AI will replace agency admin, not agency judgement

AI tools are going to take over a large share of agency admin, and I think that's good news for clients and for the agencies honest enough to say so. What AI won't replace is judgement, and the agencies that keep their clients will be the ones that show clearly which part of the bill is which.

Why is this question coming up now?

On 14 October, Mumbrella published an episode of its podcast The Unmakers in which Tim Burrowes interviewed Barney Chunn, who co-founded Drumbeat, a young PR technology company. Its platform applies AI to help a business work out its story, find journalists who suit it and run the outreach.

Chunn pitches it as a middle path between a full-service PR agency, which by his estimate runs to roughly $10,000 a month to cover a single region, and a business trying PR on its own without the know-how. He also argued there is "absolutely room for tools and people to cohabitate cohesively".

It's one start-up in one discipline, but every agency owner should take the pitch seriously. When a tool can do part of the job for a fraction of a retainer, clients will start asking what the rest of the retainer pays for.

What will AI take off an agency's plate?

Plenty. In my own corner of marketing (B2B, events and Microsoft partner marketing) a lot of the work is process: building event registration lists, writing the follow-up emails after an event, producing a first draft of campaign copy, putting together the monthly report and preparing the paperwork for a marketing development funds claim.

None of that is unimportant, but it follows a pattern, and patterns are what these tools handle well. If a tool can do it quicker and cheaper, I think the client should get that saving rather than the agency quietly keeping it.

What stays with people?

Judgement is the part clients remember you for. It's choosing the one customer story a partner's Microsoft sellers will bother to repeat. It's cutting an event agenda so people are still in the room for the final session. It's telling a client their Marketplace listing isn't the real problem, even when that's the job they asked you to quote on.

A tool can draft ten versions of a message in seconds. It can't sit across from a client, notice what isn't being said and decide which of those ten is worth sending, or whether any of them is.

Which agencies are at risk?

I don't think the agencies in trouble are the ones using AI. The ones at risk are those still charging for admin as if it were strategy. Once clients can see a tool doing the process work for far less, a retainer that bundles everything into one number gets very hard to defend.

What should agencies and marketers do now?

Be upfront about the split. For agency owners, that means pulling the retainer apart into process work and thinking work and pricing each one differently, with the process side getting cheaper as the tools improve. For in-house marketers and Microsoft partner teams, it means asking your agency the same question: which hours on this invoice are judgement, and which could a tool do?

Then put the freed-up time somewhere useful. If AI is handling the registration list and the first draft, spend those hours on the decisions that move pipeline, such as which customers to put in front of Microsoft, which events are worth running at all and what your team should stop doing.

So here's my question for marketers and partner teams: what's the first job on your plate you'd happily hand to a tool, and what's the one you never would?

Source

This article is Alvin Paronda's opinion on The Unmakers: Can an AI tool replace your PR agency? Barney Chunn makes the case, published by Mumbrella on 14 October 2026. All rights in the original belong to its publisher. Trade marks and product names belong to their owners.

Alvin Paronda is the Founder & CEO of UBE Marketing, a Sydney marketing agency for B2B and Microsoft partners.