If Machines Do 95% of the Ad Work, the Remaining 5% Becomes the Whole Price

What Happened

Start with the holding companies’ headcount plans. Ad Age reported on July 13 that WPP will cut several hundred more roles worldwide before the end of 2026, roughly 1% of its workforce. Reported headcount had already fallen 9% to 98,655 during 2025, under a restructuring program targeting £500 million in savings. Omnicom, having closed its $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic, is cutting more than 4,000 jobs and folding several legacy agency brands into other units. Across the wider US economy, Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 101,743 announced cuts citing AI in the first half of 2026, about 23% of all announced cuts, already past the 54,836 recorded for all of 2025.

Against that backdrop, a line from Brandtech Group founder David Jones in a Financial Times interview lands harder: why would you not do 95% of the work with a fast, efficient machine? Jones made the same argument more bluntly at Cannes Lions in June. Less than 1% of all marketing is made with generative AI today, he said, and it will be 100%. His proof point was a NetApp Super Bowl spot that went from brief to delivery in 14 working days. Brandtech says it has trained more than 425,000 people across 6,000 brands, with 90,000 of them taking generative AI courses.

What This Means for Founders

The pricing model breaks before the headcount does. Agencies, dev shops, design studios, localization firms, video post houses: they all quote in hours. How many people for how many weeks sets the invoice. A Super Bowl spot delivered in 14 working days is frightening not because of quality debates but because of arithmetic. When the billable hours attached to a given deliverable fall, revenue falls with them unless the hourly rate rises. And the case for raising the rate evaporates the moment the client believes AI made the work cheap.

So invert the 95%. If machines do 95%, then the remaining 5% is the entire price. The trouble is that most service firms cannot write down what that 5% actually is. Is it deciding what the brand should say? Is it navigating a client’s internal approval chain? Is it having the taste to reject the four generated options that are subtly wrong? A firm that has not defined it, and still puts hours on the quote, hands the client a negotiation anchored at the 95% price for 100% of the work.

The counter-move that is already visible in the market is not resistance but repackaging. Some studios have shifted to outcome pricing, charging per approved asset or per campaign rather than per hour, which lets production speed become margin instead of lost revenue. Others sell the judgment layer directly: a smaller senior team on retainer that reviews, rejects, and takes responsibility for machine output, with generation itself billed near cost. Both moves require naming the 5% out loud, in a contract, in front of a client who would rather not hear it.

The version of this that hits software founders is close by. Anyone whose company is an implementation partner, an integrator, or a staffed engagement is on the same clock. The next time you write a proposal, delete the hours line and see what is left holding the price up. If nothing is, that is the work for this quarter.