From billable hours to billion-dollar IP: Agencies face AI reckoning

AI isn’t another wave—it’s the tide that’s going to redraw the shoreline. Over the next decade, it will be a million times more powerful than it is today. Even in the next two or three years, it will be thousands of times more capable than the tools you’re experimenting with right now.

When the building blocks of value creation change, entire industries get rebuilt. That means every client industry you serve today is heading for reinvention in the next ten years. And this time, your customers will have access to the same tools you do. They’ll experiment, learn faster, and expect every campaign, creative, and strategy you produce to match the AI-powered convenience and precision they’re experiencing elsewhere.

If ten people today can build a $100 billion company using AI—like Figma did by becoming the go-to design platform for millions—you can create a billion-dollar piece of intellectual property from your best ideas. The question is: will you?

Don’t start with AI

It’s tempting to start with the technology. AI is dazzling, and the instinct is to look for ways to ‘apply it’. But most good products fail not because they weren’t good, but because nobody needed them.

However, the golden rule is still to start with the customer experience and work backwards. If you start with AI, you’re likely to end up with something smart and shiny that solves no real problem.

Start instead by living in your customer’s world. Identify the pain points so deeply that you can describe them better than your customers can themselves. Then—and only then—ask: how can I solve this 10x faster, better, and cheaper?

Stay on the edge of technology while doing this. AI will help you solve the pain points, but the starting point must be the need, not the tool.

This is how Google became a trillion-dollar company. Nobody—founders, investors, competitors—predicted what it would become. Yahoo and others could have bought them early, but they didn’t see the value.

The same is true for Amazon. In the dotcom crash of 2000, Amazon’s share price fell to $5. Retailers dismissed it as a failed experiment. But the company doubled down, expanded its lead, and rewrote the rules of retail.  

The founder’s blueprint

Every trillion-dollar company you admire began the same way. Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin lived the frustration of finding relevant search results in an internet clogged with spammy directories. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook to solve a social connection problem he experienced in his own dorm.

Jensen Huang bet Nvidia’s future on GPUs for gaming when the market was tiny, because he understood the performance bottlenecks firsthand. Tired of high brokerage fees and clunky platforms, Nithin Kamath built a low-cost, tech-first brokerage, Zerodha, which put user experience first, long before ‘discount brokers’ were a category.

The pattern is always the same. Live the pain point, work backwards to create an experience people love, scale only after you’ve nailed it.

The agency advantage

Agencies have two advantages most start-ups would kill for. The first is access to customer pain points. You see patterns across industries. BBH London spotted that e-commerce brands were struggling to stand out visually, so they created a proprietary ‘Brand Asset Builder’ to deliver consistent, recognisable design systems.

Secondly, agencies have a goldmine of proprietary data, courtesy years—sometimes decades—of campaign results, A/B tests, audience insights. Like P&G’s analytics teams, you can see exactly how messages land in different cultures. That’s data no off-the-shelf AI can match.

Your challenge is to turn this access and data into ownable, scalable assets.

Let’s look at what Asian Paints did. In the 1960s, it had 40,000 dealers and margins under pressure. Their solution? Buy a supercomputer—yes, in the 1960s—and use 20–30 years of dealer sales data to forecast demand.

The payoff:

• Working capital cycle: ~8 days (vs. Berger’s 45 and AkzoNobel’s 105)

• ROC: ~40%
• CAGR: ~20% over 70 years

They turned proprietary data into a compounding asset. For agencies today, your ‘paint’ is campaign performance data; your ‘dealers’ are your client brands.

From services to assets

The billable hour was built for a world where creativity scaled with human time. That world is gone. Clients are buying outcomes, not hours.

Think of AI models as the TV set manufacturers of the 1950s. The revolution came not from the sets, but from the broadcasters and advertisers who used them to create value.

Coca-Cola didn’t make refrigerators—it leveraged them to dominate cold beverage sales. As an agency, you need to be Coca-Cola in this analogy: the last link in the chain that delivers unique value to the customer.

R/GA evolved from campaign work into building platforms for data visualisation and consumer behaviour mapping—tools that generate recurring revenue, independent of hours worked. Build once, refine, license.

Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption explains what’s coming for agencies. A new entrant starts with a less effective product at a fraction of the cost, targeting customers you don’t prioritise. You dismiss them. Over time, they improve, train their AI on early customer data, and move upmarket. By the time they’re winning your best clients, it’s too late—you can’t match their cost base, speed, or learning curve. That’s why you must disrupt yourself before someone else does.

From insight to moat

Nykaa didn’t just sell beauty products. It built a content-plus-commerce engine—tutorials, reviews, influencer tie-ups—that deepened customer relationships and created a moat.  

Agencies can do the same: combine proprietary insights, creative firepower, and exclusive data into assets that get stronger every time they’re used.

Start with your clients’ biggest problems (ideation starter). If you’re looking for your next big idea, start where the pain is sharpest — in your clients’ world.

You already sit in rooms where CMOs, brand managers, and business owners share their frustrations. You’ve probably lived some of these problems yourself while trying to deliver great work. That’s your richest source of inspiration.

Ask yourself: what are the recurring issues that stall campaigns, waste budgets, or stop brands from growing? Then ask the more important follow-up: can we solve this 10× faster, cheaper, and better than it’s done today?

Some places to look:

• Slow, expensive content production – Clients needing dozens of variations for different markets but waiting weeks to get them.
• Inconsistent brand execution – Every region interpreting the brand differently, diluting its impact.
• Inefficient media spend – Millions poured into channels with poor attribution and weak targeting feedback loops.
• Underutilised first-party data – Brands sitting on rich customer data but not using it to drive personalisation or product decisions.
• Weak consumer insight pipelines – Decision-making based on last quarter’s research instead of real-time behavioural data.
• Cultural disconnects – Campaigns missing local nuance, leading to wasted spend or brand damage.

The key is to pick problems that:

• You’ve seen firsthand: You know exactly how and why they hurt.
• Your agency has unfair access to solve: Through your data, client relationships, or creative capability.
• Can be productised: A solution that, once built, gets better with every use and can be licensed, not just sold once.

Remember, the best ideas are the ones only you can build — because only you have your unique blend of insight, access, and data.

Billable hours aren’t going away. They’ll still be part of the business. But they are no longer enough.

The agencies that will thrive in the AI age will be the ones whose own IP runs quietly in the background of dozens of brands — generating value, learning from every interaction, and making money while you sleep.

You already have what most start-ups dream of: the access, the data, and the talent. The question is whether you’ll keep using them just to sell time… or whether you’ll use them to build something that’s yours, defensible, and compounding in value every year.

- Sameer Sankhe is the author of 'Make Them Love It: An AI-Driven Digital Transformation Guide'