Ben Crawford, co-founder & chief commercial officer, Brainwaves
Everyone in the agency world is talking about AI; strategy decks are full of it and new business pitches lead with it.
Yet walk the floor of most marketing teams or agencies and you’ll find something different: a workforce that hasn’t yet really moved.
A recent Financial Times article highlighted growing reluctance among younger workers to embrace AI in day-to-day work, even as leadership teams aggressively push transformation agendas.
In many organisations, AI has become a top-down commercial priority before it has become a bottom-up cultural shift.
Agencies are not immune to this tension.
The AI behaviour change gap
Agencies and marketers are investing heavily in AI tools and transformation narratives, but far less in the behavioural change required to help people genuinely work differently inside day-to-day workflows.
At the leadership level, AI is largely being treated as a margin and efficiency story.
But for many employees, especially junior and mid-level staff, demonstrating efficiency can feel like reducing their own value inside businesses still built around utilisation, headcount and hours.
Declaring transformation is far easier than building cultures where people feel safe changing how they work.
Agencies are still people businesses and their people are their greatest asset.
The question is whether leaders are doing the genuine work of bringing them with them, or just announcing the destination and expecting everyone to find their own way there.
What people on the floor actually need to develop
The people who thrive in this environment will not simply be the ones using the most AI tools.
They will be the ones combining strategic thinking, AI fluency and commercial understanding into tangible solutions.
Agencies are already hiring for this shift. One recent holding company job description called for talent capable of orchestrating AI-enabled workflows across strategy, media, creative and data teams while operating credibly with both clients and technical specialists.
That hybrid profile will quickly become one of the industry’s most valuable skill sets
We are seeing this first-hand at Brainwaves during onboarding with agency and in-house teams.
Often, the challenge is not learning the software itself, but rebuilding confidence in the strategic craft around it.
Recently, we have included training programs focused on both craft and AI fluency, helping teams embed not just the software, but the thinking behind it.
As AI accelerates production and research tasks, strategy is increasingly becoming the bottleneck.
The most useful systems are not the ones that simply generate answers, but the ones that help teams think better, explore stronger options and strengthen decision-making.
The organisations seeing the strongest adoption of tools are generally the ones pairing technology rollout with capability building, training and active leadership participation — not simply mandating usage targets from above.
For individuals, the investment worth making is not in mastering a single tool, but in building the habit of integrating AI into real workflows and articulating the business value it creates.
The commercials have to change
This is where the behaviour change and the commercial model converge.
Agencies are making significant investments in AI tools, workflows and (ideally) upskilling, while procurement pressure still runs in one direction: cheaper, faster and fewer people.
In a memorable global pitch process I worked on, procurement circulated a detailed AI disclosure sheet asking agencies to specify where AI was being used, what efficiencies it created and how much time or cost reduction it delivered.
Clients are no longer just listening to AI narratives; they are auditing operational usage directly, but on a model focused on hours.
That model cannot hold. The traditional agency equation, headcount and hours driving revenue, is being disrupted.
Clients are increasingly buying systems and operational capability, not just time.
The agencies that succeed in AI transformation will not be the ones with the most tools.
They will be the ones who redesign incentives, retrain talent and build cultures where AI adoption feels empowering rather than threatening.
Feature image- Ben Crawford, co-founder & chief commercial officer at Brainwaves.