At work we are migrating to a new server, and to support this process I’m trawling through past project folders to delete heavy files and duplicate documents we no longer need. Perhaps not the most gripping start to a column –I know, I know. But of course, there’s a point to it – it’s my mental ‘way in’ to a deeper reflection on something I’ve been ruminating on recently. 

The experience of deleting files is peculiarly cathartic. I’d recommend it for emotional as well as practical reasons. With a click of the mouse, I’m transported back to past experiences – overwhelmingly good (the debrief that landed to fulsome praise), but occasionally more challenging (the workshop I ran the day after my dad died, for example). 

I’m reminding myself of how much my team and I know about a client’s brand, category, target audience. We’ve often built enduring client relationships, so that continuity of knowledge has been an advantage – even more so as client organisations have undergone several reorganisations in recent years.

I firmly believe that this depth and breadth of background knowledge from an agency partner benefits clients. Yes of course, sometimes a fresh perspective is most valuable, helping avoid assumptions, bust persistent myths, and just shake things up. But an agency partner that brings a foundation of knowledge can move faster, filter out unnecessary noise, focus on what’s genuinely new and interesting with more confidence, and interact with stakeholders with elevated authority.

Yet, here AI represents a double-edged sword. In my work, our new server will facilitate use of AI in a range of ways, including leveraging what we already know. We see clients on the same train, adopting agentic solutions to support idea generation based on existing knowledge. The emerging possibilities are exciting, but it strikes me that this is a shift that invites some uncomfortable questions – or at least, it should. The first question is: what value should be placed on continuity of knowledge, when AI can outsource that, at least to some degree?

Wherever we sit in this sector, I’m going to wager that we bring a common tacit understanding of why agencies exist. It is so basic, so intrinsic to operations, that it goes unspoken. On the agency-side, we’re naturally always more focused on our individual offers and positionings that the foundations that sit underneath this don’t cross our minds.

So, to take stock for a moment, what we are seeing is a fast-moving collection of shifts that really should be giving us pause for thought around the raison d’être for the agency world: in-housing of research via self-serve platforms; AI tools that facilitate ‘thinking’ processes to generate, for example, innovation platforms, concepts, or conduct resights as foundations for strategic planning; the expansion of AI-based offers for strategy and synthetic data, which will take away some work that would have been delivered with more human input.

There are myriad benefits to clients in these shifts. In working with my own clients, I sometimes find myself in the unusual position of being a semi-internal user of their self-serve tools – welcoming the efficiency, the opportunity to run agile research loops, but still contribute to the process.

But these changes do – or should – invite questions about what role the insight agency or external consultant will play going forward, and – more importantly – what value they bring. 

Historically, the main principle on which the use of agencies has been predicated has arguably been impartiality. This idea even frames much of the context-setting chat at the start of running focus groups and more specifically showing stimulus: ‘I’m neutral; I don’t have an agenda; I am not trying to sell you anything; I didn’t create this work, so please feed back honestly’. 

This objectivity can also translate usefully into a reality-check perspective, one that is much easier to bring with some distance from the brand in question.  It can naturally be challenging when you work on a category day-in-day-out to be realistic about how much people really know about your products or brand. The gap between what a client-sider knows (and cares about) in any given category/brand and the reality of the consumer is bigger than the gap between the agency researcher and consumer.

Agency representatives are expert research practitioners, though I don’t believe for a moment that they possess sharper skills than clients (who have often worked agency-side, too). But when you are an active practitioner, your skills to (for example) moderate or analyse might be more honed, certainly than a client-sider that has never been in a practitioner role. However, AI chatbot moderators and analysis tools are eroding that human value somewhat.

One important aspect that agencies bring is a neutral perspective in the eyes of stakeholders – we can better be placed to deliver difficult news and critique work. That’s not enough, clearly. 

So, where does that leave us? Agencies can master the complex work – for example, multi-method studies – upstream, with tightly defined and perhaps niche samples, that are harder to run (capacity-wise or feasibility-wise) with in-house tools. For now, at least.

Importantly, we can bring expertise from working on other brands and sectors to illuminate issues and solutions in ways that it might be difficult to achieve internally. We can bring up-to-date practitioner skills to elevate work, with best practice in behavioural science, analytics or semiotics, to give a few examples. We can offer neutral wide-ranging immersion in cultural context to deepen the insight into the human truths and macro shifts that can power innovation and creative development work.

Across all of this, the agencies that win will be those that adapt – as needed – their positioning and offer to reflect these changing realities and ask themselves sometimes uncomfortable questions, not just about where they deliver value versus their main competitors, but versus self-serve models.

We mustn’t fool ourselves that the tacit contract of the agency-client working model is not going through profound transformation. The future is going to require agencies to put less emphasis on being purveyors of research processes and outcomes, but more on being individuals that bring creative, intellectually acute and strategically robust brains to partner with clients to solve their most complex marketing challenges. 

I believe the answer will lie at the human level. We can all use AI tools and adapt our research, but the only way we will really have relevance and purpose is through the accumulated knowledge, unique brains and expertise of collections of humans. 

After all, it’s a truth commonly acknowledged that people buy people. Let’s lean more into interrogating what value those people bring: the richly contextualised insight, the parallel perspectives, the creative leaps, the grounded empathy, the surprising angle.