AI drift: why agencies are colliding and what smart marketers should do about it
By Hannah Mann, Founding Partner
October 2025
For years, insight and communications agencies have lived in relative harmony. One gathered the intel. The other turned it into big, shiny ideas. It was a neat little division of labour that suited everyone, especially clients who liked to keep their creative and research spend nicely siloed.
But the tectonic plates are shifting. And the quiet force behind it? AI.
The disappearing lines between insight, strategy and execution
Over the past few years, generative AI has quietly but profoundly changed the rules. Tools that used to be the domain of specialists are now widely accessible. Planners dabbling in insights. Researchers dabbling in brand strategy and even execution. What we’re seeing is a fundamental blurring of where one agency’s remit ends and another begins.
At Day One Strategy, we’ve experienced this shift first-hand. Better known as a pure play insights firm, we recently worked on the brand narrative development for a blockbuster drug using InsightBrain – our AI powered platform for marketeers. Not only delivering a global positioning, but also the tailored supporting messages needed for each individual market and HCP segment. What used to consume huge amounts of budget, and take many months research and alignment sessions, was competed in a fraction of the time and cost. Still with that critical, skilled human oversight, but now also with significant AI firepower behind the scenes.
Ask for timely, strategic advice in response to market changes in real time – not weeks or months after the market shifts
So who’s best placed to lead?
There’s a growing debate: is it the comms agencies who can use AI to do lightweight research? Or the insight agencies who can now translate data into content?
The real question is: who actually understands the customer and who can do something useful with that understanding, quickly?
The winners will be those who combine:
- Deep, customer understanding: surfacing true market insights
- Smart application of AI tools (not just prompts, but training, fine-tuning and governance)
- A firm grasp of marketing strategy: segmentation, targeting, positioning, messaging
That first and last points matter most, because if your agency does not understand these, then all the AI in the world won’t save you.
Why insight and creative will both have to change
It’s tempting to see this as a technology problem but it’s more of a business model problem.
If you run a research agency, the idea of a 12-week timeline with 80 interviews is going extinct. We still need to do research, but AI is making it better, more iterative, and often more about validation than pure discovery.
On the creative side, the myth of the lone genius and the agency “big idea” is also losing ground. AI can now generate, iterate, and even test communications using synthetic environments. That doesn’t mean you stop making content. It means you make better content, informed by real-time data, evaluated before launch, and refined continuously.
What this means for pharma marketers
In regulated categories like pharma, where speed to market often equates to share gain, this shift is particularly potent. AI allows you to:
- Generate and tailor comms faster across markets and personas
- Validate them in hours, not weeks
- Pivot messaging dynamically as new data emerges
But don’t be fooled into thinking this is just about cost savings. It’s about competitive advantage, and in a slow-moving sector, the first to move intelligently will pull ahead of the game.
And no, you’re not ditching human research. Quite the opposite. You’re just doing it smarter.
So what should you be doing?
- Proactively seek change – Don’t sit back and wait to see what happens, proactively go seek new suppliers who are already doing things differently.
- Interrogate your agency partners – Do they understand how to safely and successfully leverage AI to help you get much further, much faster than before? Do they have real case studies?
- Raise the bar – Demand timely strategic advice in real time, not months after the market shifts to give you the competitive edge you need to get ahead.
The bottom line
AI is not the answer to all our prayers but it is an accelerant. The agencies and marketers who use it to strip out inefficiency, tighten strategy, and build stronger brands will win. The rest will still be scheduling cross-functional alignment meetings while their market share vanishes.
Your call.