I used to own a web agency. Now I hardly hire one.

Building the shop by hand

When I started Pod1 in London in 2001 there was no Shopify. Pod1 later became BORN, and you can read how in my story. If a brand wanted to sell online, someone had to build the catalogue, the basket, the checkout and the emails that went out afterwards. In the very early days that was me, at home in my pyjamas late into the night, hand-coding in PHP3 and MySQL with a pile of reference books open for whenever I got stuck. Before long we had a team of talented developers and designers doing the work, and doing it far better than I could.

The difficulty was the business model. The work was hard, few people could do it and brands paid well for it. As our clients grew, so did the projects, and within a few years our minimum project was creeping towards £200,000.

What I stopped paying for

Twenty-five years later I'm on the other side of the table. I run HIRO, and I used to spend a lot of money on agencies: development, CRM and plenty else.

I don't any more. Over the past three months I've built my own tools with AI for most of it. There's a CRM engine, a tool for improving the website and its conversion, one for SEO and one for writing. I've built paid media tools too, though I'm not running them yet.

I'm a solopreneur, so all of this works in my favour. I sit right in the middle of it and get the benefit. My worry is for friends who run agencies. It must be a tough time.

The agencies I mean

I'm talking about the agencies small businesses hire. The Shopify agency that builds your store. The studio that puts up a WordPress site. The developer who builds a simple app. The email agency that sets up your flows. The paid media agency running your ads.

A founder with an AI agent can now do most of that, at any hour, without writing code. At DTC Live this month I met a lot of founders and solopreneurs, and the two things that used to stop them, technology and money, have mostly fallen away. It is harder than it sounds. Even so, nobody needs to pay an agency tens of thousands of pounds for a small brand's Shopify store any more.

Somebody still has to manage the agents

There's a catch, and it's a big one. These tools don't run themselves. I'm working harder at HIRO than I ever have, probably five times harder, because I have agents doing several jobs at once. It's like having staff. Someone has to brief them, check their work and keep on top of them.

Plenty of founders don't have that time. It's one of the things I help with in mentoring. Neither do most big organisations, where everyone already has a full day job. They'll still need people to run the agents for them. Probably fewer people than before, and that's where good agencies can earn their place. It's the same shift I talk about with bigger teams in my talks and training.

Deep roots in the pipes

Some work you want to trust to humans who have done it before. I'm a trustee of an agency that does fantastic work for big organisations, from the creative and the front end through to the back ends, the CRM systems and the plumbing between a website and everything behind it. AI can do some of that work. You still need someone smart at the top, orchestrating it, who knows what breaks and why.

Agencies with deep roots in the technology will last.

Creative still needs people

Making creative has never been cheaper. At DTC Live, Higgsfield showed one person producing what used to take fifty creatives a day, with 64 image and video generations running at once. I wrote up the rest of the day in Field Notes: DTC Live.

The thinking behind it is still hard. Working out what to say, who to say it to and why anyone should stop scrolling needs people who have done it before. You can start the process with AI. World-class work needs proper thinking.

Some of the best content we've made at HIRO is raw, founder-led video. Maddy and I did an ice plunge challenge, among others. Nobody could fake that authentically with AI, and it still works.

If I ran an agency today

• Small and senior. Fewer people with more experience, and AI doing the production work that used to need a junior team.
• Run the agents for clients. Most businesses don't have time to manage the tools themselves. Doing it well, and faster, is a service worth paying for.
• Sell the thinking. Creative strategy, the offer, what to fix first.
• Go deep on the plumbing. Integration work for bigger clients still needs people who know what they're doing.
• Price from the top. When we opened Pod1 in New York we put our prices up four or five times and won almost every pitch. Confidence in your price matters even more now.

If you're a small business hiring one

• Try it yourself first. Spend a week building the store or the email flows with an AI agent before you brief anyone. You'll either save the fee or write a much better brief.
• Be honest about your time. If you can't manage the agents, pay someone who can.
• Spend the money on creative and your own voice. That's where good people still make the biggest difference.
• Check what the machines say about you. More buyers now ask an AI assistant for a shortlist first. I wrote about that in The transaction hasn't moved. The decision already has.

I'm curious how my agency friends are finding it, and I'm pretty sure there's still room for them. The ones who change with the times will do things faster and better with AI. To every agency I've worked with over the last 25 years: thank you. It's going to change, and I think the good ones will be fine.