Even in the Age of AI, you may still well hire some human agencies. At least for a while. AI Agents can’t do everything in marketing, in design, etc. — for now.
So I want to talk about something that every founder, every VP, every revenue leader has experienced but rarely talks about openly: the slow decay of even your best agency relationships.
Because here’s the thing — agencies aren’t bad. Many of them are genuinely great. They bring expertise you don’t have in-house, they ramp fast, and the best ones truly move the needle early on.
But even the best agencies almost always … run their course.
Let me give you a real example.
When an Agency Cancelled My Own Session — At My Own Event
A few years back, we had an agency “helping” us with speakers and speaker content for a SaaStr AI event. Sourcing speakers, managing the content pipeline, all of it. And they were decent! At first.
Then one day, I realized the agency had cancelled my session the day before my keynote to make their lives easier in scheduling.
My. Own. Session. At a SaaStr event!
They didn’t reschedule it. They didn’t flag it. They didn’t even tell me until the day before. They just … cancelled it. Gone.
Now, that sounds crazy. And it is crazy. But if you’ve worked with enough agencies over enough years, it’s not even that surprising. Because this is what happens at the tail end of every agency engagement. The A-team moves on to the newer, shinier client. Your account gets handed down. The passion fades. The details slip.
And eventually, someone cancels the founder’s own session at his own event and nobody even notices.
The Agency Business Model Has a Built-In Decay Function
This isn’t about bad agencies vs. good agencies. It’s about the fundamental nature of the business model.
Here’s how it almost always works:
- Month 1-3: You get the A-team. The senior strategist is on every call. The founder of the agency might even show up. The work is sharp, fast, and tailored to you. You think, “Finally, we found the right partner.”
- Month 4-8: The A-team starts rotating. You get a new account manager. They’re good! But they’re learning your business from a brief, not from instinct. Things are still solid, but the magic is fading.
- Month 9-18: You’re now being serviced by the B-team, maybe the C-team. The deliverables are technically fine but feel generic. You’re paying the same retainer for less strategic value. You start wondering if you should just hire someone in-house.
- Month 18+: Time to move on. Someone cancels your session at your own event.
This isn’t a failure of character. It’s a failure of incentives. Agencies are always hunting for the next logo, the next case study, the next big contract. Your account becomes mature — which in agency-speak means “stable enough to staff with junior people.”
AI Agents Always Give You Their Best
And this is where the shift gets really interesting.
AI agents don’t have a decay function. They don’t get bored. They don’t rotate your account to a junior associate. They don’t quietly deprioritize you because a bigger client signed last quarter.
Every single time you engage an AI agent, you get its best. Its full context. Its full attention. Its full capability. At 8am and at 2am. On Day 1 and on Day 500.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a fundamental change in the nature of outsourced work.
Now, I’m not saying AI agents can do everything a great agency can do today. They can’t. The best agencies still bring human creativity, relationship leverage, and strategic intuition that AI hasn’t fully replicated yet.
But the gap is closing fast. And AI agents have one structural advantage that no agency will ever match: they never mail it in.
The End of the Line For Mediocre Human Agencies?
If you’re running a startup or scaling a B2B company, here’s my practical advice:
Use agencies when you need to. They’re still valuable for specialized expertise and burst capacity. But go in with clear eyes. Know that the honeymoon period is real — and it has an expiration date. Build your contracts and relationships around that reality.
And start experimenting seriously with AI agents for the workflows where consistency and reliability matter more than creative brilliance. Because in those workflows, the AI agent that gives you 90% of the quality 100% of the time will beat the agency that gives you 100% of the quality for three months and then slowly fades to 60%.
The best agencies will adapt. They’ll use AI themselves to fight the decay function. They’ll build hybrid models where humans do the high-judgment work and AI handles the consistency layer.
But the old model — charge a premium retainer, deliver the A-team for 90 days, and hope the client doesn’t notice when the quality drops — that model is over.
Because AI agents always give you their best.
And human agencies? You often get their best up front. Sometimes longer. But rarely … forever.
It’s just part of the nature of the business model. And now there’s an alternative.
