The conversation around AI in the agency world has been dominated by fear. Will AI replace agencies? Will clients build in-house? Will the work that sustains a team of 50 be done by a team of 5?
These are the wrong questions. The right question is whether your agency will be the one that harnesses AI or the one that gets disrupted by competitors who did.
Our CEO, Raj Ramanan, calls AI the biggest technology moment of his lifetime. That’s not hyperbole. It’s the operating thesis behind how Herringbone Digital invests in and supports its portfolio companies.
What 70 AI Experiments Look Like
Across our portfolio companies, we currently have roughly 70 AI experiments running at various stages of development and deployment. Some are in early testing. Others have already been scaled and shared across the platform.
The experiments span the full spectrum of agency operations: content creation workflows, campaign optimization, client reporting automation, internal knowledge management, lead scoring, and creative production. The goal isn’t to replace people. It’s to amplify what skilled practitioners can accomplish.
A single agency running on its own revenue might be able to test two or three AI tools in a year. Inside a portfolio, the experimentation happens in parallel. What works at one agency gets evaluated for the others. What fails gets documented, so nobody else wastes time.
This is the R&D advantage that’s nearly impossible for standalone agencies to replicate.
Why Agencies Are Uniquely Positioned
The agencies that thrive in the AI era will be the ones that sit closest to the client’s revenue. They understand the problems. They have the data. They have the relationships. AI doesn’t change that. It accelerates it.
Consider what a legal marketing agency like CJ Advertising brings to the table: 30 years of proprietary performance data across personal injury advertising. No AI model has that dataset. No in-house team has that institutional knowledge. The agency’s value isn’t in executing tasks that AI can automate. It’s in the strategic layer that sits on top of decades of pattern recognition.
The same principle applies across verticals. Agencies that have built deep expertise in dental marketing, home services, or elective medical aren’t going to be displaced by generic AI tools. They’re going to use those tools to deliver results that generalists can’t match.
The Platform Advantage
For agencies inside a portfolio, the AI opportunity is compounded. Herringbone provides the infrastructure to test, evaluate, and scale AI applications without diverting resources from client work. The platform team identifies the most promising tools, runs pilot programs, measures impact, and then rolls out proven solutions across the portfolio.
This means a mid-market agency with 40 employees gets access to the same AI capabilities that a holding company with thousands of employees might deploy. The playing field levels not because of size but because of shared investment.
What Founders Should Be Thinking About
If you’re running an agency and AI isn’t on your strategic roadmap, you’re already behind. The question isn’t whether to adopt AI. It’s how quickly you can integrate it into your workflows without disrupting what already works.
For agencies exploring a partnership, ask the hard questions: What AI investments has the platform made? How many experiments are running? What’s the process for scaling what works? And critically, who decides what gets tested?
The best agencies will treat AI as an accelerator to what they want to do. It won’t replace humans. It will enhance human impact. The agencies that understand this distinction will win the next decade.