Will the use of AI services ultimately spell disaster for many agencies?

And in a sense, AI is of course very attractive. As David Droga, CEO of Accenture Song, said when he recently spoke at the Ciclope Festival in Berlin, to succeed in today’s fiercely competitive market it’s all about “growth and relevance; that’s all you care about.” For many, AI offers opportunities in both areas. And given the bloodless growth currently topping industry articles, it’s only natural that creative agencies would be magpie-drawn to the bright future that AI promises.

For many, AI is therefore the answer to our future. But if that’s the case, what’s the question?

Perhaps the most logical place to start is by drawing parallels with other important eras of change. The growth of ‘digital’ is the most obvious. When digital first emerged (on a meaningful scale) in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of the old ad agencies began setting up departments to advise clients on its impact and likely application. Logically? Certainly. But by locking digital into a department and leaving it adrift there for years in some cases, digital became an add-on or an afterthought. This opened the door for a progressive group of new and future-oriented digital agencies. They ate their more established analog counterparts’ lunch, grew rapidly, had a modern agenda, and in time would become attractive acquisition targets for network agencies looking to reassure clients’ concerns about contemporary competencies.

Today’s creative agencies are at risk of following a similar path. Take a stroll through the daily commentary on any well-trodden industry platform and you’ll find countless agencies, panels and articles touting AI services. This is a theme that extends to agencies’ commercial reputation, with new Gen AI icons being added to agencies’ capability charts, alongside new rate card roles (‘AI Creative Technologist’ anyone?). None of this is wrong, of course, but it feels painfully familiar and carries an inherent risk. By selling AI as a service in the short term, we risk taking our eyes off the bigger challenge of adapting our businesses to the long-term impact of AI.

If the answer is AI, the question for agencies today must be: how will it change our industry and what steps do we need to take to adapt? In response, we need to rethink not only our services but, more fundamentally, our commercial models. Forget seeing AI as an add-on and start reshaping our businesses with AI at the core of what we do.

Forrester’s recent report, The State of Generative AI Inside US Agencies 2024, came to a similar conclusion, albeit from across the pond. Two statistics from the report particularly stood out. First, more than three-quarters of respondents said generative AI is disruptive to their organization, and second, nearly a third (29%) of respondents said AI is “a major disruption that will change their business forever.”

Despite all this, it’s still easy to be nonchalant about AI (after all, we all have the daily job to keep ourselves busy) or wish the AI ​​genie would just go back in the bottle. But the truth is very difficult to avoid. There is a generational revolution underway in our industry and it is happening right before our eyes. And the agencies that will win are the ones that will treat it with the significance it deserves and not just as an afterthought.