Scale vs. agility: How agencies are battling for AI supremacy

In the AI race, holding companies and independent agencies are taking very different paths — and moving at different speeds.

Indie agencies are highlighting their agility and nimbleness. Holdcos are showcasing their scale and large resources to invest in AI solutions, including partnerships with leading AI players such as OpenAI and Microsoft.

Both sides are under pressure to incorporate AI and deliver results, agency leaders say.

“There’s a huge lane opening up for indies in the AI space because we don’t have as much red tape,” Christine Schrader, vice president of strategic innovation at indie agency Wpromote, tells The Current. “The speed of change gives smaller companies the space to catch up to holdcos.”

And some are doing more than catching up. Companies like Snowflake and OpenAI are working with indies to build custom, proprietary AI solutions — fueling the kind of innovation Schrader is describing.

“I think there’s such a big misconception that the indies are playing catch-up,” Melissa Andraos, senior vice president at indie agency Exverus by Brainlabs, says. “Agility has really been the key here. We’re not waiting for rollouts. We’re rolling up our sleeves; we’re testing; we’re building; we’re adapting everything in real time.”

Holding companies, meanwhile, are using their heft to their advantage. All of the majors have partnered with or acquired AI companies. Dentsu, for example, reported last year that using Microsoft’s Azure AI cut the time to find media insights by 90%.

The combination of these partnerships, layered onto Dentsu’s existing data and resources “permeates everything we build,” according to Stephen Kiely, the CEO of Dentsu Canada and CEO of Tag Americas.

AI can’t take off without a great data backbone

One point of agreement across the board: Foundational data infrastructure is crucial to any AI solution. Great AI results can’t come without a pipeline of quality data.

“If there’s bad data in it, it doesn’t matter the model,” Chuck Anderson-Weir, Ovative Group’s senior director of measurement solutions, says.

Both sides are leaning on AI as a complement to humans, rather than a full replacement. Despite the buzz around agentic AI media buying, every agency The Current spoke with said we’re not there yet. None of them are ready to go to a fully agentic AI media buying strategy.

These agency leaders say AI is best as a consultant and big data cruncher rather than a full driver of decision-making.

Right now, they’re using AI for media planning, building audiences, targeting, spotting trends through data, creative production and optimization, mid-flight reporting and automating retail performance.

Flipping results in two days instead of two months

Ovative Group recently deployed an AI agent — called BLADE — to overhaul media strategy for a telecom client that spends $150 million a year on video ads. It took just two days to launch.

That speed was only possible thanks to the data foundation it built with EMRge, Ovative’s connected data platform that has powered planning, buying and measurement for the last two years. BLADE ingested 10 data sources, along with more information like quarterly business reviews, to find the answers it needed.

After fine-tuning to improve data quality, Ovative improved this client’s overall strategic plan, leading to a 10% to 15% increase in video ROI in one quarter.

“This wasn’t like some big formal executive project with a million-dollar budget,” Ovative’s Anderson-Weir says. “We were just going fast and working together because we were interested in it.”

Last year, he adds, this would have taken the agency two months to coordinate everything manually with data teams.

Indie agencies’ healthy paranoia

Another indie agency, 85Sixty, partnered with OpenAI to build its own closed version of ChatGPT — dubbed Amanda — powered by privacy-safe client data. The tool has become a de facto media strategist, identifying performance anomalies, zero-conversion campaigns and emerging trends in real time.

“That is astounding,” Steven “Lounge” Price, founder and chief strategist of 85Sixty, tells The Current. “The tool essentially can understand, ‘Oh, this is the Black Friday period. And here’s how we think about promotions.’ We’re able to inject more context into it.”

For now, Amanda doesn’t include macroeconomic details into the system, but that’s coming.

Price, who started the agency in 2012, describes “part of being successful while being small is having this healthy paranoia of what the holding companies are capable of.”

Precision outperforms scale

Exverus by Brainlabs saw major results by leveraging AI to power better targeting for its enterprise data company, Equinix, which competes with giants like AWS and Azure.

To reach IT leaders across multiple verticals, Exverus activated a campaign on connected TV (CTV) and programmatic audio, supported by Bombora’s Intelligent Account-Based Marketing (iABM) solution. The iABM used a custom algorithm built by Chalice AI to target researchers at key accounts, control frequency capping and deliver transparent reporting.

Those moves helped triple landing page views, with 9 million people exposed to Equinix’s messaging. On top of that, the brand saw a 22% year-over-year search traffic increase and a 7% year-over-year revenue increase.

“We proved that precision can really help outperform scale,” Andraos says. “It really showed that we could play with the big boys in the industry, which was really exciting for us.”

Building bridges, not walled gardens

Dentsu’s Kiely admits that indie agencies are more agile than holdcos, but only “to a degree.” He says that “Agility without substance is just fluff. A lot of what’s out there, from smaller players and even some bigger ones, is essentially ‘GPT sauce’ — plugging some data or prompts behind a slick interface and calling it progress.”

Rather than asking clients to plug into an AI black box, Dentsu’s AI solution, Dentsu.Connect, integrates directly into brands’ tech stacks. That collaborative approach has driven a 30% improvement in business outcomes.

“We’re building bridges, not walls or walled gardens,” Kiely says.

In a competitive market, speed, precision and differentiation are more than buzzwords. They are lines being drawn in the sand.