Sign in with Google Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, has said that AI is “10X the industrial revolution happening at 10X the speed, making it 100X the change.” Today, Google is the full-stack AI company, from the silicon to the search bar.
For marketers, the only real limitations are your imagination and understanding of how to use the technology. In speaking with CMOs, they are often searching for a partner to bring deep technical expertise and inspiration to unlock the potential of AI for their brand. What CMOs need is an inspired navigator.
Here’s the secret the most successful leaders have already discovered: that navigator is already part of their team. This navigation isn’t just about direction; it’s about velocity. Research from BCG shows that agencies are already 35% more advanced than advertisers in deploying AI,1 making them the ideal accelerator for large enterprises facing internal friction.
Move at market speed with agility
When the market is facing 100X change, agility is paramount. But for large enterprises, moving fast comes with challenges and risks, like organizational change, internal procurement, and brand equity. Agencies function as an acceleration layer, absorbing the friction of trial and error.
“Our role is to be the stress test for AI innovation,” says Dan Roberts, global SVP of search at Assembly Media. “We intentionally push new AI search and automation tools to their breaking point. By the time we bring a solution to a client, we’ve already identified the hallucinations, the data gaps, and the frictions. We provide the innovation without the instability.”
As a result, agencies can help you compress the learning curve. “Most brands plan in quarters while the market moves weekly,” warns Mike Stone, chief strategy officer at Wpromote. “Our role is to build systems that let brands pivot in real time.”
Master a new mindset, tool set, and skill set
The new AI playbook requires marketers to develop a new mindset, tool set, and skill set. Your agencies are poised to help.
First, the new mindset requires leaders to foster cultures of courage and curiosity. That means questioning everything and taking calculated risks. “Our teams have always embodied a born restless mentality — constantly experimenting, learning, and pressure‑testing new ways of working,” says Liz Rutgersson, CEO NA at iProspect.
Next is assessing your tool set and integrating the right AI capabilities into your daily work. This isn’t just about having shiny new tools; it’s about deploying them with discipline. We have rapidly moved from predictive AI to the agentic future, systems that reason, plan, and execute. But as Di Anderson, SVP of media and creative at the Ovative Group, explains, “If the underlying data or workflows are messy, agents will only accelerate the same problems. We correct this by treating agents as an operating discipline, helping clients strengthen that foundation first.”
AI agents are taking over the linear work and that frees up our talent to do lateral thinking
When you get the foundation right, it unlocks a new kind of human creativity. As Ali Amarsy, chief strategy officer at Digitas, puts it: “Our AI agents are taking over the linear work and that frees up our talent to do lateral thinking: unexpected angles, cultural tension, and counterintuitive opportunity.”
And finally, you need the right skill set, which harnesses the tool set and mindset to drive growth and innovation. I was talking to a CMO recently who told me an incredible story. One of their junior copywriters, by leaning into AI over a single weekend, transformed into a full campaign manager, capable of strategy, asset creation, and media planning.
This is the era of the “multihyphenate”: the employee who can be a creative-strategist, acting as data-storyteller and copywriter. Agencies are uniquely positioned to engineer this talent at scale. “Agencies function as an adaptive, flexible talent layer that can scale up or bring in niche expertise as needed,” says Rutgersson.
“To solve the industrywide talent gap, we built the Assembly Academy, an intensive program that trains entry-level talent to be AI-native from day one,” notes Dan Roberts. For a brand, it means bypassing the talent wars.
Curiosity is the new credential
Ultimately, this AI era requires CMOs to evolve into “change management officers.” And leading change doesn’t mean bearing the burden of execution alone.
The organizations that thrive will be those that combine their own brand vision with the technical agility of their partners. It is time to widen the aperture of what is possible — not just with your technology but for the future growth and innovation of your business and the role you can play in shaping it.
Lean in, get vulnerable, and share your challenges openly with your agency partners. Ask questions about everything, because, in the AI era, curiosity isn’t just a soft skill. Curiosity is the new credential.
