I still remember the sound of the office printer—that industrial hum that meant someone was printing a major deck. Forty, fifty, sometimes sixty pages, warm to the touch, going into a binder with tabs color-coded by section. The weight of it felt important. Serious. Worth the retainer.
I remember carrying one of those binders into a conference room in New York, setting it down with a satisfying thud. Three months of work. Competitive analysis, consumer research, strategic frameworks, tactical recommendations. We'd put everything in there. Every finding, every data cut, every possible angle. Because that's what you did. You showed your work. You proved the value.
The client flipped through it politely. Nodded at the right moments. Asked clarifying questions on maybe three slides. Then, about forty minutes in, we got to a simple diagram on page 23—just a two-by-two matrix showing how their competitors were positioned. And suddenly, the energy in the room changed. The CMO leaned forward. "Wait, so nobody's actually doing this?" She pointed to an empty quadrant. The conversation that followed—maybe ten minutes of rapid-fire strategic thinking—changed their entire product roadmap for the next year.
The deck went into a drawer somewhere. The invoice got paid. We celebrated the win.
But I knew, even then, that we'd buried the insight. We'd hidden it inside volume because we didn't trust that a single idea—however transformative—could justify three months of fees. We needed the fortress of deliverables around it.
The Performance of Busyness
If you've worked in an agency for more than a few years, you know the feeling I'm talking about. That low-grade anxiety that comes when a project feels too efficient, when the solution comes too quickly, when you're ahead of schedule. There's this voice that says: If this only took us two weeks, will they think we didn't try hard enough? Should we add another round of revisions? Should we expand the appendix?
We've built an entire professional culture around the performance of effort. The all-nighters. The weekend work. The "we ran 47 different scenarios" casually dropped in a presentation. The research reports that could double as doorstops. We've confused motion with progress, output with outcome, and somewhere along the way, we've convinced ourselves—and tried to convince our clients—that more is always better.
The conference room table covered in printouts. The Slack channels lighting up at 11 PM. The version 23 of the creative brief. These weren't just work—they were proof of work. Evidence that we'd earned our place at the table.
And then AI shows up.
The Uncomfortable Mirror
Here's what's actually threatening about AI for agency folks: it's not that it's going to replace us. It's that it's revealing what we've been hiding behind.
You can now generate a competitive analysis in twenty minutes that would have taken a junior strategist a week. You can produce fifty variations of copy in the time it used to take to write five. You can synthesize hundreds of pages of research into key themes before you've finished your morning coffee.
And that's terrifying. Not because the outputs are perfect—they're not. Not because they're as good as what a talented human can do—they're often not. But because they're good enough to expose the gap between the work we were doing and the value we were actually providing.
If an AI can produce that 40-page competitive landscape in an afternoon, what were we actually doing during those weeks we spent on it? If it can generate those twenty logo variations in minutes, what was the value in the dozens of hours we billed?
The honest answer—the one that's hard to say out loud—is that a lot of that time wasn't adding value for the client. It was adding volume. It was creating the appearance of rigor. It was making us feel like we'd earned the fee.
The actual value was always in the ten percent we didn't want to admit was the ten percent. The insight that reframed the problem. The creative concept that made everything else obvious. The strategic recommendation that had nothing to do with the fifty data cuts and everything to do with understanding what the client was actually trying to accomplish.
What Clients Actually Pay For
I learned this lesson the hard way in my third year at an agency. We'd been working with a retail client on their brand positioning for months. Mountains of research. Ethnographies. Segmentation studies. Perceptual maps. Workshop after workshop. We presented a gorgeous 80-page strategy document with a positioning framework that had been tested and validated and refined within an inch of its life.
The CEO thanked us. Then she said, "This is great work. But I'm going to be honest—the thing that's actually going to change how we run this business is what you said in the hallway last month. When you asked me why we were trying to compete on price when we clearly cared more about craftsmanship than any of our competitors. That question has been rattling around in my head ever since. Everything else is just... confirming what we already kind of knew."
That question—asked casually, after a meeting, because I was genuinely curious—was worth more than the three months of formal work. But I couldn't have invoiced for just the question. Could I?
