A strategist says one high-taste person plus a few dozen AI agents can do the work legacy agencies bill millions for, while WPP and its peers cut tens of thousands of jobs.
He admits the $1B valuation is pure nonsense, a token picked to grab your attention. But the bet underneath is real: most of what clients pay a big agency for is nineteen layers of lossy routing, three weeks of sync calls, and a $400,000 invoice to change the typography on a slide deck.
The industry billed by the seat and the hour, so more people meant a bigger bill. AI collapses the marginal cost of drafting, formatting and resizing to almost nothing, leaving three jobs: working out what the client needs, finding an idea nobody has had, and judging what comes back.
What surprised me most is that he admits he still catches mistakes in agent output every day. Those mistakes are exactly what clients pay him to catch.
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