By Wayne Blodwell, Global SVP Programmatic at Assembly Global
Spend enough time talking to AI startups and you’ll quickly notice a familiar theme.
“We’ll save your team 80% of their time.”
Perhaps they’re right. The pace of innovation in agentic AI is extraordinary, and it’s becoming increasingly believable that many of the operational tasks that consume our industry today will soon be even more heavily automated.
Campaign setup. Reporting. Workflow management. Optimisation. Integrations. Activities that have traditionally taken hours are rapidly becoming minutes.
But I can’t help thinking we’ve become distracted by the wrong conversation.
The more interesting question isn’t whether AI can save us time. It’s ‘what will we do with the time it creates?’.
For years, our industry has employed incredibly talented people to spend a significant proportion of their week operating technology. AI has the potential to change that equation completely.
Instead of building reports, perhaps we’ll spend more time questioning whether clients (across every sector of the industry) are measuring the right things in the first place.
Instead of simply activating audiences, perhaps we’ll invest more time understanding how consumer behaviour is changing and whether those audiences remain relevant.
Instead of becoming experts in platforms, perhaps we’ll become even better students of our clients’ businesses, their categories and the commercial challenges they’re trying to solve.
In other words, execution becomes easier. Understanding becomes more important.
There’s an interesting parallel in financial services.
For years, automation has steadily taken over portfolio management, reporting and trading. Rather than making financial advisors obsolete, it shifted where they created value. The best advisors aren’t differentiated by the software they use; they’re differentiated by the quality of their advice, their understanding of a client’s objectives and their ability to guide complex decisions.
Eventually, every company will have access to sophisticated AI. Every company will automate workflows. Every company will deploy agents.
Those capabilities will become expected rather than exceptional.
The real differentiator will be much harder to copy.
Which company understands my business better than anyone else?
Which company has the strongest perspective on where my category is heading?
Which company understands how media consumption is evolving, and what that means for my business?
Perhaps that’s the real opportunity AI presents to our industry. Not simply to reduce costs or improve efficiency, but to redeploy our collective expertise towards the work that has always mattered most: helping clients make better commercial decisions.
As AI continues to democratise execution, understanding may become the last true competitive advantage.
Which leaves some unanswered questions:
If AI really does give us back 80% of our time, will we use it to do the same work faster or to become far more valuable to our clients? How do we bring talent through as understanding is gained through experience of execution? Where’s the moat?
The final point I’ll make is that this is a generational opportunity for those that lean in – I saw it once with programmatic, people before me saw it with digital, now we all have an opportunity to shape the next wave of advertising. How does that not get you fired up as we head through H2?
