The model is under pressure. AI exposes it

I went to a panel discussion last night on the creative industries, hosted by the West of England Design Forum. The theme was “flux”.

AI came up. Talent came up. Pricing came up. No surprise there then.

But the more people spoke, the clearer it became that everyone was describing the same problem from different angles.

• Agencies talking about the importance of talent, while hiring fewer juniors and expecting a full stack of skills for £12 an hour roles.

• Clients pushing back on fees, while comparing agency work to tools that can generate something in seconds.

• Teams getting excited about AI, but using it to produce more of the same work, just faster and cheaper.

Individually, these sound like separate issues. But they’re not. They all point to the same underlying tension: many agencies are still built around selling output, at a time when output is becoming easier to produce and harder to differentiate.

That model has been under pressure for a while. AI just accelerates it.

Because if the value you create is tied too closely to what gets produced: the asset, the campaign, the deliverable, then it becomes much easier for clients to question the cost. Or compare it to something else. Or try to do it themselves.

Which is why so many of the conversations around talent, pricing and AI are connected. They’re all symptoms of the same shift.

The agencies that navigate this well are the ones that are clear about where they actually create value. Not just what they produce, but the thinking, judgment, and commercial impact behind it.

That’s harder to define. And yes, harder to sell. But it’s also much harder to replace.