How AI Is Creating One-Person Agencies: Jude D'Souza on Orchestrators, QA and What Still Can't Be Copied

The biggest hurdle is staying ahead of the curve while things are moving faster than at any point in history. Last year was fast for us. This year I've pretty much entirely changed how the agency works.

We have to be open to change, open to chaos. It's going to change: that's the only constant we can keep at the moment.

My feed is full of people saying this role is dead, that role is dead. Maybe it is. But you have to figure that out with actual practice. The theory is what builds hype; the application is a different story.

AI lets you bring an idea to life fast. But to tweak it and get it right, that last 10% takes ten times the time and ten times the effort. So be strategic about what you put into your business.

You need a network you can rely on to say, I've tried this and it doesn't work as well as you're hearing online. My friends who run agencies have saved me a lot of time, and they've used the things I got working.

My department heads experiment and figure out how to implement things. If we're removing an entire workflow and replacing it with AI, I don't want an execution role making that decision. I want it from someone who sees the whole picture.

If everyone's using AI, where's the difference in the work? AI will keep reproducing the same work for everyone. The change lies in out-of-the-box thinking, where it always has.

I think there are only two real roles for humans at the moment: orchestration and QA. It comes down to understanding how AI works, what its limits are, and what the end product should look like.

You can get lost just thinking about how complex these systems need to be. The fastest way I've got through it is to dive in.

Only about 5% of the problems in Meta advertising live inside the ads manager. The other 95% live outside it: offers, workflows, customer journey, brand positioning.

E-commerce products can be replicated. Business models can be replicated quickly. The only thing that can't is brands and personal brands.

One person leading the ship could theoretically be a 20- to 50-person agency. Each department head becomes an orchestrator of multiple agents.