“A 100-people agency is now 5 people with AI” invites a fair challenge: which hundred people? Show your work.
Fine. Here’s the mapping — role by role, honestly, including the roles that don’t map.
Roles agents absorb
Junior and mid-level production. Junior designers producing banner resizes, junior copywriters adapting the master text into twelve formats, junior developers building the CRUD screens, junior analysts assembling the weekly report. This work is real, necessary — and it is exactly what agents do best: high-volume execution inside constraints a senior defined. This was the majority of agency headcount. It maps almost one-to-one.
Research and preparation. The competitive scans, the audience research decks, the technical audits, the discovery documentation. An agent produces in an hour what a strategy junior produced in a week — and the senior reviewing it applies the same skepticism either way.
QA and adaptation. Testing flows, checking links, adapting campaigns per market and language, keeping the spreadsheet of versions. Systematic work with clear success criteria: agent territory.
Roles that concentrate into seniors
Creative direction, strategy, architecture. These don’t get automated — they get amplified. A creative director who could explore three directions with a team of four can explore twenty with agents, and their taste becomes more valuable, not less, because selection is now the bottleneck. Same for the engineer deciding system architecture and the strategist deciding what the campaign should claim.
The catch: this amplification only works on people who already have judgement. Agents multiply seniors. They flatter juniors into shipping plausible garbage. That’s why our team is senior-only — it’s not elitism, it’s how the math works.
Roles that simply disappear
The coordination layer. Account managers, project managers, traffic managers, and every role whose function was moving information between people. Not because they were useless — because the thing they coordinated no longer exists. When two people and their agents do the whole project, the information never leaves the room. There is nothing to hand over, so there is no handover role.
The reporting apparatus. The people who made the deck about the work for the meeting about the deck. The client now looks at the artifact itself, which is finished or it isn’t.
What doesn’t map (the honest part)
Some things a 100-person agency has that we don’t, and won’t pretend to:
Bodies in many rooms. Global agencies put a team physically next to your team in São Paulo and another in Singapore. If you need staffed presence in eight offices, that’s a different product. We’re not it.
Absorption capacity for chaos. A big agency can throw fifteen people at a crisis weekend. We throw agents and a few seniors — which covers more than you’d think, but there is a scale of simultaneous chaos where headcount still wins.
The theatre. The big pitch, the office tour, the twelve-person meeting that makes a decision feel important. Some organizations genuinely need this to get internal buy-in. We can’t provide it, and we’ve stopped apologizing.
The scoreboard
For the actual output — the sites, apps, campaigns, content, systems — five seniors with agents genuinely deliver what the hundred delivered, faster, because most of the hundred were never producing output. They were producing coordination.
We didn’t shrink the agency. We deleted the part of it that wasn’t work.
Want the full argument? Read the manifesto. Want it applied to your project? Talk to us.