← Back to Blog

What's Really Going On Between Clients and Their Agencies

Rami Atassi Rami Atassi

Almost every day I see some hellfire and brimstone, doom and gloom post about what the AI era is doing to creatives, marketers, and agencies. And I see similar posts from AI advocates about how SMBs can replace their in-house marketing staff with $499 per month AI.

We’re bordering on collective psychosis when we discuss the business impact of AI.

But I get why it’s happening. The new AI tools are truly disruptive and if you’re an early adopter, you’re already seeing it.

Here’s my take on what’s really going on between clients and their agencies.

First let’s talk about a huge change in service delivery—conceptually this has gone mainstream, but practically, it’s not here for most of us yet. But it is here for some of us (the early adopters) and coming for many of us soon.

The Old Way to Produce Digital Media (2010-2025)

CLIENT SIDE

  • Client: The organization authorizing the project
  • Stakeholders: Individuals who represent business interests

AGENCY SIDE

  • Account Manager: Your day-to-day contact
  • Creative Director: Directs the creative aspect of the work
  • Media Buyer: Directs the programmatic media buy
  • Marketing Strategist: Aligns Creative Director & Media Buyer to Channel-Specific Tactics
  • Project Manager: Managers the teams delivering creative, media buys
  • Channel Experts: Ad buyers, web application developers, Shopify experts, Video directors, Meta ads experts, Hubspot inbound certified marketers, etc x1000

The New Way (2026 and beyond)

CLIENT SIDE

  • Clients: The organization authorizing the project
  • Stakeholders: Individuals who represent business interests

AGENCY SIDE

  • Account Manager: A subject matter expert who works with the client team
  • Strategic Operators: A marketing expert who works with AI agents to produce deliverables programmatically
  • Creative Specialist: An expert with a specific creative domain, who taps in to provide best-in-class creative work (i.e. video, motion, photography, messaging, music)

The big shift here is that we can get a lot of programmatic marketing output with smaller teams than before. If you’re a client, agency, or freelancer, you need to figure out what this new dynamic means for you.

For Enterprise Clients

You’ll be slow to adapt to the AI era, but it’s not a bad thing. What you DON’T want to do is buy more AI tools or bolt AI onto your existing software stack. What you want to do is rethink software development entirely—you have to be using AI coding agents, not off the shelf AI plugins. So you want to start incubator programs that allow you to deploy agentic in low stakes environments with a low blast radius, gradually increasing the scale of your experiments as you harden your security. I can’t emphasize enough that you need in-house developers who came up writing code before AI, but also use AI coding agents daily.

For SMBs and mid-market players

This is your golden era. Your competition is thinking—let’s slash marketing! we hated this stuff anyways! why not give it to an AI agent?

But not you. You understand that this is an opportunity to punch above your weight. You don’t want to stop marketing—you want to get more from your marketing. So you find a partner who understands agentic AI and programmatic marketing. The best partners will bring expertise in AI and agentic software development, so you can apply it throughout your business.

For Agencies

As always, the success of an agency depends on people who build relationships with stakeholders and truly understand the client’s business. That is timeless. But some things have changed…

No more moat around complex technologies, no more SaaS bloat, and no more software lock ins. Agencies need to be platform agnostic, experts in software development, with programmatic toolsets that plug in to anything, anywhere.

For Creative Professionals

This AI era will reward creative people who have an integrated skillset—tying together different domains and approaches to solve specific problems in new ways.

This AI will be a threat to 80% of creative specialists. The top 20% of creative specialists will still be in demand—for organizations who want to stand out with truly memorable creative work.

So, if you are a specialist and you don’t love it, work on becoming a generalist. If you are a specialist and you love it, become the 20% of specialists who understand how their creative domain plugs into the new layer of agentic software.

WHAT’S NEXT

Like any disruptive technology, the era of AI agents will create winners and losers. And no doubt, the wins and losses will not be distributed equitably (they never are).

The competitive drive of business is what moves this new reality forward—but we’re making a mistake if we do this without human compassion and kindness. We should not deride people ignoring AI any more than we should celebrate those championing AI. It is neither good nor bad. It is so new that smart people will be wrong about it. Dumb people will get lucky.

However it shakes down, it is the new reality, and we can help each other navigate it in the spirit of collaboration.