7d • General discussion
The real AI risk for service businesses - When clients stop needing you (Part 1)
Something I keep coming back to after a recent conversation...
I was presenting to an agency C-suite team on creative production automation, specifically how they could use it to reduce turnaround times and production costs against a backdrop of increasing client expectations and disappearing margins. At some point they asked me what their competitors were doing.
Honestly? Pretty much the same things; same tools, same red tape and same mind bending internal processes.But here's what struck me; while they were benchmarking against each other, their clients had been quietly getting on with it.
Some had already started using automation to reduce what they were spending on agencies, others were producing assets faster internally but all of them were questioning why certain work needed to go outside at all.
The agencies were looking sideways at each other and their clients were looking at what they could do for themselves.
The question I encouraged the agency to ask is: Can our clients now do for themselves what they used to need us for?
That feels like the more important benchmark.
It’s not just about another agency doing the work better or cheaper. It’s that some of the work itself may stop being worth outsourcing once the client can automate enough of it in-house. I think agencies are just one example of a much broader pattern.
The real pressure may not come from competitors, but from customers becoming more self-sufficient.
What work in your world do you think clients will start doing for themselves first?
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The real AI risk for service businesses - When clients stop needing you (Part 1)
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