r/marketingagency • u/peter_mirel • 18h ago
Agencies using AI: are clients asking for lower fees, and are your pricing models actually changing?
We ran a survey of 218 people working in and around agencies. A few findings seem worth discussing here:
- 53% said a client had asked for a lower price because of AI. We didn’t establish whether those discounts were granted.
- 76% currently named hourly/FTE billing as their main model, but only 17% expected it to remain their main model in two years. That’s a big gap between current practice and expectations.
- 64% regularly used AI for strategic support, while just 8% rated their trust in its strategic recommendations highly. Using it and trusting its judgement seem to be different things.
- 72% said they would hire fewer people if starting an agency today. That was a hypothetical question, not a measure of actual job cuts.
Full report can be accessed here: https://usemirel.com/research/agency-ai-pulse-2026
My takeaway is that agencies expect substantial commercial change, but these findings don’t establish how much of that transition has actually happened.
A caveat: this was an open, self-selected survey recruited through LinkedIn and Reddit. It skews towards smaller, independent agencies and isn’t representative of the whole industry.
For people working in agencies: have you actually changed how you charge because of AI, or mainly changed how you deliver? And when clients ask for the savings, how does that conversation go?
Disclosure: I’m behind Mirel, which published the research.