By Sammy Mansourpour, Managing Director, AgencyUK
Silicon Valley is expected to spend around $650 billion on AI in 2026. Unsurprisingly, investors are starting to ask a nervous question: what happens if the machines start doing the buying as well as the selling?
The recent “AI doomsday” thesis from Citrini Research suggests a bleak answer. As AI improves, it argues, jobs will disappear, demand will compress and purchasing will increasingly be handled by personal AI agents optimising for price. The theory is that if consumers outsource buying decisions to algorithms, brand loyalty disappears and marketing becomes irrelevant.
It’s a compelling narrative, but it deserves closer scrutiny from a marketer’s perspective.
There is no doubt AI will reshape the economy. It will change how people work, how consumers behave and how advertising is produced. The real question is not whether change is coming, but where the impact will land first.
Human resources become tech resources
The first shift will be economic. AI is unlikely to remove cost from the marketing ecosystem; it will simply move it.
As providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic introduce aggressive monetisation and subscription models, agencies will begin redirecting spend away from human resources and into technology infrastructure. In other words, the cost base changes shape.
Agency networks with large headcounts will face the most painful transition. Downsizing is expensive, and AI systems will initially be implemented unevenly across different agencies before network-wide platforms emerge. For holding groups already struggling with complex management structures, that transition could be slow and costly.
Smaller and mid-sized agencies, by contrast, may find themselves with a structural advantage. AI agents will allow them to scale production without scaling staff. Much of the technical legwork of production will disappear, freeing teams to focus on higher-value thinking. In a world where output becomes abundant, agility matters.
Creative strategy becomes the scarce resource
This does not mean human talent disappears – it changes shape.
Like the Industrial Revolution before it, AI will automate the legwork while increasing overall output. The difference is that creative industries are built on judgment as much as execution.
We will likely need fewer developers, editors and production specialists. But the demand for people who can shape ideas, interpret cultural signals and guide creative direction will increase.
Imagine a global brand running a pitch process in 2028. Every agency can now generate photorealistic films, synthetic influencers and thousands of personalised ad variants overnight. Production is no longer the bottleneck.
The decision instead hinges on insight. Which agency truly understands the brand? Which team recognises that despite confident rhetoric, the company might shy away from a bold position? Which strategists can sense what a client actually wants, even when the client isn’t entirely sure themselves?
AI can generate options. It cannot read a room. In that world, strategic judgment becomes the rarest commodity.
Will AI destroy brand loyalty?
Citrini’s scenario also assumes something more fundamental: that consumers will stop caring about brands altogether.
If personal AI agents handle purchasing decisions – from choosing a takeaway on Friday night to selecting household goods – the argument goes that price will become the dominant factor. Algorithms, after all, have no concept of brand loyalty.
But this assumes the human instructing the agent only cares about price.
If that were true, luxury markets would not exist. Consumers consistently make emotional purchases and justify them with rational explanations afterwards. Brands are bound up with identity, trust, aspiration and status in ways that simple optimisation cannot erase.
Where AI may have a greater impact is in B2B procurement. Corporate purchasing decisions are already driven by logic, and AI agents may increasingly handle routine vendor selection, driving price competition in commoditised services.
Advertising, however, is different. It is highly visible, strategically significant and deeply tied to brand perception. Decisions in this space will almost certainly retain human oversight. And, where humans are involved, emotion follows.
The human advantage
Agencies may need fewer executors, but the human brain will remain the most valuable asset in a creative business, even if it is no longer the largest cost base.
AI will transform production and scale creative output to levels previously unimaginable. But the emotional drivers behind why people buy – identity, aspiration, trust and taste – will remain stubbornly human.
AI may industrialise advertising, but it will not automate taste.
