In this week's newsletter:

36% of CMOs expect to cut headcount in the next 12-24 months because of AI. 23% of agencies already reduced junior copywriter roles in 2025. 31% are planning more cuts in 2026. 19% cut junior production and design roles. AI investment across agencies went from 57% in 2023 to 86% today.

This is happening right now.

And the agencies who are just "using AI tools" - giving the team a Claude subscription and hoping for the best are about to find out that a 30-40% efficiency boost doesn't change anything structurally.

The ones rebuilding their delivery model around AI are playing a completely different game.

I was on a call with the founder of a paid media agency managing around 100 client accounts.

His team tracks time across every task. Reporting, strategy, creative briefing, client comms - everything broken down by media buyer.

One junior media buyer who uses AI properly spends 12 minutes on a client report.

A senior media buyer who doesn't... 55 minutes. Same report. Same data. Same output.

That's a 4.5x difference on a single task. And reporting is just one of maybe 12 things a media buyer does in a week.

Dmitry Fesenko, CEO at Haven x Romans Ivanovs - Watch Video

This founder's initial instinct was the same one I hear from pretty much every agency: "Let's give the team better tools. Let's automate the routine stuff and free up the media buyers to focus on strategy."

That gets you maybe 30-40% more capacity. Which is great, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a bigger opportunity here.

He said something that shifted my thinking too. He asked himself: "What actually IS strategy? Why can't AI do strategy better than a media buyer can, if it has all the context and data?"

If AI has access to the client's performance data, their history, their goals, their creative performance, their market context... the "strategy" that a media buyer produces manually is already worse than what a well-built AI agent could generate.

So the role fundamentally changes.

They stop being the person who builds campaigns and analyses data. They become the person who manages the relationship, interprets the AI's output for the client, and steps in when something needs a human decision.

A media buyer managing 8-12 accounts today could manage 50. Maybe more. Because the execution layer is handled by AI agents that have full context on every client.

The role looks a lot more like a customer success manager than a traditional media buyer.

In this agency, the ambitious juniors (the key word is ambitious) are the ones adopting AI naturally. Building with it, experimenting with it, treating it as a co-pilot from day one.

The seniors not su much apparently. who've been doing it the same way for 3-4 years are resistant. And I get it. Being told that the way you've worked for four years is about to change completely... that feels like starting from a blank canvas.

Spencer Stuart's latest research puts it bluntly: 37% of CMOs at the largest companies say their CEOs expect 20%+ cost cuts within two years. That pressure flows directly into how agencies are structured and who they employ.

The agencies that figure this out in the next 12 months will have a structural cost advantage that's very hard to replicate. Same quality delivery, fundamentally different economics.

A pod that needed 5 people two years ago might need 3. The margin profile changes. The pricing flexibility changes. The competitive position changes.

I fell into the same AI trap.

For the past half year, I’ve been testing several dozen AI tools. Building AI agents, buying AI services and hiring AI engineers.

Obsidian
OpenClaw
RAG pipelines
Databases
Claude agents and so on

Some of that is useful, most turned out to be a complete waste of time for me as a business owner.

Some thoughts on what made a difference and how to approach AI implementation in your agency business in this LinkedIn post.

We, as founders, have to be honest about what this means for how we structure our teams. The roles that exist today in your agency will look completely different in 18 months. Some of them won't exist at all.

The question is whether you're designing for that future or hoping it doesn't arrive.

Have a great week.

– Romans

P.S. If you want to figure out what your agency looks like when AI is built into the operating model - you can apply for a 1:1 Founder Dependency Audit - we diagnose it together.