How AI Can Drive A Hiring Surge In Your Agency

Forbes

10-07-2025

Abigail Stuart, founding partner of Day One Strategy, with 20+ years in brand and market research, drives innovation and champions AI.
How would you finish this sentence: 'In my agency, AI has the power to …'? Chances are, your answer didn't include 'create jobs.'
Since 2023, when Goldman Sachs made the bombshell statement that AI could put 300 million jobs at risk, the narrative surrounding AI and employment has been overwhelmingly negative. And it seems that agencies should be particularly worried—Pew Research shows that our workforce, which skews toward educated, well-paid, female professionals, is among the most exposed to AI's disruption.
Agencies, both big and small, are feeling the pressure, from WPP's CEO resignation to boutique firms making staff cuts. Yet while we hear reports of competitors making redundancies, at Day One Strategy, we're experiencing the opposite: We're growing and hiring. This isn't happening despite AI; it's happening because of it.
Here are three ways agencies can harness AI to create jobs rather than cut them, based on our firsthand experience.
1. Use AI to win more business (and keep it).
The most immediate application is enhancing your 'request for proposal' (RFP) process. AI can conduct deep competitive research, analyze client needs and identify unspoken business challenges. Think of it as a tool to boost your knowledge and support you to respond credibly to the RFP, without weeks of desk research.
But the step change comes when you move beyond internal efficiency to client-facing innovation. At our agency, we run AI-powered workshops at project kickoff to unlock insights from clients' existing data. Many organizations, particularly in healthcare and pharma, sit on mountains of legacy data that remain impenetrable to the teams who need it most. Using AI to synthesize and surface actionable insights delivers immediate value without extending timelines or budgets.
When clients experience your AI-enhanced approach firsthand, retention naturally follows. We've found that as we win more projects, we need more people in client-facing and operational roles to manage the increased workload. The key is hiring professionals who embrace AI innovation while understanding that the careful nurturing of client relationships remains critical to agency success.
2. Expand your offering through AI.
Once you're using AI to win more core business, it's time to set your sights wider. Look upstream and downstream in your clients' project workflows. Which adjacent services could you credibly deliver with AI augmentation?
We're a market research and insights agency, so our involvement traditionally ended with delivering research reports and recommendations—but not anymore. With a combination of human expertise and AI frameworks, we've moved beyond research into strategy and communications, climbing up the value chain from researchers to guardians of customer insight.
Recently, we helped a client test and refine their communications to doctors about their HIV drug. In the past, we'd simply advise on which messages to use. Now, we build personas for customers loyal to competitor brands and use AI to simulate their responses to our client's messaging. We then develop frameworks that sales teams can use for effective objection handling.
Having successfully expanded our role within existing projects, we're now ready to pitch for projects in these new areas. And so we're hiring experts in the relevant disciplines, as well as AI strategists who can harness technology to capitalize on commercial opportunities.
3. Build your own AI products.
You're winning more core business, you're expanding your offerings … what comes next? I believe that for agencies to succeed in the AI era, we need to do more than just leverage existing technology. We need to build our own.
If you're not a tech agency, that may sound daunting. But it begins by creating a culture where your team of AI enthusiasts has the space and support to play. We've found that hiring people with the right mindset and encouraging them to experiment can light fires. We've got everyone building their own GPTs; we take the best ones and scale them.
With an established culture of collaboration and courage, you'll be ready to identify a client need that's going unanswered. Where traditional methods are failing by being cumbersome, costly and slow, you can develop a tool that makes things easier, cheaper and faster for your clients.
A product can't exist on its own. You'll need to hire talented developers to build a first-of-its-kind solution, subject matter experts to shape it around client needs and implementation experts to ensure it delivers.
Choose Your Agency's AI Future
AI has the potential to help agencies thrive in a challenging market. But it won't be enough to simply bolt on AI to your existing model; AI needs to be built into your agency at a foundational level. Recent research by McKinsey shows that employees are ready to embrace AI—it's up to leaders to steer the ship toward AI maturity.
As a small, tech-focused agency, we've run toward AI and built our positioning around it. We're intentionally targeting clients with the right appetite for AI, and we acknowledge that this approach may exclude more cautious potential clients in the process. That's a sacrifice we're willing to make as we're seeing a growing market that's hungry for this approach.
The impact of AI on agency employment isn't predetermined. While some companies will use AI primarily for cost reduction, others will harness it for growth. The difference lies in vision and execution. The question isn't whether AI will transform agencies—it's whether your agency will use that transformation to shrink or to soar. The choice, and the opportunity, is yours.
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