Context Is the Moat: Reinventing the Agency Model
Agencies don’t win on tooling—they win on context. Turn brand memory into your moat.
The Spark
Each wave of digital agencies changed the game:
The .com boom made digital possible.
The social era made it cultural.
The programmatic era made it measurable.
This era is different. It unlocks massive efficiencies—and forces leaders to rethink the model. In Anthropic Economic Index: Tracking AI’s role in the US and global economy, the share of conversations where AI performs tasks end-to-end (“directive use”) rose from 27% to 39% over nine months and reaches ~77% among enterprise users—evidence that routine production work is shifting to machines while human time concentrates on judgment and collaboration.
A seasoned industry veteran asked me today: How transparent should agencies be about using AI?
My answer: completely. Hiding AI to protect margins props up an outdated model. Transparency creates a better client experience—built on speed, collaboration, and trust.
The old model is already cracking. Agencies aren’t just slow; they’re paying a fragmentation penalty—hours lost to RFP cycles, budgets misallocated by siloed data, and creative trapped in disconnected tools.
So I asked myself: If I were launching a services business today, how would I design it?
Where Value Really Lives
For decades, pricing assumed clients pay for hours—retainers, T&M, fixed fees. AI changes that. Clients don’t want to fund routine work—research, formatting, reporting—because machines can do it instantly.
What they value now is:
Speed: getting to a credible first draft fast.
Shared experience: shaping the work in real time.
Codified IP: lessons and rules embedded so every interaction makes the system smarter.
Findings in Anthropic Economic Index: Tracking AI’s role in the US and global economy underscore this shift: a decisive tilt toward direct automation—especially inside enterprises—moves value from production to judgment, taste, and context.
The First Draft, Reimagined
Agencies used to disappear behind the curtain and return weeks later with a polished deck. In the AI era, the first draft becomes the collaborative moment:
Upload a brief.
AI generates structured storyboards, strategies, or directions.
Strategists, planners, creatives—and the client—curate together.
It’s not about perfection. It’s about accelerating to where human judgment matters most. In this article, directive use means tasks the model completes end-to-end with minimal human involvement—translation, extraction, formatting, or policy-constrained copy—distinct from augmentation, where humans and the model iterate together on the work. This framing follows Anthropic Economic Index: Tracking AI’s role in the US and global economy.
The flywheel: Faster first drafts → confidence → delegation → leverage.
From Abundance to Simplification
Generative tools create abundance—hundreds of options from a single input. Abundance without design is friction. The modern agency’s job is simplification:
Package abundance into navigable choices.
Turn 200 raw images into 3 clear storyboards.
Make exploration energizing, not overwhelming.
In Anthropic Economic Index: Tracking AI’s role in the US and global economy, a bottom-up taxonomy of 630 real-world categories ranges from font selection and storyboard drafting to battery charging guidance and physics simulations—illustrating why variety explodes and why agencies win by organizing that abundance into clear choices. Abundance isn’t the value. Organized abundance is.
The New Agency IP
Old IP lived in people (instincts, reputations), artifacts (decks, showreels), and recognition (awards). Useful—but scattered. New IP is a reinforcement loop:
Every prioritization, curation, and creative judgment feeds the system.
Historical campaigns and rules inform each new draft.
Over time, your tools reflect your codified judgment.
This isn’t static IP. It’s brand memory—a living stylebook that learns with every draft, edit, and outcome. That reinforcement layer becomes your proprietary context—the fingerprint competitors can’t copy.
Context Is the Operating System
The agencies winning now don’t just “use AI.” They build contextual intelligence that compounds:
Historical performance informs creative choices.
Brand memory preserves institutional knowledge.
Reinforcement loops make each campaign smarter.
Context Is the Operating System. Adoption will never be uniform across regions or teams. Without a shared context layer, that means uneven outcomes. With a context operating system—brand memory, creative/playbook templates, decision rules, and learned examples—you ship judgment alongside tools. Any team, anywhere, opens with the same high-quality first draft, the same guardrails, and the same rationale for why an option is recommended. That makes great work portable, consistent, and compounding: every win updates the system so the next office, vendor, or time zone starts smarter.
The New Value Stack
What clients pay for has shifted to:
Strategic curation of AI-generated options.
Contextual intelligence that improves first drafts.
Collaborative exploration instead of black-box delivery.
Continuous learning systems that get better with each interaction.
These are the layers least threatened by automation’s rise and most amplified by it—consistent with Anthropic Economic Index: Tracking AI’s role in the US and global economy.
A New Social Contract
Transparency about AI isn’t a disclosure; it’s a way of working.
Clients don’t pay for junior grind.
They partner with the strategists and creatives they value most.
Together, they explore, iterate, and refine—faster than ever.
The contract is simple: We’ll use AI to reach meaningful drafts faster. We’ll collaborate with you at that level. And every draft makes both our team and our system smarter.
Closing Thought
The agency of the future isn’t defined by the tools it hides—it’s defined by the context it ships. Codify brand memory, standardize the first draft, and let every win teach the system.
Transparent. Collaborative. Context-rich. The agencies that do this won’t just adapt. They’ll lead.