The Native Agency

I was having dinner with a founder a couple of weeks ago and she said something that stuck with me. She said her agency had stopped using AI and started being an AI business. I asked her what she meant.

She'd rebuilt almost everything over about eighteen months. Not just the obvious things like content production and research, but pricing, resource planning, client reporting, and parts of the strategic process itself. Her team had gone from forty-two people to twenty-eight without losing revenue. They'd repriced around value rather than time and their margins had roughly doubled.

The distinction she was drawing, I think, was between AI as a tool and AI as infrastructure. At Level 4, Optimised in the maturity model I use, you've got AI improving how you do what you've always done. Faster briefs, better research, leaner production. At Level 5, the business model itself has changed. The services you sell, the way you price them, the number of people you need, the kind of clients you attract, all of it reshaping around the fact that AI is foundational rather than supplementary.

She was clear that the hardest part wasn't the technology. It was getting comfortable with the idea that the business she was building looked very different from the one she'd started. Several of the people who'd left were good, and she missed them. But the business couldn't justify their roles once the workflows had changed.

Most agencies are somewhere between Level 2 and Level 3 right now. That's where the work is. But it's worth understanding where the road leads, because some of the decisions you make at Level 3 either open the path to Level 5 or close it off.