judgment!
