Because of that, you can slowly start to see which professions are really going to shift. Developer is probably the clearest example. The job hasn’t disappeared overnight, but it is changing fundamentally. Less and less about typing everything out yourself, more and more about directing systems, agents, and models. About judging, steering, structuring, and choosing.
Anyone paying attention sees the first outlines of that future popping up everywhere. People building their own tools. Teams setting up internal software in a matter of weeks. Marketing managers replacing a website without an agency. Small groups suddenly producing the kind of output that used to need a sizeable team. These aren’t isolated cases anymore. It’s just the direction things are moving.
Everyone can, and now everyone’s getting started
At our clients, that shift is already in full swing.
The heavy lifting is still outsourced. Strategy. Identity. Building websites and apps. But everything that comes after, increasingly moves in-house.
Which isn’t all that strange.
I read recently about a mid-sized training company that rebuilt its website in a week using an AI tool, and now manages that site entirely on its own. No agency. Clients write, translate, and correct their own copy more and more. And more companies have a wiz kid on staff, someone who is already setting up automations and helping internally with custom software.
We’ll only see more of these examples in the coming years.
You can be difficult about it, but the direction is clear. Production capacity is shifting inwards. Not all of it, and not everywhere, but enough to put pressure on the old model that many agencies still rely on.
Because the moment a client can build a first version of a landing page, a piece of copy, a flow, an automation, or a piece of software themselves, part of the old difference disappears. You’re no longer automatically the only party in the room who knows how something gets built.
And honestly, that was never a particularly strong basis to build your value on.
Clients aren’t stupid
Translation agencies were the first real casualties I saw. But that was just the early version of what is now starting to happen on a much bigger scale. Content production, programming, design, it’s all slowly moving toward internal teams or a single sharp person with the right tools.
For many clients, this feels like a no-brainer. A mid-level marketer with ChatGPT and Claude suddenly seems able to do the same thing as that expensive agency from before.
Whether that’s actually true could easily fill its own article. But that’s not what this piece is about. This is about the movement.
Clients are adjusting how they work, on the creative as well as the technical side. Your opinion or mine doesn’t change much about that. The perception is now that with AI you bring half a marketing department in-house, run by one person or a small team.
That obviously makes experts bristle. Rightly so, because anyone who is genuinely deep into this knows it doesn’t work that simply. But part of this problem we created ourselves as agencies.
Of all the agencies I’ve worked at, except Kinekt of course, I don’t actually know one that really held itself accountable for proving its own effectiveness. This whole business has been running on gut feeling and pretty pictures for far too long. Not on results. Not on return on investment. Even though that’s ultimately what marketing and creative should be measured on.
So how credible is it really to act outraged about tasteless AI campaigns now, when we never put the burden of proof on our own work? Why should clients take our word for it that we know what works, when we steered on feel for years and pulled them along with us?
In that light, it’s not so strange that they’re now taking the next step. Especially when that step costs a fraction of what an agency used to charge.
There was already an ocean of ineffective marketing in the world. What AI is going to do is dump a tsunami of marketing slop on top of it.
That, frankly, seems unavoidable.
What an agency is for: thinking work
As a sector, we have always undervalued our thinking.
Pitches are still the most normal thing in the world. We give our thinking away for free in a race against our peers, so we can take on the production work afterwards at hourly rates. If you take a step back, that’s actually an absurd model. We’ve just gotten so used to it that it has come to feel normal.
Selling hours is going to disappear. Or more precisely, every hour gets less valuable every week. As these tools develop, an ever larger part of execution comes down to formulating the right input, judging the output, and steering where needed. That’s increasingly hard to sell by the hour. And the problem only grows as the models get better.
So what’s left that’s defensible?
That sits in expertise, talent, and insight. Not as nice words on a slide, but as a real edge.
An agency that positions itself sharply, so not generalist but specialist, builds up a layer of knowledge that isn’t easily matched. It compounds. At Kinekt we work on the marketing engine for tech companies. So we only build skills that fit within that field. We get a sharper picture of the playing field every day. We see dozens of organizations, each with their own way of working, bottlenecks, and sales process. We collect data from dozens of parties that only we have, and use it to give clients insight into their own situation.
You don’t replicate that with a few prompts.
On top of that, there’s just a difference in the kind of people who work at a good agency. People who wouldn’t be caught dead in some lumbering corporate system. People with a talent for problem solving. People who are stress-resistant, who quickly connect dots, and have deep insight into their craft. Not because they’re necessarily smarter than everyone on the client side, but because day in and day out they work at the same level of abstraction on similar problems.
But the real core sits in insight.
The emphasis is shifting more and more toward the insight you bring as an agency within your domain of expertise, and the head start that gives you while building solutions. Not just in the making itself, but especially in understanding how something should work. How a website supports the sales process. How a product story translates into UX. How data, communication, interface, and software logic relate to each other. How you reduce complexity without breaking the essence.
That’s where the value sits.
For agencies that have always positioned themselves as hour factories, this becomes a hard turn. And I think a lot of agencies aren’t going to make it. Some will be replaced by internal capacity with AI. Others will have to budget-cut themselves into bankruptcy, because production capacity is being commoditized so hard that there will eventually be nothing left to earn.
And it’s happening faster than many people think.
My neighbor is vibe-coding his own platform and marketing material together in a few months. Marketing managers are replacing an expensive website in a few weeks with their own version in Lovable or Cursor. The change isn’t coming. It’s already catching up with us at full speed.
Why I’m optimistic
The agency world has been overdue for a shift for a long time. We give our thinking away in pitches, sell hours like raw materials, and have spent years maneuvering ourselves into a position with less and less influence.
It’s high time we focused on results again, and that we’re willing to take real risks on those results ourselves. That we feel the necessity to specialize, and through that, add more and more value to the product, service, or processes of our clients.
If you’re willing in this moment to take on that existential fight with yourself as an agency, and transform into a thinking-first agency, the opportunities are huge.
Because that’s the other side of this story.
The production capacity of an agency with a hundred FTE is suddenly within reach of a team of five. That’s not just threatening, it’s also liberating. It means small, sharp teams with real expertise can build, test, learn, and iterate far more than ever before. It also means the playing field opens up for agencies that no longer derive their identity from volume, but from insight.
So the golden age isn’t necessarily behind us. It might still be ahead.
But only for agencies willing to throw off the yoke of the old agency structure. Agencies that stop pretending production is the core of their value. Agencies that finally take their thinking seriously. Agencies that no longer sell themselves as asset suppliers, but as partners that give direction, help build systems, and safeguard the coherence between brand, UX, software, and commerce.
For those agencies, AI doesn’t become a threat, but an amplifier.
And honestly, that seems like a much healthier future than the world we’ve been coming out of.
