Execution is deflating: drafts, variants, reports and boilerplate code now cost minutes. What appreciates is everything execution depended on: strategy, taste, accountability for outcomes, and the judgment to know when the machine is wrong. Agencies selling hours are exposed; agencies selling results are accelerated.
We automate our own work, so we watch this honestly. The tasks that filled agency timesheets for twenty years, first drafts, ad variants, monthly report assembly, routine implementation, have collapsed in cost. Any agency still billing them at 2022 hours is charging for friction the tools removed.
What did not deflate: knowing which problem matters, taste that separates competent from compelling, the willingness to be measured on outcomes, and the experience to catch confident nonsense before it ships to a client's customers.
How to buy in this market
Ask vendors how they use AI, and distrust both no-answers: those who deny using it are overpriced, those who are only a wrapper around it add nothing you could not prompt yourself.
The tell of a durable partner is what they measure. Deliverables are cheap now. Accountability for leads, sales and visibility is the scarce good.