Why the safest career move in advertising is the one that scares you 

I had a conversation recently with someone on my team. Not a formal one. More of a passing comment that stuck with me. They said something along the lines of, “With everything you’re doing with AI, should I be worried?” 

It was honest. And I think it reflects something a lot of people in advertising are feeling right now but not saying out loud. There is a genuine, widespread anxiety that AI is coming for jobs. That the people pushing hardest to adopt it are the same ones who will eventually use it to trim headcount. 

I understand why people feel that way. So I want to be clear about where I stand, both as a business founder and as someone who has spent the last year embedding AI into how our agency operates: humans are more important today than they have ever been. And the opportunity in front of the people willing to engage with AI is enormous. 

Here is how I think about it. 

Picture every agency as a ladder. The rungs on that ladder represent the value the agency can deliver to its clients. The height of the ladder has nothing to do with headcount or office space or tenure. It is about capability. What can this agency actually do for the people paying it? 

AI is giving agencies the ability to build new rungs at the top. The ones integrating it in meaningful ways are expanding what they can deliver. Predictive planning that used to require a team of analysts; optimisation cycles that happen in hours instead of weeks; pattern recognition across campaigns that no human could synthesise manually at the same speed or scale. These are new rungs. New capability. New value that did not exist two years ago. 

And the people climbing those rungs are becoming the most valuable people in the building. 

The media planner who used to spend three days building a cross-channel recommendation now does it in half a day and spends the remaining time doing what actually matters: thinking critically, interrogating the output, layering in context that no model has access to, and presenting a recommendation that is genuinely strategic. That person has gone up the ladder. Their value to the client has increased, their skillset has expanded, and they are harder to replace than they were 12 months ago. 

This is what I mean when I talk about AI augmenting individual ability.

It is not about doing the same work with fewer people. It is about the same people doing higher quality work, more of it, and at a level they could not have reached on their own. A team of specialists with the right tools can operate like a team twice the size. That is a growth story for the individual, not a redundancy story. 

There is a fair question in all of this: if AI makes certain tasks faster and cheaper, why would clients not just expect to pay less?

Some will. But the agencies that will hold their value are the ones where the efficiency creates room for higher quality work, not just faster delivery of the same thing. When your planner can build a recommendation in half the time, the other half is not idle. It goes into deeper analysis, sharper strategy, and better outcomes. The client is not paying for hours, they are paying for what those hours produce — and what those hours produce has gone up.

We saw the same dynamic when agencies adopted programmatic. The manual insertion order disappeared, but the people who understood how to use programmatic strategically were worth more because the outcomes improved. Pricing follows value. The agencies that can only offer speed will get squeezed. The ones that can demonstrate improved results will grow. 

The key word in all of this is “meaningful”. I am not talking about giving everyone a ChatGPT login and calling it transformation. That is the equivalent of putting a calculator on every desk in 1985 and claiming you had computerised the office.

Meaningful integration means specialised tools doing specialised things. Purpose-built platforms that sit inside your workflow and elevate specific functions. Slide generation tools that produce presentation-ready decks in minutes rather than hours. AI models selected because their architecture suits the task, embedded so deeply into the operation that they change what your people are capable of delivering. 

Giving everyone a ChatGPT login is the 2026 equivalent of doing this in 1985 and calling it computerising the office

When you work at an agency that invests in this properly, you learn how to use these tools. You develop instincts for where AI adds value and where it needs a human hand. You build a working fluency with technology that the rest of the market is still trying to understand. That fluency becomes part of your professional value. It travels with you, and compounds over time. 

This is the real upside that I think gets lost in the anxiety. The people who engage with AI now, who learn to work alongside it while the tools are still maturing, are building a career advantage that will only widen as adoption accelerates.

It is the same programmatic story again. The planners who got in early had a head start that compounded into long-term career capital, while the ones who waited found themselves with a shrinking market for what they knew. The technology was never the threat — standing still while the ground moved was. 

Alfred Lagos – author

Now here is where the ladder analogy gets uncomfortable, and why I think some people are making decisions they will regret. 

If you are nervous about AI and you move to an agency that has not adopted it, you land on a rung that feels familiar. The work is recognisable, nobody is talking about replacing anyone, and it feels safe. But the ladder you have moved to has stopped growing. The work it delivers — things like base-level campaign management, templated reporting, manual media buying — is being commoditised. It still exists, but clients will pay less for it as AI-enabled competitors deliver the same output faster and cheaper. 

Meanwhile, the ladder you left keeps adding rungs. The gap widens every quarter. And eventually, jumping back across becomes difficult because the distance between where the industry has moved and where you have been standing has grown too large. 

The people who will thrive over the next five years are building fluency now.

They are comfortable being uncomfortable for a while as workflows change and new tools reshape what their day looks like; they recognise that the human layer, the critical thinking, the client relationships, the ability to challenge a brief or connect dots that do not obviously connect, is exactly what moves up the ladder. AI handles the production. Humans handle the judgment. And judgment is becoming the most valuable currency in the industry. 

AI is here to make every individual more capable, and to take a team of specialists and give them tools that let them reach higher than they could on their own. 

If you are someone working in this industry and feeling uncertain, I would encourage you to look at it through this lens. The agencies investing in AI are investing in their people. They are building taller ladders. And the people on those ladders are climbing. 

The ladders are moving. Choose the one that is still adding rungs. 

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