The portal is the product: inside the operating model rewriting digital agencies
Most digital agencies hit a wall somewhere between their fiftieth and hundredth active client. Sales is fine; the pitch deck still works, the services still convert. The breakdown is on the delivery side. The operation behind the scenes starts to crack under the weight of clients it was never designed to hold.
It’s a wall AI is rapidly pushing more agencies toward. According to SparkToro’s annual State of Digital Agencies survey, the share of agency owners who view AI as a significant threat to their business jumped from 44% to 53% in a single year. Clients are squeezing retainers. The tasks that used to anchor monthly invoices, from keyword research to first-draft copy to basic reporting, have been steadily absorbed by ChatGPT, Claude, and a thickening layer of vertical AI tools. The agencies thriving in that environment look almost nothing like the agencies that defined the 2010s.
The...
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