Why AI is forcing businesses to rethink what they're selling.
If you run a service business, agency, consultancy, studio, whatever shape it takes, there's a question sitting underneath almost every client conversation you're having right now, whether they say it out loud or not:
Now that AI helps you finish the work faster, why should we still pay the same?
That’s a fair question but it’s also the wrong question, and I want to show you why.
I sold Digital Ethos right as AI was about to go mainstream, and I've spent the years since watching it do something most agencies haven't fully clocked yet.
It’s gone further than just making work faster as it's broken the old link between time and value that service pricing was built on.
This is directly important to you, whether you're a founder pricing your next retainer, a consultant staring at a scope-creep conversation, or an operator trying to work out if your margins are about to get squeezed or protected.
By the end of this, you'll know exactly what changes first, what "AI native" means beyond the buzzword, and why the businesses getting this right are pulling ahead.
Let's get into it.
It's an important time for businesses to flip to value and sell based on value, at least optically, from a sales process perspective. Internally, you're still able to manage that time to keep margins healthy.
That's really where the advantage comes from now, regardless of whether you use AI or not, because at this point every agency does.
That's why I recommend outcome-based pricing over channel-by-channel pitching.
If somebody's looking for 10% growth in sales, they probably care less now than they did before about how you're doing it or what channel it is. Historically, agencies would go in and pitch channel by channel, educating the client as they went.
That's largely done.
Now it's simpler:
How do we grow your revenue, and what does that look like?
On revenue share deals specifically, I've never been a huge fan of pure revenue or performance-based pricing, although having a component of it as an uplift is attractive.
I always favour fair retainers that give you ballast as an agency because that's how you build stability, hire good people, and train them properly.
Bigger brands will keep pushing for performance-based pricing, and if you can find a blend, that's the way to do it. As you know, value-based pricing isn't new.
It's just how it's positioned and delivered that matters.
Check out my post on AI Agencies
If AI helps you complete the work faster in an agency, or some parts of the work, why should the client pay the same amount? The client would expect efficiency gains to be passed straight back, right?
The key is this:
The efficiency gains allow the consultant or the team to do more work.
It doesn't mean they should be paid less for that work, because they're just able to do more in the time they have, or in the value they've proposed.
It doesn't mean the client is getting less bang for their buck, it means they're getting more. It's about how much more you can do, and how much faster you can move.
The other thing to keep in mind: with AI mainstream, everybody is using it which has levelled the playing field.
If it was just one or two agencies with access to this, maybe it would drive prices in one direction or another but because everybody has the same access, the same playing field for the most part, some of that gain gets wiped off.
So you need to do more to compete than ever before, which is where AI and the efficiency piece becomes absolutely critical. If anything, prices should rise.
To step beyond the base level of what everybody's doing with AI tools, you need more creative output, you need more humans involved in the process.
Marking a point in time here, in the third quarter of 2026:
Is AI making agencies more profitable, or is it helping clients squeeze them harder?
Truthfully, it's a double answer as agencies that are genuinely agentic layers, AI native, are 14% more profitable at the moment than agencies that aren't using or aren't yet AI native.
Promethean Research's 2026 Digital Agency Industry Report backs this up from another angle: only 28% of agencies raised their prices between 2024 and 2025, even as AI adoption became close to universal, which tells you the pricing pressure is already visible in the rate data.
AI native means you've built agentic agents and systems into the way you operate. Its become an operating layer within your business for efficiency.
All the big agencies are moving towards this as Omnicom has already spent $1.2 billion building out their own systemisation for it.
On a smaller scale, I see agencies with 20 people doing incredible work with Claude. They've built in sub-agents, something close to a co-CEO built out as an agent doing loads of work, all the way down to admin-based stuff.
Get that efficiency right and you gain back hours, 10 a week, 50 a week, whatever it might be by role.
Agencies still not leaning into it are watching their margins compress, from a healthy 20-plus percent down to low teens, and that's only going to get worse.
If you want a proper audit of where AI can move your margin, not just another tool subscription, this is what our AI Transformation consulting inside Unusual Group is built for. We dive into your agency's strengths and challenges, then co-create a complete AI adoption strategy covering everything from content to client reporting.
The same tools are available to everybody, from £20 or $20 a month up to $100 or $200 for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Pro. So what's stopping the client creating their own agency, GPT, or agent, and deciding they don't need the agency at all?
A lot of clients are testing exactly that and well, what's lacking is the human-in-the-loop experience and the strategic experience across multiple campaigns and sectors. You still need the agency depth and breadth of different skill sets.
One of the beauties of agencies has always been having multiple brains across different disciplines in one place.
That creativity is really hard to replicate and a large part of the strategic piece. Let's see where we are in a few years but there's a need for that hybrid.
In a few months' time, who knows where we'll be by the end of 2026.
Smaller agencies that are always firefighting, with localised clients right now, are at risk of cannibalisation, if not being killed off.
I see so many struggling and it's a time where, more than ever, independent agencies need to band together. I speak to hundreds of agencies every month, and I ask them how they're using AI.
Too often it's:
"Well, we've got Gemini, or we've got Claude, or we've got GPT, and we let the team go off and do what they want."
That's getting better, but there still aren't many businesses genuinely building proper systems and agentic layers into their roles. That's where the real efficiency comes from.
For the fuller conversation this is drawn from, including where I think this goes next, I sat down with Millennial Masters to go deeper on all of it.
Watch the full episode below:
Let’s go back to the question we started this with: if AI helps you finish faster, why should the client pay the same?
Well because they were never paying for your hours. They were paying for the outcome those hours produced, and AI just made it obvious that a lot of agencies had been pricing the wrong thing for years.
So go ahead, build the system, price for the outcome, and let AI do what it's good for: growing your margin.
Luke
Writer, The Success Method
P.S. If you want to see what an AI-native operating layer looks like inside a real agency, not just in theory, that's exactly what we build inside Unusual Group. Take a look here: https://www.unusualgroup.com/about .
To your unstoppable success!
Writer, The Success Method
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