What clients want from agencies right now — and how we’re responding

Sixty-two percent of clients say they would replace an agency that never challenges their thinking. Eighty-nine percent expect agencies to own AI outcomes, even when the client’s own team is using it. Seventy-five percent want a critical strategic partner, not a vendor.¹

That data came from clients, answering researchers, with nothing to sell. It’s the clearest picture we’ve seen of what marketers wants right now, and it’s exactly the picture we’ve been building our own approach around.

Businesses often talk about AI as a productivity tool: faster turnaround, lower cost, more output per hour. The data says something different. Clients are not asking for a faster version of the same job. They are asking for a different job entirely, and that’s the shift we’ve spent the past year preparing for.

The job is moving up a level

Client expectations are changing from “we need an agency to create this,” to “we need an agency to help us decide what we should create.”

That is not a subtle shift. It moves agencies’ value away from execution and toward judgment, before a single asset gets built. 81% of clients now expect proactive ideas and want help anticipating change, not just responding to a brief after the fact. 74% want strategic advisors, full stop.

Here’s the detail we think matters most: only 29% of clients expect AI to reduce agency fees. Clients are not shopping for cheaper. They are shopping for sharper. Efficiency is invisible to a client. Better thinking is memorable. That’s the part of the shift we’ve built our approach around.

Trust is the actual currency

The data on transparency is where this gets interesting. 89% of clients expect agencies to own AI outcomes, even on their own team’s output. 82% trust an agency more when its AI use is disclosed openly. 83% prefer long-term agency relationships over vendor churn.

Put together, this tells us something worth building around: clients aren’t worried that agencies use AI. They want to know exactly how, and who’s accountable for the result. Good work alone isn’t enough anymore. Demonstrated impact, clarity about process and accountability for the outcome are the new baseline.

There’s a real opportunity inside that expectation too. 37% of clients say they want agencies to teach them how to use AI effectively. That’s not a threat to the agency model; it’s an invitation and one that we’ve started saying yes to.

How Notion Partners is responding

We read this data as a direct brief, not just a trend report. Over the past year, we’ve built our approach to AI around three commitments: keep judgment, taste and client relationships firmly in human hands; treat transparency about how we use AI as a baseline, not a differentiator; and build the governance behind it before we ever need to defend it.

That shows up in a formal AI governance framework, in how our own teams are rebuilding their workflows around AI rather than bolting it on, and in a simple internal rule: AI can create speed, but a person still owns every decision that matters to a client.

What’s ahead in this series

This is the first in a series on where AI actually stands, for our industry and inside our own work. Next, we’ll walk through our AI philosophy in more detail, then hand it over to the teams doing the work, copy, creative, account, and video, to show exactly how each one is putting this into practice.

Source:

1. 2026 AMI Agency Edge Report

This article was originally published on LinkedIn on August 18, 2026.