How Agencies Can Still Grow in the Age of Automation

Automation made the work faster. It did not make the fees smaller.

The consensus on automation and agencies is bleak. Execution gets cheap, clients notice, fees compress, and the agency model gets squeezed from both ends. It is a tidy story, and one UK agency leader thinks it is wrong.

Chris Turton, Managing Director at Ecommerce Intelligence, automated the work and it got faster. The capacity that came back went into deeper analysis and interpretation per client, not into stripped-out cost. That is a materially different conclusion to the one most agency owners are being sold.

It is also a claim worth interrogating. Around 61% of agency clients now raise AI during renewal conversations, and roughly 27% of agencies have been asked outright for an AI discount, though only about 13% have actually lowered their rates. Any agency still billing by the hour faces the uncomfortable version of this, where its own efficiency cuts its revenue.

Join us live with Chris for a session on where agency growth actually comes from once the execution layer gets automated.