Should My Marketing Agency Be Using AI in 2026?

By TJ Robertson, Founder and Lead Strategist at TJ Digital

Yes, your marketing agency should be using AI. If you’re paying an agency for marketing work and the quality of that work hasn’t dramatically improved over the last one to two years, you should be concerned.

I run a marketing agency, TJ Digital, and I can tell you that agency work has been more affected by AI than probably any other kind of work except coding.

That doesn’t mean you should hand your marketing over to ChatGPT or Claude. At least not yet. Right now, the best work comes from a person working together with AI.

How your agency uses AI should change what you pay. More importantly, it should change the quality of the work you get.

Should You Pay Less If Your Agency Uses AI?

If your agency is using AI, you should be getting one of two things: a lower bill for the same work, or noticeably better work for the same price.

AI lets agencies do the same work more efficiently now. So if you’re paying what you paid two years ago for the same work, you’re getting ripped off.

I’ve seen this from the inside. Before I started TJ Digital in May 2025, I was director of SEO and strategy at a digital marketing agency.

AI was making our work there better and more efficient. The agency kept charging clients the same prices and hid those gains from them. I couldn’t do it anymore, so I left.

I’m not the only one who has noticed agencies keeping the savings. In an April 2026 Glossy report, Gartner analyst Jay Wilson said CMOs reviewing their agencies’ scopes of work are “still not seeing the cost savings in terms of fee.”

I’ve written about the warning signs that have nothing to do with AI in Is Your Marketing Agency Ripping You Off?

What Should AI Change About Your Agency’s Work?

Paying less is one reason to care whether your agency uses AI. The bigger reason is that AI should be making the work itself noticeably better.

There’s evidence it can. In a 2023 Harvard Business School study, consultants at Boston Consulting Group used GPT-4 on tasks AI is good at. On those tasks, using GPT-4 raised the quality of their work by more than 40%, as rated by human reviewers.

Your agency needs to be using AI that way, because AI is raising the quality standard for everyone. Businesses like yours use AI too. The smart ones, including some of your competitors, spend the time AI saves them on making their marketing better.

As AI makes generic work easy, generic work becomes useless. By generic, I mean marketing that could belong to any business in your industry, like a blog post that repeats what every other post on the topic already says.

The kind of work agencies like mine were doing two years ago can now be completely automated, and its cost is heading toward zero. Once anyone can have that work for almost nothing, it can’t set your business apart.

To stand out, your marketing has to be clearly better than what AI can already produce automatically. I’ve written more about how AI is raising the quality standard in marketing.

Better work should show up in what your agency makes for you:

• Your website should go through many more rounds of revision before it’s finished. With AI building each new version, your agency can keep revising the design and copy until it’s right. Expect a site that’s clearly better than one you’d have accepted a year or two ago.
• Your website content and social media posts should be specific to your business, saying things your competitors’ posts couldn’t say.
• Your agency should also be doing things for you that weren’t practical before, such as editing video.

Is It a Bad Sign If Your Agency Uses AI?

Your agency using AI is a good sign. Work that reads as generic is the bad sign. When AI work comes out generic, it usually means your agency is using AI only to turn out work faster.

People still need to check what AI produces. Google’s guidance on AI-generated content says to manually fact-check and review all of it before publishing.

If your agency uses AI to generate many pages on your website without adding value for users, Google warns that this may violate its spam policies.

An agency that uses AI well also has no reason to hide it. We tell our clients that we use AI. Claude does most of the hands-on work, and people review and edit all of it before it reaches them.

What If Your Agency Says It Barely Uses AI?

Be wary of an agency that tells you it barely uses AI. If yours says something like, “Yeah, we use AI here and there, but it’s important that the work is done by a human. AI just can’t match the quality of human work,” they don’t get it. They’re already falling behind.

A year ago, you could have made a compelling argument that AI only lets you do generic work faster. I wouldn’t have made it, but someone could have. If anyone makes that argument today, you can be absolutely certain they aren’t keeping up.

How to Tell If Your Agency Is Keeping Up With AI

The clearest way to tell whether your agency is keeping up with AI is to look at the work. Put what it delivered a year or two ago next to what it has delivered in the last few months: your website, your content, your social media posts and your strategy. If you’d be just as happy with the older work, your agency isn’t keeping up, no matter what it tells you about AI.

What to Ask Your Agency About AI

Asking whether your agency uses AI won’t tell you much, because almost every agency will say yes. When NinjaCat, an agency software company, surveyed 547 US agency decision-makers in January 2025, 91% said they were actively using AI in some form. So ask how:

• How are you using AI in the work you do for us?
• Because of AI, what’s better about our work now than two years ago?
• Where does a person review and edit what AI produces before it reaches us?
• How has AI changed what we pay, or what we get for the same price?

A good answer is specific. Your agency should be able to tell you what AI does in your work, where people review it, and what’s better because of it. And the answer should match what you saw when you compared the work.

On price, a good answer is either that you’re paying less for the same work, or a clear description of what’s better about the work you get for the same price.

If the answers are vague, or you hear “here and there,” your agency probably isn’t keeping up.

When Is It Time to Find a New Agency?

If your agency is still dabbling in AI or waiting to see where the technology goes, it’s probably time to find a new agency.

If the work has clearly improved and your agency can tell you exactly how AI helped, you probably have a good agency.

If you do start looking, use the same two tests: look at the work they’re doing for clients now, and ask how they use AI. I’ve also written about what to look for when hiring an SEO agency or consultant.

If you have questions about how your agency is using AI, or about how we use it, reach out through our contact page or email me at [email protected].