IN PARTNERSHIP
AI & Agencies: Understanding the future
A complimentary half-day session for agency leadership teams
Position your agency
above the algorithm.
Half a day with your leadership team on where AI moves the value, what stops being yours, and what you have to own to stay hard to replace.
Free of charge · Run as part of our research
01 — What changed
You have not been outbid.
You have been re-sourced.
01
In-housing.
Brands built the department. They kept the volume.
More than 80% of major brands now run an in-house agency. The work that filled your studio is the work that moved first.
ANA, 2023
02
AI in your client's hands.
Every marketer has an assistant. None of them need a brief.
95% of brand marketers now use AI at work. Your clients are not waiting for you to tell them what it can do.
TYPEFORM AI DATA REPORT, 2026
03
The billing model.
The work got faster. The invoice did not.
AI turns a hundred-hour job into forty. Sell hours and you have just cut your own revenue. By 2028 most advertisers expect to have changed how they pay agencies anyway.
PISCARI, AGENCY RESET 2026 · WFA AND MEDIASENSE, 2024
02 — What clients actually buy
30th
That is where “the work” ranks as a driver of client satisfaction.
Strategic vision, business understanding and relational orientation all rank above it. The thing you organise your agency around is not the thing your client is scoring you on.
VERITY RI RELATIONSHIP REPORT, Q4 2025
PISCARI RESEARCH03 — Where the value went
Execution gets cheaper every quarter.
Judgement does not.
AI compressed the cost of production, adaptation and delivery. It did nothing to the cost of knowing what a brand should do next, and nothing to the trust that gets that decision made. The two lines have already crossed for some of your clients.
Illustrative. Directionally correct beats scientifically accurate.
04 — The model
There are three places to stand.
Only one of them is defensible.
Select a layer
ABOVE THE ALGORITHM
WHERE THE STRATEGIC VALUE IS
Scarce, and hard to rebuild in-house.
This is the layer a client cannot copy, because it runs on judgement they do not have and context you own. Price it on the decision, not the hour.
THE ALGORITHM
THE AI CONTROL LAYER
You will never own this layer.
The models, the platforms and the signals belong to someone else. The question is not whether you own it. It is whether you orchestrate it better than your client can.
BELOW THE ALGORITHM
EXECUTION, INCREASINGLY SHAPED BY AI AND PLATFORMS
Cheaper every quarter.
Sold by the hour, this is a shrinking business. Run with AI and priced on the outcome, it is margin. The work is deciding which of the two you are.
Own the intelligence, judgement and orchestration layer. Use AI to scale delivery below the line.
Where does your agency sit, above or below the algorithm?
Who gets smarter over time, you or your client?
05 — Which one are you becoming
Four agencies. Their economics are not the same.
Select a role to see the tell
ROLE
WHAT THE CLIENT HIRES YOU FOR
WHAT YOU CONTROL
AI EFFECT
LIKELY ECONOMICS
ROLE
The Growth Orchestrator
WHAT THE CLIENT HIRES YOU FOR
Continuously decide where and how the brand should act, then orchestrate execution
WHAT YOU CONTROL
The loop from intelligence to decisions to activation to learning
AI EFFECT
AI is the enabler of the operating system
LIKELY ECONOMICS
Strongest strategic position
YOU KNOW YOU ARE HERE WHEN
The client brings you the problem before they have decided what to do about it, and the budget follows the decision rather than the deliverable.
WHAT MOVES YOU UP
Nothing sits above this. The work is keeping the loop closed and proving, every quarter, that it paid.
ROLE
The Brand Intelligence Partner
WHAT THE CLIENT HIRES YOU FOR
Help determine what the brand should do and why
WHAT YOU CONTROL
Consumer understanding, positioning and decision models
AI EFFECT
AI makes proprietary intelligence more powerful
LIKELY ECONOMICS
Attractive
YOU KNOW YOU ARE HERE WHEN
Your data and your point of view shape the brief, but somebody else turns it into activity.
WHAT MOVES YOU UP
Carry the decision through to activation and own the learning that comes back. That is the loop.
ROLE
The Creative Specialist
WHAT THE CLIENT HIRES YOU FOR
Breakthrough ideas competitors cannot match
WHAT YOU CONTROL
Creative judgement and cultural differentiation
AI EFFECT
AI augments but does not eliminate
LIKELY ECONOMICS
Viable but episodic
YOU KNOW YOU ARE HERE WHEN
You are called for the big moments and nothing in between. Brilliant work, lumpy revenue.
WHAT MOVES YOU UP
Turn the judgement into something always on: a system the client runs with you, not a project they buy from you.
ROLE
The Maker
WHAT THE CLIENT HIRES YOU FOR
Produce campaigns, content and assets
WHAT YOU CONTROL
Production workflow
AI EFFECT
AI increases supply
LIKELY ECONOMICS
Margin compression
YOU KNOW YOU ARE HERE WHEN
The brief arrives fully formed and the only conversation left is price.
WHAT MOVES YOU UP
Own one decision the client cannot make without you. Start small, then widen it.
Five years from now, what does a client CEO say about you?
MAKER
“They make our marketing assets really efficiently and consistently.”
CREATIVE SPECIALIST
“They give us ideas we couldn't produce ourselves.”
INTELLIGENCE PARTNER
“They understand our customers better than anyone and help us make better decisions at lower risk.”
ORCHESTRATOR
“They help us decide how to grow the brand and orchestrate the people, technology, AI and partners to make it happen.”
06 — The session
Half a day, free. Hypotheses, not homework.
There is no fee for this session. We are researching how AI is repricing agency work, and these rooms are where we learn it, so what comes out of the half day is worth as much to us as it is to you.
You leave with
01
An exposure map.
A first-draft view of how much of your revenue is tied to hours, volume and people, and how much of it AI can compress.
02
Your control points.
Where you are still scarce, hard or risky to replace, and what you would have to own to keep it that way.
03
A named beachhead.
The one client or workflow where you can prove better value, better economics and a stronger position.
We will not settle
Your future operating model, org design, tech stack, pricing or repositioning.
The session generates the hypotheses. The decisions come after.
07 — Who is in the room
Two people who have sat on both sides of the table.
Jeremy McDonald
WE ARE PIONEERS
Seventeen years in digital, six as CEO of Kaizen, a fifty-person UK digital agency, before founding We Are Pioneers. Now builds and deploys AI infrastructure and agentic workflows for agencies and brands, as a certified Anthropic partner.
Mike Lander
PISCARI
Former procurement director, now the person agencies call before they negotiate. Has been on both sides of more than £400m of commercial deals, and writes the Agency Reset on how AI and procurement are repricing agency work.
Find out where your agency
actually sits.
Tell us your size, your client mix and where you think you are exposed. We will tell you whether this session is worth your leadership team's afternoon. It is complimentary: we are running these as part of our research into how AI is repricing agency work.
Book a call
Schedule a conversation.
Pick a time that works for you. No pitch, no pressure: we will tell you straight whether the half day is right for your team.
What happens on the call
01
Twenty minutes. No deck.
02
We ask what your revenue is tied to, and who in the room makes the call.
03
You get a straight answer on whether the half day is worth your team's afternoon.
Half a day · Free of charge
Send a message
Drop us a line.
Tell us your size, your client mix and where you think you are exposed. We will come back to you quickly.
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