On Nov. 30 of this year, we will celebrate the third birthday of ChatGPT. To say that the adoption of ChatGPT and its competitors has been anything short of remarkable is understating the obvious.
Predictions of the end of humanity, or at the very minimum the end of work, have been flying around ever since.
In our industry, many aspects of our day-to-day are easy targets for the power
and capabilities of AI. I have written before about Meta and Alphabet offering
end-to-end agency services powered by AI. Amazon this week launched its new agentic AI tool inside its Creative Studio, positioned as a real-time creative partner for advertisers. Through a
conversational interface, brands can brainstorm ideas, generate storyboards, produce professional-quality videos and display ads in hours, all at no extra cost.
Also this week, Martin
Sorrell’s S4 Capital announced it was fully embracing the pivot from agency to agentic, rewiring its business into three AI workforces: data-driven strategy, automated content and optimized
media. These are the exact same services that Meta, Alphabet and Amazon offer with their "AI agencies.”
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“We personally estimate about 65% of the tasks agencies get paid for
currently could be done by AI agents with today’s technology,” said Wes ter Haar, an executive director of S4 Capital, on a company earnings call. S4 highlighted an example of a
recent Pixel smartphone campaign, in which AI handled nearly every part of the production pipeline: scriptwriting, storyboarding, pre-production, production, and post were all executed by AI agents.
What would have taken months for a traditional agency was compressed into weeks.
Martin Sorrell is a smart man. He initially launched S4 because he knew traditional agency holding companies
were not making significant money or margin in any of the pipelines, except for media. So he scaled a business model that could offer these services more competitively than traditional agencies. Now
that offering is being challenged by AI. Thus the pivot.
At the same time though, this week also saw a number of articles that highlighted a slowdown of unencumbered AI adoption into
businesses. A study from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that among firms with more than 250 staff, adoption rates of AI peaked at just under 14% earlier this summer, before slipping back to about
12%.
Of course, this could be a mere blip in the data, but a recent MIT study, “State of AI in Business 2025,” found that only 5% of corporate AI pilots tend to deliver any
meaningful gains in revenue. The best returns came from back-office automation rather than sales or marketing tools. And eMarketer reported that among U.S. adults, preference for human-created content
had grown between 2023 and 2025.
It took eight years for CDs to replace vinyl and cassettes as the primary music format, and 11 years for online music to replace CDs. So it is way too soon to
draw any conclusions, other than to remind yourself of marketing author Joseph Jaffe’s dinosaur analogy: Dinosaurs were wiped out because they couldn't adapt to a changed environment.
Don’t be a dinosaur.