Every major technological transformation is accompanied by a business transformation, and the Industrial Revolution is perhaps the most obvious example. The steam engine, electricity, and later, the advancement of automation did not merely serve to do things faster that were already being done. They changed the logic of production, created markets, made activities obsolete, and forced entire companies to rethink how they generated value.
It is the process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction, when the new does not simply add to what existed before, but dismantles structures so that others can emerge.
It is not hard to find examples throughout history, and with Artificial Intelligence, we are facing yet another one of those moments. According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, 86% of employers expect AI and information processing technologies to transform their business by 2030. By then, 39% of the skills used by professionals today may transform or become obsolete.
For those who work in an advertising agency, this transformation is no longer a projection about the future. This is happening now.
What will the client continue paying an advertising agency for?
Until the arrival of AI, a significant portion of the value delivered by agencies was tied to their execution capability. Teams, working hours, and different specialties were required to transform a strategy into dozens or hundreds of pieces, campaigns, reports, analyses, and adaptations.
AI has already begun to alter this exact equation, and a range of activities can now be carried out in a fraction of the time they previously required. Research by Forrester in partnership with the 4A's revealed that nine out of ten marketing agencies in the United States already use generative AI, while half already use agentic AI in marketing execution. For 81% of them, increasing team productivity and impact is among the main objectives of using generative AI.
Producing faster is excellent news. But it also brings an uncomfortable question for an industry that has historically structured a good part of its operation and compensation around people, hours, and deliverables: if producing has become faster, cheaper, and more accessible, what will the client keep paying an agency for?
Clients have also noticed that the equation has changed. In Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, 39% of CMOs stated that they planned to reduce investments in agencies. Even more significant, 22% said that generative AI has already allowed them to reduce their reliance on external partners for creative and strategic activities.
This does not mean companies no longer need marketing; on the contrary, in the same survey, 59% of CMOs stated they do not have a sufficient budget to execute their strategies. The pressure, therefore, is to do more with limited resources, and technology offers new possibilities for that.
This is where I believe we need to think. We shouldn't spend so much energy trying to figure out how to protect what agencies have always done. We need to understand where we can generate more value now.
Efficiency cannot be our only differentiator
If everyone has access to the same technologies, producing more quickly ceases to be a competitive advantage. Although AI is increasing agency productivity, an adoption excessively focused on cost reduction can compromise precisely what sustains differentiation and long-term growth: creativity and effectiveness.
Agencies can occupy a space of interpretation, creativity, strategy, specialization, and the ability to connect technology to real business problems. Our value does not disappear when a technology starts executing part of the work, but it shifts. And realizing where this value is migrating to may be one of the most important discussions for anyone leading an agency today.
I am the Director of Innovation and Strategy at Sabiá, an agency specializing in the B2B tech market. Therefore, keeping up with these transformations is not just a matter of interest or professional update; it is a matter of our very survival as a business.
This is my first article for Abradi, and it is precisely this reflection that I intend to bring here: looking at some of these signals and discussing not only what is new in technology, but also what each new development might mean for the agency business.
I can't believe we are watching the end of agencies. But perhaps we are facing the end of some of the premises upon which we built the agencies we know. And that means we have already begun building the next ones.
