But It Will Force Them to Transform. What Jack Skeels and Mark Curtis taught me about the future of agency work
Every few months, someone announces that AI will make marketing agencies obsolete. The logic seems airtight: AI researches faster, ideates faster, writes and designs faster. Therefore, the agency model must collapse. But this week I read two articles that completely reframe this narrative and offer a roadmap for what agencies must become.
Jack Skeels, CEO and former RAND researcher, published “Good News: No, Your Agency Isn’t Going Away,” drawing on research from Decision Analysis to argue why the doomsayers are wrong. Mark Curtis, who spent three decades in digital transformation including founding and selling Fjord to Accenture, published “Where is Design Heading?” at Full Moon. This is a sweeping reflection on what 30 years of technological change teaches us about this moment.
Reading them together revealed something powerful: they arrive at identical conclusions from completely different starting points. And those conclusions fundamentally change how we need to think about the future of agency work. [Links to both articles are below.]
The Production Myth
Both authors puncture the same misconception: that AI’s value lies in accelerating production. Yes, AI can draft copy in seconds, generate campaign concepts at scale, and synthesise research from dozens of sources simultaneously. This is genuinely impressive. It’s also missing the point. As Skeels argues,
“AI speeds up the part of the process that was never the bottleneck.”
Production speed was never our constraint. The bottleneck has always been strategic judgement: deciding what matters, resolving contradictions, clarifying objectives, and turning a mass of plausible ideas into a coherent path forward.
Curtis demonstrates how this pattern has repeated across every technological wave. When web design emerged, then mobile, then service design, the challenge was never about creating more options. It was about curating meaning from complexity. The tools changed, but the fundamental problem remained: human sense-making. AI doesn’t solve this problem. It intensifies it.
The Judgement Flood
Here’s what’s actually happening, as Skeels describes:
“AI floods the organization with more ideas, more inputs, more narratives, more ‘insights’ than ever before. Without structural change, this surge overwhelms the slowest part of the system: the layers of prioritization, framing, coordination, and decision-making.”
Curtis shows this isn’t new, we’ve seen it with every technology shift. But AI accelerates it to an unprecedented degree. Your clients are arriving at meetings with AI-generated drafts and frameworks. Your teams are using AI to explore dozens of strategic directions simultaneously. Everyone’s drowning in possibility.
This creates what appears to be a paradox: the more AI accelerates ideation, the more organisations need humans who can evaluate, sequence, and choose. The demand for strategic judgement doesn’t decline, it increases exponentially.
As Skeels puts it:
“The judgment layer must grow faster.”
Which brings us to the core insight both authors share: agencies aren’t becoming obsolete. They’re becoming more essential. But only if they transform how they work.
What Both Authors Tell Us Must Change
Skeels provides a practical framework. Curtis offers historical validation from three decades of similar transformations. Together, they map four critical dimensions of change:
1. Structure: Speed Up Decision-Making
Skeels advocates for “pods, stable teams, and shorter decision loops” to raise what he calls “absorption velocity” which is the organisation’s ability to metabolise AI-accelerated inputs without drowning in them. Curtis emphasises that structure “becomes the enabling technology” that determines whether teams harness AI’s speed or get crushed by it. Traditional hierarchies with multiple approval layers and unclear ownership cannot keep pace. This isn’t about org charts, it’s about fundamentally reimagining how work flows and decisions get made.
2. Development: Accelerate Strategic Maturity
Both authors challenge the old apprenticeship model that asked people to wait years before being trusted with real strategic work. Skeels argues: “When machines generate endless options, agencies need more humans who can evaluate, sequence, and choose. The path to becoming a strategist must shorten.” Curtis demonstrates how every technological shift has required faster development of strategic capability.
AI simply makes this non-negotiable. This isn’t about lowering standards it’s about recognising that strategic thinking is now required at every level, not just reserved for senior leadership.
3. Collaboration: Make Meaning-Making Collective
Curtis coined a phrase that haunts me: “corporate botox” which is when organisations create innovation centres with fake chalk writing and pretend creativity, but don’t actually change how they work. Both authors insist that real transformation requires genuine cultural change. Skeels describes it: “Teams must develop shared cognition, shared context, and shared interpretation. Meaning-making becomes a group sport.”
Curtis’s “Design Rule of Three” reinforces this: you need thinking, doing, and culture. Without the right culture (the right incentives, environment, and leadership) best practices become performative theatre. The lone strategist crafting the sacred presentation deck is already an anachronism. AI simply finishes that shift.
4. Partnership: Co-Create with Clients
Skeels identifies a crucial shift: “Clients will bring AI outputs too. They will arrive with drafts, frameworks, and pseudo-insights of their own. The agency’s role shifts from delivering answers to helping clients separate signal from noise.”
This requires a fundamentally different client relationship which is less about presentation and persuasion and more about collaborative sense-making. As Skeels puts it, agencies become “the stabilizing partner in a world of rapidly generated possibility.”
Curtis’s historical lens validates this: the best outcomes have always emerged when organisations brought users (in this case, clients) inside the design process itself.
numero’s Roadmap Forward
Reading Skeels and Curtis together clarified what we’re already sensing in our own work and gave us language and frameworks to accelerate our transformation. We’re restructuring around smaller, empowered teams with clearer ownership and faster decision cycles. We’re investing heavily in developing strategic capability across more of our organisation, earlier in people’s careers. We’re making strategy development genuinely collaborative, not something that happens behind closed doors. And we’re completely reimagining how we partner with clients, bringing them inside our judgement process rather than presenting them with finished answers.
This isn’t easy.
It requires letting go of comfortable hierarchies, traditional career paths, and familiar ways of working with clients. But both authors make the stakes clear: agencies that cling to old structures will be overwhelmed. Those that genuinely transform (not just adopt new tools, but rebuild their cultures and structures) won’t just survive. They’ll thrive.
The Ultimate Insight
Curtis closes his essay with an observation that crystallises everything: “Feeling becomes the new functionality.” After 30 years of digital transformation, he’s identified the pattern: as technology makes functional competence ubiquitous, human judgement and meaningful connection become the ultimate differentiators.
Skeels frames the same insight commercially: “In an era where anyone can generate ideas at scale, the real value lies in judgment, discernment, alignment, and the ability to turn possibility into coherent action.”
AI hasn’t changed the fundamental challenge. It’s simply removed any remaining ambiguity about what actually matters. For agencies, this is profoundly good news but only if we have the courage to transform ourselves before market pressure forces the issue. The question isn’t whether AI will replace agencies. It’s whether we’ll adapt fast enough to meet this moment. And having read Skeels and Curtis, I’m convinced we not only can, but must.
Read the full articles that inspired this thinking:
Jack Skeels – Good News: No, Your Agency Isn’t Going Away
Mark Curtis – Where is Design Heading?
And as we wrap up 2025 the numero® team is hard at work reviewing and revising our operating processes to reflect what I’ve learned.
What transformations is your agency making to harness AI effectively? I’d be keen to hear your perspective.
Richard Gilbert, Founder, numero®
