Four Reasons Why We Must Disrupt Our Agency Model Now

For the past few months, not a day has gone by without new articles, posts, or headlines about AI. Everywhere you look there’s curiosity, excitement, amazement — and, when it comes to ethical and legal issues or the looming monopolies of big tech, legitimate concern. Within agencies, it’s mainly the creatives who are experimenting playfully with the new possibilities offered by ChatGPT, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, and the like.
What surprises me, however, is that public debate in our industry hasn’t already become much broader. Because the fact is this: we are facing one of the biggest disruptions the advertising industry has ever seen. We must think seriously about how to demonstrate our value to clients — and, crucially, we need to adapt our business model comprehensively and decisively, without delay.
To start finding early answers and positioning ourselves for the future, it helps to look at the impact of AI on these four core areas:

Billing parts of creative work on an hourly basis will no longer be viable in light of AI’s capabilities. How can we justify charging the same hourly rate for certain tasks when AI tools can now deliver similar results at a fraction of the cost?
The particularly bitter truth: as things stand today, we are usually paid for execution — rarely for ideas. Perhaps this moment offers us the opportunity to finally redefine the basis for fair compensation, focusing on the truly value-adding aspects of our work that cannot be replaced by AI, and to renegotiate this with clients.

Creative output is about to change dramatically. AI opens up previously unthinkable creative possibilities across all media forms — text, image, audio, video, even code. Anyone equipped with a generative AI tool can now produce professional results in certain areas — even me.
If our creative work is not infused with AI tools, we will have to accept a significant competitive disadvantage. On the other hand, excellent creatives will unleash superpowers with these tools, pushing their creativity even further.
At the core of our work will be — more than ever — strategic thinking, a deep understanding of people’s needs, and the innovative ideas that lead to new solutions. The creative execution process, meanwhile, will increasingly be taken over by far more efficient AI.

But this is about far more than efficiency. With AI, the only real limitation so far is imagination: it can only reproduce what is already known — it has no needs of its own. That means it’s up to us to redefine the services and value that agencies bring.
This will include, above all, innovative products and services. We should focus more than ever on creating value in unique ways — perhaps even by developing and deploying our own AI tools for specific purposes. How brilliant would a tool be that helps us identify the most effective creative route for a brand? Imagine how much money and human working time it could save, while simultaneously creating high value for CMOs.

We must make the understanding and application of AI our top priority and put everything into developing AI talent. Upskilling — and yes, even full-scale reskilling — of our employees will be absolutely essential. Just as crucial will be defining new competencies and hiring fresh talent who are eager to work fluently with AI. (For example, the design agency Mutabor recently posted a job opening for a Prompt Engineer.)
In fact, engaging positively with AI may even be an opportunity for agencies to become more attractive employers again — precisely because the creative use of AI will be in especially high demand in our industry.

The ultimate question arising from these points is this: what might agencies look like in three to five years if we integrate AI meaningfully into our business model? Answering this requires a kind of “AI roadmap.” We need to rethink every aspect of our business, analyze our processes, and determine which tasks AI can perform better, faster, and more effectively than we can. Equally, we must decide where we want to invest our working hours in the future — where we can create real, value-adding differentiation for advertisers. And we must define the offerings we can still earn money with. That will almost certainly no longer include day-to-day execution work or the adaptation of thousands of assets — and perhaps, in the medium term, not even big film productions in South Africa.
Even though many questions — such as those around intellectual property and copyright protection — remain unresolved, one thing is clear: we must take the AI-driven changes seriously. We cannot laugh them off, underestimate them arrogantly, or reduce them to a joyful creative toy. Like it or not, AI will disrupt our business model in the medium term. But if we engage with it positively now, there lies a major opportunity for the future: more time for strategic thinking, for tackling the big questions, and for genuine innovation with impact — both for society and for our clients’ businesses.