This is the thing we don't talk about enough: clients aren't paying for the research. They're paying for the person who knows which research questions to ask. They're not paying for the fifty logo explorations. They're paying for the creative director who can look at all fifty and explain why number twelve is the one that will work. They're not paying for the media plan spreadsheet. They're paying for the strategist who understands their business well enough to know where to place the bet.
The deliverables were never the product. They were the byproduct. But we priced like they were the product because we didn't know how else to price judgment, taste, intuition, experience, and courage.
The Courage Problem
Because that's what it really takes, isn't it? Courage.
Courage to walk into a room and say, "We spent two weeks on this instead of two months, and it's better for it because we focused on the one thing that actually matters."
Courage to present three ideas instead of ten because you know the right one when you see it and you're willing to stake your reputation on it.
Courage to tell a client that they're asking the wrong question, solving the wrong problem, or chasing the wrong opportunity—even when saying yes would be easier and more profitable.
Courage to charge appropriately for thinking, not just doing.
The volume—all those deliverables, all that "showing our work"—it was protective. It insulated us from having to stand fully behind our judgment. If the strategy didn't work, well, look at all this research we did. If the creative didn't perform, well, look at all these rounds we went through. The process became the shield.
AI is taking away the shield. And that's what makes it scary.
The Real Disruption
I've watched agency people respond to AI in basically three ways.
Some are trying to out-volume it. "Sure, AI can make a logo, but we'll make fifty logos and a brand book and a guidelines document and..." They're doubling down on deliverables, trying to stay ahead by doing even more.
Some are trying to ignore it. "Our work is special. It's human. It's creative. AI can't do what we do." They're hoping that if they don't acknowledge it, it won't change anything.
And some—the ones I think will actually thrive—are letting it break them open a little bit. They're asking: If AI can do the production work, what am I actually here to do? What's the irreplaceable part? What's the thing that only happens because I'm in the room?
Those questions are uncomfortable. They require us to confront the possibility that some of what we've been calling strategy was really just well-formatted busy work. That some of what we've been calling creativity was really just pattern-matching. That some of what we've been calling expertise was really just experience with tools that are now democratized.
But they're also liberating questions. Because when you strip away everything that AI can do—the research compilation, the data analysis, the variation generation, the format production—what's left is the most human stuff. The most valuable stuff.
The ability to sit with a client and ask the question they didn't know they needed to ask.
The ability to look at data and see the story it's trying to tell—or the story it's trying to hide.
The ability to hold space for the messy, uncomfortable, non-linear process of actually solving a hard problem instead of just documenting the obvious solution.
The ability to bring taste, judgment, and point of view to decisions that could go multiple ways.
The willingness to say "I don't know, but here's how we'll figure it out" instead of pretending certainty.
The confidence to present less and stand behind it more.
What We've Always Known
Here's what I keep coming back to: we've always known the client presentation that runs long isn't better. We've always known the strategy document nobody reads doesn't create value. We've always known the sixteenth revision of the creative brief isn't improving anything.
We've always known that our best work came from understanding, not documentation. That the value was in the moment when someone said something that reframed everything. In the idea that was so right it made all the other options irrelevant. In the strategic bet that only made sense because someone understood the context deeply enough to see it.
AI isn't teaching us something new. It's just making it impossible to pretend we don't know what we've always known.
And that work—the thinking, the judgment, the humanity—doesn't get cheaper with AI. It gets more valuable. Because in a world where everyone has access to the same tools and information, the differentiator is the person who knows what to do with it.
No Easy Ending
I wish I could tie this up neatly. I wish I could end with "and here's exactly what to do now" or "this is how it all works out." But I don't think we're there yet. I think we're in the messy middle of a transition that's going to take years to fully play out.
What I do know is that the agencies and the individual contributors who navigate this well won't be the ones who resist it or ignore it or try to out-volume it. They'll be the ones who let it clarify what they're actually here to do.
They'll be the ones brave enough to walk into the next client meeting with less—less process, less documentation, less performance—and more. More clarity. More confidence. More willingness to stand behind what they actually think instead of hiding behind what they produced.
The work isn't getting cheaper. The theater is getting expensive. And maybe that's exactly what we needed.