I have almost the same conversation every week.
Some weeks it is with the CEO of a PR agency. Other weeks it is with the head of marketing at a law firm, the kind of person who has spent twenty years making partners look brilliant. Different people, separate worlds, the exact same look on their face.
It is a mix of real excitement and quiet dread.
They know AI is going to change their business. They feel it in their gut.
What they cannot figure out is what to do about it on Monday morning. And they worry they are already falling behind while they decide.
Believe me, I understand. I have felt that same feeling myself.
It is one of the odd gifts of how we built InnovAItion Partners. Half of our clients are marketing and PR agencies. The other half are law firms, where we work shoulder to shoulder with the marketing, communications, and business development teams.
So I get to stand in both rooms. Lately, the two rooms are saying the same thing.
Two worlds, one shared fear
On the surface, these are not the same business.
When I sit with an agency, the worry is about the campaign, the deck, the content calendar, the first-draft creative that used to take a team a week. That is the work AI is making cheap, and their clients already know it.
When I sit with a law firm marketing team, the worry rhymes but sounds different. It is the pitch, the client alert, the practice description, the directory submission, the bylined article.
The work that filled their days is getting faster to produce. Partners are starting to notice.
Both of them carry the same fear underneath. If the thing we have always been paid to make can now be made in minutes, what are we really selling?
That is what is happening beneath the surface. It is the quiet repricing of all the work those tools just made easy.
Dan Shipper , who runs the AI studio Every Inc. , named the mechanism better than I can. AI "commoditizes the residue of human expertise," he says. Anything that can be written down and trained on gets cheap and available to everyone.
So when a whole industry runs on the same models, trained on the same past work, the output drifts toward sameness. He calls it slop. It is everywhere now.
Once the average becomes free and instant, whatever stands out becomes the rare and valuable thing.
For an agency, being different is the entire job. For a law firm marketing team, a real voice and point of view is what gets read and remembered.
And it is the one thing the same shared model cannot hand everyone at once.
The people at the very top are already moving
This is not hype. The biggest players in both industries are saying it out loud.
Last month, Kirkland & Ellis, the first law firm on earth to cross $10 billion in revenue, announced it is putting $500 million over the next three to four years into building its own AI platform.
Chairman Jon A. Ballis explained it in one line: "We don't get hired for the floor." Off-the-shelf tools, he said, raise the floor for everyone, while Kirkland competes at the ceiling. He tied the whole investment to moving the firm off the billable hour and toward value-based pricing.
Now look at the agency world, where the most important figure of the last forty years is making the same point.
Sir Martin Sorrell built WPP into the largest advertising company on the planet. He now runs S4 Capital, and he has bet it heavily on AI.
His view on how agencies should get paid is blunt. Pricing should follow the value and the result. He says agencies "have to now start to develop models that are based on outputs."
His own firm already prices by output rather than headcount. WPP itself, the giant he left behind, has told investors it is moving from manpower-based billing toward outcome-based pricing.
The highest-grossing law firm in the world and the most influential agency builder of his generation just gave the same speech. Charge for outcomes rather than the hours it takes to get there.
Those two rarely agree on anything.
Where teams get stuck
So you would assume the hard part is the pricing model, or choosing the right platform.
It is not. I have sat with dozens of these teams as they try. The thing that trips them up is rarely the technology.
It is the people. More precisely, it is one quiet mistake.
A lot of leaders are treating AI like a new tool to roll out. It is a piece of software you train people to use, the way you would a new CRM or design app. Run a workshop, teach the buttons, watch the productivity tick up.
I understand the instinct. It feels manageable, it fits a budget line. It is what we have always done with new software.
But it misses what is happening.
AI is a new way of working. The tool is the easy part, the piece you can buy and install in an afternoon. What really changes is the job itself.
Think about the marketer who used to spend three days on a first draft and now spends three hours. The saved time is the obvious win. The deeper one is the question that follows.
What do you do with the rest of the week? The answer is a different job, built around judgment, strategy, and the things only that person can do.
That is a change in how someone sees their own work, and even how they value themselves. No software update does that.
People do not make that kind of change because you handed them a login and a cheat sheet.
What both sides need most
This is the part I wish more leaders sat with.
The training counts. People do need to learn the tools. A good program gets them started, but it is only the floor.
The real work starts after the training ends.
The teams that handle this well, on both the agency side and the law firm side, are doing the harder thing. They are leading their people through a change in how they think about the work.
They help a copywriter, or a BD manager, or a young associate see the better version of their role that is taking form on the other side of the fear.
That is change management. It is slow, it is human, and you cannot buy it off a shelf.
It also happens to be the one thing a giant AI budget cannot solve for you. Kirkland can spend $500 million. Sorrell can wire AI into everything.
None of it works if the people doing the work still believe AI is a faster way to do the old job, rather than an invitation to do a new one.
Josh Kubicki, who has trained thousands of lawyers on AI, looked hard at the same Kirkland announcement and reached a similar conclusion. The binding constraint, he wrote, was never technology, money, or data.
Kirkland has more of all three than any firm alive. It still has no answer. He calls it an admission rather than an event.
Why I stay optimistic
Even on the hard days, I stay hopeful, for a simple reason.
The biggest challenge in front of agencies and law firm teams is a human one. The technology is the easy half.
It is about helping a copywriter or a young associate feel less afraid as the ground shifts under them. That, more than any model or platform, is the real job of a leader right now: walking people through a change they did not choose.
Look at what happened at Every. After automating everything he could, Shipper found the opposite of what he expected. There was more human work to do than before.
The work changes, but it does not vanish. His team has a phrase for it. The human is the bread on both sides of the AI sandwich.
You set up the task, the AI does the grunt work in the middle, then a person judges it, sharpens it, and decides what comes next.
The setup and the judgment still belong to your people. Both get more valuable as the tools get stronger.
You win this by helping your people work a new way and staying beside them while they learn. The smartest AI alone will not do it for you.
That is leadership. A software rollout never gets you there.
So the test that counts comes down to one thing. Has your team changed how they think about the work itself?
Have they?