Every Tech Wave Made Agencies Bigger. AI Will Too.

Agencies should be the last ones worried

There's an irony in agencies being anxious about AI. Truth is, agencies have been the first beneficiary of every technology wave for the past 40 years. Not just surviving them. Growing because of them.

We went back and looked at the data. The pattern is so consistent it's almost boring.

Wave 1: Desktop publishing (mid-1980s)

Before the Mac and PageMaker showed up in 1985, producing a brochure required a typesetter, a paste-up artist, and a trip to a print shop. The process took weeks and cost thousands. Small businesses couldn't afford professional marketing materials. They made do with typewritten flyers and hand-drawn signs.

Desktop publishing collapsed the production cost by about 80%. The prediction at the time and typesetters and layout artists would be out of work. Agencies would shrink because clients could "do it themselves."

What actually happened: the US graphic design industry grew from roughly $6 billion in 1985 to $15 billion by 1995 (AIGA estimates). Demand exploded when producing marketing materials got cheap. Every small business suddenly wanted a logo, a brochure, a business card, a newsletter. They could afford it now. And most of them quickly discovered that owning PageMaker didn't make them a designer. They hired agencies.

The technology eliminated some production roles. But it created so much new demand that the industry tripled in a decade.

Wave 2: The internet (mid-1990s)

This one's personal for a lot of us. The early web was supposed to disintermediate everything. Clients could build their own websites (GeoCities, anyone? ). They could run their own email campaigns. They could sell directly online without middlemen.

The prediction? Agencies would become irrelevant because the tools were "so easy anyone can use them."

The reality: the internet created the modern agency industry and before 1995, "digital agencies" didn't exist as a category. By 2000, there were thousands. By 2010, digital work was the majority of revenue for most agencies.

Look at the numbers. The Interactive Advertising Bureau started tracking digital ad spend in 1996 at $267 million. By 2005: $12.5 billion. By 2015: $59.6 billion. By 2024: over $200 billion in the US alone, so every dollar of that spend meant work for someone. Agencies captured a huge share.

And the "anyone can build a website" thing? Look, we've been hearing that for 30 years. Squarespace, Wix, WordPress. All great tools. All supposedly going to kill web agencies. The number of web development agencies in the US has grown every single year since 1998. Because the bar for "good enough" keeps rising, and businesses keep needing help clearing it.

Wave 3: Social media (late 2000s)

Same script. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Free to use. "Every brand can be its own publisher." Why would you need an agency?

Because managing social media well is a full-time job, and most companies discovered that about three months in. The initial excitement of posting on Facebook gave way to the reality of content calendars, community management, paid promotion, analytics, crisis response, platform algorithm changes, and the relentless demand for fresh content.

Social media management wasn't a service category in 2007, and by 2015, it was a $10 billion+ industry globally. Hundreds of thousands of agency jobs that simply didn't exist before.

We watched this happen in real time at agencies we worked with. The pitch went from "you should be on Facebook" to "we'll run your entire social presence" in about 18 months. Clients went from curious to overwhelmed that fast.

Wave 4: Mobile (early 2010s)

When the iPhone launched in 2007 and the App Store opened in 2008, everyone needed a mobile strategy. Then a responsive website. Then an app. Then a mobile-first redesign. Then a progressive web app.

Each sub-wave created its own surge of agency work. And each time, the tools got easier but the expectations got higher. By the time you could build a decent responsive site with a template, clients expected custom mobile experiences with animations, offline capability, and sub-second load times.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows web developer employment growing from about 100,000 in 2010 to over 200,000 by 2020. Mobile didn't eat those jobs. It doubled them.

Wave 5: Marketing automation and data (mid-2010s)

HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel. Tools that were supposed to automate marketing so well that you wouldn't need external help.

Instead, they created an entire consulting network. Marketing operations. CRM implementation. Analytics and attribution. Data strategy. Tag management. Companies bought these $50,000/year platforms and then realized they needed someone to actually run them. Often, that someone was an agency.

We lived through this at our own shop. We started doing HubSpot implementations in 2016. By 2018 it was 30% of our revenue. The reality is, that revenue category didn't exist two years prior. The tool created the work.

So what does AI actually change?

Every wave follows the same four stages:

Stage 1: The tool appears. Everyone experiments. "Anyone can do this now." Panic about obsolescence.

Stage 2: Cost collapse. The thing that used to cost $50,000 now costs $500. Or takes 60 hours instead of 600.

Stage 3: Demand explosion. Because it's cheaper and quicker, way more people want it. Markets that couldn't afford professional services now can.

Stage 4: Complexity shift. The easy version becomes non-negotiable. Tough advantage moves to the harder, more strategic, more human layer on top. That's where agencies live.

We're currently in Stage 2 heading into Stage 3 with AI. Here's the thing: the cost of producing a first draft, generating design concepts, analyzing data, building basic automations, all of it's dropping fast. What happens next? More demand. From more clients. For more work. At a higher strategic level.

The agencies that will struggle are the ones selling Stage 2 work (basic production) at Stage 1 prices. If your entire value proposition is "we write blog posts" and that's all, then yes, AI is a threat. But if your value pitch is "we build content strategies that drive qualified leads and we use every tool available to execute them better than your internal team can," you're fine. Better than fine.

The numbers are already moving

We're not speculating here. We're seeing it.

Forrester projected that AI would add $1.7 trillion in new marketing spend globally by 2028. Not shifting existing spend. New spend. Money that enters the market because AI makes new things possible.

Agencies specializing in AI-adjacent services grew revenue 34% faster than traditional agencies in 2025, according to a Promethean Research survey of 400+ agencies. The gap is widening.

And the historical comparison that feels most relevant: when the internet created the digital agency category, those agencies didn't cannibalize traditional agencies. They grew the total market. Total US agency revenue (all types) roughly doubled between 1995 and 2010. The pie got bigger.

We expect AI to do the same thing. Actually, we're watching it happen already.

One more thing the anxious takes get wrong

Every "AI will kill agencies" take makes the same mistake. It assumes a fixed amount of work in the world. Like there's a set pile of tasks, and AI grabs from that pile, so humans get less.

But that's never how it works. The pile grows.

When spreadsheets automated accounting calculations in the 1980s, the number of accountants in the US went up, not down. Because spreadsheets made financial analysis accessible to smaller businesses, created new types of analysis that weren't practical before, and raised the standard for what "good" financial management looked like. More work. More jobs. Higher wages.

Same thing is happening now. The agency that used to produce one video a month for a client can now produce four. The agency that could only afford to serve $50,000+ clients can now profitably serve $15,000 clients, and that matters more than you'd think. The agency that spent 20 hours on reporting can redirect those hours to strategy.

More output. More clients. More value per hour. That's not a threat. That's a growth engine.