Most marketing agencies are getting AI wrong. There are two common failure modes, and the right answer isn’t either of them.

Failure mode one: pretending nothing has changed

The first group says AI doesn’t really matter. They write LinkedIn posts about “human creativity” as if that’s an answer to the question they’re refusing to engage with. They keep doing things the way they always did. They charge clients a premium for hours that should now take half the time.

Their pitch hasn’t changed in five years. Their content workflows haven’t either. They are, slowly, becoming the equivalent of a print agency in 2010 — still doing good work, but on the wrong side of a change that’s already happened.

Failure mode two: pretending everything has changed

The second group has rebranded as “AI marketing agencies.” Every deck has the word AI in it. Their pitches talk about “AI-powered” everything — content generation, ad creative, optimisation, attribution. Half their service descriptions could be replaced with ChatGPT.

They’re charging premium prices for thinly wrapped AI tools any client could use directly. Their work has the unmistakable shape of being mostly AI-generated, mostly unedited, and mostly forgettable.

The first group is going to lose business slowly. The second group is going to lose business as soon as clients realise they’re being charged thousands for what’s effectively a wrapper around a $20/month tool.

What’s actually changing

The honest version is more interesting than either of those positions.

AI has made the execution layer of marketing dramatically cheaper. Writing a competent blog post used to take a few hours; it now takes minutes. Generating ad variations, drafting email copy, building first-pass dashboards, doing research, structuring documents — all of these are an order of magnitude faster than they were two years ago.

That doesn’t mean those things don’t need doing. It means the bottleneck has moved. The hard part isn’t producing the content anymore. It’s deciding what’s worth producing in the first place.

What’s not changing

A few things are not changing, and probably won’t.

Strategy. AI can analyse data and suggest patterns. It cannot tell you whether to enter a new market, how to position against a specific competitor, or whether your founder story is the right story to lead with. These are judgement calls that depend on context AI doesn’t have.

Editorial judgement. AI can write a perfectly grammatical paragraph that says nothing memorable. The difference between content that gets read and content that gets ignored is editorial judgement — the human decision about what’s worth saying, in what order, and what to cut. AI is genuinely bad at this, and there’s no clear path to it getting better.

Trust. Clients work with agencies they trust. AI doesn’t generate trust. Relationships do. Honesty does. Track record does.

Real-world feedback loops. Marketing isn’t a closed system. What worked last quarter might not work this one. Customer behaviour shifts. Channels change their rules. A human watching the numbers, asking the right questions, and adjusting is hard to replace with an automated system.

What this means for agencies

The agencies that win the next five years will be the ones that absorb AI properly — neither ignoring it nor performing it.

That means: use AI for the things AI is good at. Research. Structure. First drafts. Iteration. Volume. Stuff that used to cost hours of human time.

Then put a human on top of it. Editing, judging, deciding what’s worth shipping. Adding the specific perspective and editorial sharpness that AI can’t generate on its own.

The result is faster, cheaper, and better than the all-human workflow. It’s also dramatically better than the all-AI workflow. The maths isn’t complicated: AI alone produces forgettable content. Humans alone are slow. Humans on top of AI is the right answer.

What we do at RareBear

We use AI extensively. Research, structuring, first drafts, audits, dashboards, brainstorming. It speeds up almost everything we do.

We also don’t ship work that AI generated without a human in the loop. Every piece of content we deliver has been written, edited, or substantively reworked by someone who knows what they’re doing. The strategy comes from us. The decisions come from us. The judgement comes from us.

That’s the model: AI as a tool, humans as the operators. Not AI as a marketing buzzword to charge clients a premium for. Not “human creativity” as a way to avoid the change.

The agencies that figure this out are going to do well. The ones that don’t will be in trouble within two or three years. The middle ground — quietly using AI to do better work — is where the right answer lives.