AI isn't making projects dangerous by producing bad work. It's making them dangerous by suppressing the signals that tell you something needs more thinking.
The risk
Scope isn’t just about client requests. In fact, it is something much more complex: shared mental models, the internal, team-level understanding of what work actually is and how
Most agency leaders I work with are convinced the chaos comes from talent gaps, culture issues, or individual behavior. After 200+ engagements, I can tell you: it almost never does.
Assemblers, architects, and the collapse of the formulation premium
Most of what we call knowledge work is formulation.
Not content production. Not information processing. Formulation — the act of applying individual
Speed has always been structural. AI just makes that impossible to ignore.
Most AI pilots return improvements somewhere around 10%. That's not nothing, but it's chump
Most conversations about AI and innovation assume a simple replacement story. As automation improves, human work recedes. The messy becomes structured. Judgment gives way to systems.
That framing misses what
AI may accelerate some things, but that doesn't mean that the organization will go faster.
It’s common to ask why organizations don’t move faster. Speed is
If we are going to redesign organizations for an AI era, we need to be clear about one thing up front: Tools have almost always pulled people apart.
In organizatiomns,
Every few months someone else does a "Sam Altman" and announces that AI will make agencies obsolete. The case always sounds the same. AI can research faster. AI
Most leaders can name their “messy” client relationships—the ones full of surprises, shifting scopes, and long, meandering conversations (yes, including disputes and arguments) that somehow still move the work forward.
Agencies are built to adapt. It's their superpower—and their curse. The same instincts that make them brilliant under pressure also make them nearly impossible to change. They
Originally published in MIT Sloan Management Review, September 23, 2025. Republished with permission.
There's a tendency to overmanage complicated collaborations. But additional meetings and structure put additional stressors
