A Better Agency Model - New * Improved

I can't say for sure - but this is what it's looking like to me these days.

Author

Tim Kilroy
24 Jun • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

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What's Inside

I Spoke at Agency Advantage Today

Super-duper hosting company Cloudways asked me to speak at their Agency Advantage event today (part 2 of the event happens tomorrow, June 25, register right now and check out Day 2)

The topic they asked me to speak about was The New Agency Model: AI, Automation, and Strategic Partnerships for 2025 and Beyond. When I started putting together my thoughts for the session, I was immediately thinking about the future of agencies relative to the efficiency gains, speed of analysis & scale of iteration that AI can drive.

I started to look deeply at agents for campaign management, reporting, recruiting, etc. etc. etc. and started to build a roadmap towards a heavily agentified agency.

And then I stopped. Because that isn’t the roadmap that agency leaders need right now.

AI Is A Squirmy Worm

You don’t need a roadmap to an agentified agency because that roadmap is out of date before the pixels render on your screen. The tech is moving so quickly and capabilities evolving so dramatically that anything you decide to do today is antiquated in 2 weeks.

As I thought about the challenges of managing AI as it evolves at hyper speed, it dawned on me that the technology challenge will resolve itself - there will be agentic platform winners, frontier models will develop more capabilities & the platforms we use, from Wordpress to Meta Ads manager will develop their own agentic qualities. So trying to nail down an AI roadmap is somewhat a waste of time - it’s too amorphous.

But it is real enough, and the changes are already happening fast enough that you need to start imagining your agency differently.

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Your Agency Is Going To Change

The challenging thing for agencies is that we’ve largely built our value on the execution layer. We get sh!t done. While it is still a ways off, the value of execution is dropping, and it will likely drop to an unsustainable level in the next decade. So the time to prepare for that eventuality is right f*cking now.

You don’t need to change a single thing you are doing this week, this month, and probably not even this year…but changing your thinking about the value your agency brings should start today.

AI Brings Infinite Options - Hooray?

As the value of execution diminishes, the value of curation becomes higher. And I don’t mean “curation” like some West Village influencer, I mean curation in the sense of knowing WHAT TO DO.

Agents & AI gives us potentially unlimited options of things to try. There is an endless buffet of options of marketing tactics, digital experiences, and channels to explore and test. Sadly, however, all marketing is constrained by budgets. So an infinite array of options is useless. Even if you try 1000 things, you haven’t made a statistical dent in unlimited options. And every test you try costs time and/or money.

Your value is in knowing which options to try.

As More Agents Perform The Heavy Execution Lift, You Have A Management Crisis To Address

You have a team of folks who are really good at the things they are tasked with…but what happens when the value of that task diminishes? Do you fire them? NO. Before the value disappears, you need to help them see WHY that task is necessary. WHY that task creates value. WHAT goes into the design of that task. HOW does that task fit inside the mission that you are chasing. It’s your job to help them understand WHY THIS TASK AND NOT OTHERS. WHY THIS MISSION AND NOT OTHERS. WHY THIS DECISION-MAKING PROCESS AND NOT OTHERS.

All of that is in service of them being able to curate what needs to get done (out of all the infinite options) and how to show the value of that curated set of activities to your clients.

THIS IS THE TRUE WORK OF YOUR AGENCY

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Your Job Is To Elevate Your Technical Experts To Expert Curators With Deep Experience

This isn’t a terrible thing - in fact, this model will help your team create more value for your clients, and it will value them more for the way that they think & reason & respond. Their years of working on the execution side - understanding data & code & campaign structures & ad creatives will give them the background to make the right curations - but moreover will give them the grounding to not be carried away with any flights of fancy encouraged by our AI co-workers. The AI machine will break, or misunderstand or just go off the rails, and the experience of your team will keep this mission moving forward.

But how do you prepare yourself as an agency leader to create a team of curators who make sound choices, communicate value and stay on mission?

Congrats on Your New Job - It Starts Tomorrow

Like so many things in the agency world, this is a responsibility that falls squarely on you. You still have to run the agency you have, PLUS you need to start building your strategic metacognition.

Do you know what metacognition is? It’s thinking about thinking.

You, and maybe some others in your agency, have the depth of skills and experience to have strategic insights, to be able to see the best actions among the sea of options. But now you need to think about how you do that. What are your frames of reference? What are the patterns that you recognize? What are the inputs that you need and what are the outputs that create progress towards the mission.

Learn how you make decisions. At this point, your strategic insights probably come rapidly and fluidly, and they probably happen with some degree of automaticity. But in order to arm your agency for the next wave, you need to learn how you think, how you intuit the next step and how you fill in the detail gaps with instinct and experience.

You need to start breaking down your own instincts into discrete decisions. You need to work with your most experienced team members to help them do the same so that you can create a framework that your less experienced employees can inhabit to bring the best curation of infinite opportunities to your clients who put trust in you & your team.

You Are Making A Living Playbook

Becoming the curator of actions (which may be executed by agentic AI) is no less valuable than doing the execution-level work yourself. In fact, it will likely be MORE valuable because it mixes the scale and horse-power of AI with the restraint of a human who want to get it right (and understands the costs of getting it wrong).

And that human can likely handle more clients as a curator of AI-executed opportunities than they could as an execution specialist. Financially, their elevation above the task level makes them more profitable for your agency (and I am going to guess that they will be happier because their impact and responsibility are higher with less “busywork” attached.

As you metacognate and make your own decision tree external & you mix it with your more experienced team members, you are going to create a robust hybrid of decisioning that will almost certainly perform better than any individual way of thinking. Then as your less experienced team members step inside the framework, you’ll see that they bring their own ideas. New opportunities and datapoints arise from changes in technology or markets or media.

When that starts to happen, and the decisioning framework hybridizes in such a way that your original framework is more “felt” than seen, you will find yourself in a new position. Rather than being the curator who knows what approach will have the biggest impact, you are now a curator of people who can embrace and extend your agency decisioning framework, you are a curator of what external influences are added to accelerate your growth, you are the curator of the messaging that brings the opportunities that your team’s decisioning can impact the most.

The opportunity to elevate into curators is just starting to emerge. It will happen slowly, like a winter sunrise…but it is coming.

It’s time to start preparing, because once the transition is obvious, you’ll be stuck running an agency that is great at execution when the value is elsewhere.

Be Sure To Read Friday’s Installment → We Will Be Extending This Idea Further

This is a really solid read, every week.

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