Agencies will never die!

Everyone's saying it. Agencies are finished. Google and Meta want the whole thing to run itself, cutting out the middlemen. And lately, it sounds true.

I believed it too, a while ago. I hold an IT degree and an MBA, and I exited as founder of a programmatic media agency I had scaled over ten years. So I did what I always do when an industry agrees on something. I tested it myself.

What I tested

CLIs, MCPs, the hottest features and models out there, promising the whole lot. Not as a demo on a made-up brief, but on live client work: media plans, pitch decks, creative variants in a dozen languages, daily pacing, reporting. And I pushed them as far as they'd go.

A lot of it keeps its promise. Work that used to take a whole agency can now be done alone. A deck that used to take a team a week is built overnight. Numbers that used to take an analyst two days sit in your inbox before the client asks for them.

What the tools still can't do

Take responsibility.

Tell a system to do what it takes to achieve a goal, and it will do it somehow. But is it the right way? Was there no other option? You often only see the wrong assumption three steps later, when the budget has already moved. The more you keep asking these questions, the more you drown in both opportunities and uncertainty.

So yes, AI does help us. As adtech helped us. Both made the work faster. Neither one decided anything.

What clients actually buy

Will AI replace agencies? I honestly doubt it. Clients are lightyears away from understanding, let alone applying, let alone taking responsibility for creating advertising and running media budgets on their own. At least not most of them. Because they just don't have the time to understand and do so. Or the organizational structure allowing them to.

What a client buys from an agency was never the execution. It is someone who understands the DNA of the request, brings a creative idea, lays out the options, and stands behind the decision when it goes to the board.

That part does not get automated. It gets harder, because everyone around the table now arrives with an AI answer and no way to judge it.

So what happens to agencies

They keep existing. Creative, experienced, consultative. Understanding the DNA of any client request, providing creative ideas, leading the way with options and a transparent basis for decisions, and helping them reach their goals without neglecting or risking their own job.

What gets thin is the media side. The network media agencies are pulling seniors off accounts, and the tools that were supposed to replace them still need someone who knows which question to ask. That is the part we do, behind the agency, under their name.