Most agency owners are going to fire people this year and call it "AI optimization." Let's be real about what's actually happening. AI is not replacing your employees. You are replacing your employees and using AI as the excuse. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is cowardly. Here's my hot take: The agencies that gut their teams in favor of AI tools are going to produce mediocre, interchangeable work within 18 months, and they'll lose their best clients to agencies that figured out the real play. The real play is this: AI handles volume, humans handle judgment. That's it. That's the whole strategy. If your agency's value proposition is "we produce content fast and cheap," congratulations, you've already lost because a $20/month subscription just replaced you entirely. The agencies that survive and scale are the ones where humans are making strategic decisions, building relationships, and doing the creative thinking that no prompt can replicate; and AI is doing the tedious execution work underneath them. What drives me crazy is watching agency owners treat headcount reduction as the primary ROI of AI adoption. That's the wrong metric entirely. The right metric is what your senior people can now accomplish because they're not drowning in the work that used to require three junior hires. You don't shrink the team, you multiply the output of the team you have. Yes, some roles will change. Yes, some entry-level positions look different now. But the agencies treating every human as a cost to be eliminated are building fragile operations with no institutional knowledge, no creative culture, and no loyalty from the clients who signed on because they trusted specific people. AI is a leverage tool, not a headcount strategy. The agencies that understand that distinction are going to dominate the next five years. The ones chasing margin through layoffs are going to be unrecognizable by 2027. Do you agree or disagree? And if you've actually restructured your team around AI, what did you get right or wrong?