The old agency model profits from your work taking longer

I spent fifteen years doing marketing, in-house and on the agency side. Some of the work I did back then, like a three-hour SEO task, an AI agent can now finish in about a minute.

So here is a question I would ask any agency today: if that task is on my invoice, what am I paying for? Three hours? One? The results? The answer says everything about how the industry is built.

The old agency model sells human time. Hourly, retainer, project fee, the format does not matter much. Underneath, the price tracks how many hours people spend on your account. That was a reasonable way to price work when human hours were the only way work got done. But it’s no longer valid, in the AI age. Value is no longer tied to the hour it took to produce it, and a business built on selling hours now has a structural problem: it earns most when work takes longest.

Think about what that does to incentives. An agency billing by the hour has no reason to get faster. Competition pushes a little, sure, but the model itself pushes the other way, hard. The classic shape I saw sold again and again was 25 hours a month at 125 euros an hour. When AI cuts the real work inside those hours by half, who gets the difference? In the old model, nobody volunteers to shrink their own invoice.

There is a newer problem too, and it worries me maybe even more: Agencies have of course started using AI in their delivery, which is sensible. But from what I have seen in the industry, far from all of them sign the kind of data processing agreements with clients that are standard practice in IT. Client data goes into AI tools, sometimes through employees’ personal accounts, with nothing in the contract covering it. If your agency uses AI on your account, ask what the DPA says. If the answer is vague, that is your answer.

To be fair, agencies are full of capable people, and many are adopting AI seriously. Some will transform completely, and I expect a few to do it well. But adoption inside an hourly P&L fights itself: every hour AI saves is an hour the model can no longer bill. A firm can bolt AI onto a business that is paid for effort, or it can be built for a world where effort and value have come apart. Those are different companies, and only one of them profits when your work gets done faster.

I would not found a traditional agency today. Growth work should be priced by what gets done, not by how long it takes. When you next review an agency contract, ask one thing: does this company earn more when my work goes faster, or when it goes slower? The answer tells you whose side the model is on.

If you want to see what the other kind of company looks like, book a call with your Growth Strategist. We will map where your fastest wins are.

Otso

Otso Karvinen

Co-founder & Growth Strategist

I help marketing and sales teams do more in a month than their competitors do in a quarter. With 15+ years in marketing and sales, I now help build agentic AI systems that let small teams deliver faster and better results. I’m easy to work with and happy to have a no-strings conversation about where you are and how I and our team at Parvi can help.

Read more about Otso Karvinen