Let’s be honest: the realities of running an agency have changed.
The work still needs to be thoughtful. The strategy still needs to hold up. Clients still deserve people who understand their business and take responsibility for the outcome.
But how we get there? That’s changing quickly. And from where we sit, it’s changing for the better.
We can do more without building a deep bench of individual specialists for every task. We can apply our expertise across more of an engagement. And we can hand over work that clients are better equipped to use, maintain, and build on.
Those are meaningful improvements. They should change what clients expect from an agency.
Our expertise has a new place to live
For a long time, expanding an agency’s capabilities usually meant adding people. More specialists, more coordination, more overhead.
People and specialized expertise still matter enormously. But hiring is no longer the only way to expand what a team can deliver.
We’re using our expertise to shape how AI agents work: giving them context, instructions, examples, and standards that reflect how we approach a problem. Methods that once lived mostly in someone’s head can become repeatable parts of our process.
That takes real work. An agent doesn’t become reliable because we give it a job title and a prompt. We have to test its output, define where human judgment belongs, and keep improving the process.
The opportunity is to make our expertise more useful and spend more time applying judgment where it matters most.
Our responsibility for the result stays with us.
Yes, we can deliver faster. We can also deliver more.
“So this means everything happens faster, right? No more month-long scopes?”
Fair question. Yes, AI can shorten the time it takes to deliver certain kinds of work. Clients should benefit from that.
It also changes what we can accomplish within an engagement.
A month that once produced a strategy and a handful of assets can potentially include implementation, testing, documented workflows, and hands-on support for the team responsible for carrying it forward.
The right scope still depends on the problem. Sometimes the best outcome is a smaller project completed sooner. Sometimes it’s using the available time to solve more of the client’s problem.
We can make that decision together.
For us, the most valuable use of that additional capacity is often spending more time as an extension of the client’s team: understanding where work gets stuck, helping people adopt better processes, and getting them AI-ready through actual work.
There’s a meaningful difference between presenting a team with possibilities and sitting beside them while they learn to put those possibilities into practice.
We want more room for the second.
AI readiness is part of the deliverable
Access to AI doesn’t automatically translate into effective adoption.
Anthropic’s March 2026 research found that more experienced Claude users were “more likely to elicit successful responses in their conversations.” The researchers caution that this association may reflect differences among users as well as learning through experience. Still, it makes a practical point worth taking seriously: how people work with these tools matters. Anthropic, Learning curves
Our view is that agencies have a role in helping clients build that capability.
Tools like Claude and ChatGPT give nontechnical teams more ways to create, analyze, and maintain their work. Getting value from them requires context, usable processes, and the judgment to recognize when an output needs attention.
That’s why the handoff matters.
Can the team understand what we built? Can they update it? Do they have reusable instructions and examples? Do they know what good output looks like and when a person needs to step in?
Documentation, skills transfer, and practical training belong inside the engagement.
We would be doing clients a disservice if we delivered work they could only operate with us standing beside them. Their ability to move forward independently is evidence that we did our job.
For startups, this is also about staying in the game
The startup curve has a difficult middle.
Launch excitement fades. Customer acquisition proves harder than expected. The team is still learning what people will pay for, while time and money keep moving.
Speaking at Y Combinator, Gobble founder Ooshma Garg described the “trough of sorrow” as “oftentimes a multi-year slog.” It’s a useful reminder that the distance between launching and building a sustainable business can be substantial. Y Combinator, The Snakes and Ladders Game of Startups
Paul Graham describes a related danger with particular clarity:
“The fatal pinch is default dead + slow growth + not enough time to fix it.”
Here, “default dead” means the company won’t reach profitability with its remaining cash if its current trajectory continues. Paul Graham, Default Alive or Default Dead?
AI doesn’t erase that risk. Producing more work won’t fix weak demand on its own.
But we see practical ways an agency can help reduce the pressure: lower the effort required to test an idea, get useful work in front of customers sooner, reduce repetitive operations, and help a small team maintain more of what it builds.
That might mean testing messaging before committing to a larger campaign. Connecting customer feedback to the next product decision. Or creating a process the team can run without adding another ongoing dependency.
The purpose is to give founders more opportunities to learn and respond within the resources they have.
That’s how we think about helping fortify a business for the future: making it more capable of adapting when the original plan meets reality.
Agility should benefit the client
As models improve and new tools emerge, we keep evaluating what they make possible.
That gives us more opportunities to say yes to a useful experiment, an operational improvement, or an idea that previously required too much time to explore.
It also requires judgment. Every new tool doesn’t deserve a place in the process. Clients need us to understand which changes are worth their attention and help them put those changes to work.
Our bet is that the agencies that thrive will make the entire relationship better: clearer communication, greater visibility, more useful deliverables, and teams that leave the engagement more capable than they entered it.
Come on, the way agencies work has changed. We have more ways to help, and more room to do the work that matters.
Clients should feel the difference.