AI Agents Started a Race to the Bottom on Agency Prices: Loan Laux on One Person, One Account

If there's one thing that has changed drastically, it's the ability for smaller agencies to have a proper jab at the bigger ones. That wasn't necessarily true before.

Discovery to delivery has always been broken. I've never met anyone in the agency space who likes discovery. You sit on hours of calls trying to work out what the client wants in technical terms, then produce an SOW and a set of tickets for your team.

Why is the agency world so underserved with purpose-built software? Because nobody in Silicon Valley cares about agencies. They don't even know we exist.

The product world is brutal. In services, if you get it wrong, your clients tell you. With a product, they just churn, and you don't get a reason. You're left guessing a lot of the variables.

Are coding tools a replacement for developers? No. Do they take over most of the work? Yes. You keep your developers; they're just superhuman now. I see the same future for business analysts.

I do a lot of loop engineering. A Claude loop on a server writes our blog posts under strict editorial guidelines. It's plugged into Google Analytics and Search Console, so if a topic is ranking it keeps going, and if posts get zero clicks it finds another niche. I get a summary in Slack every Monday. It's like an employee.

Don't use AI for branding. An LLM is a word-predicting algorithm built on text that already exists. There's zero chance it gets genuinely creative.

The agency of tomorrow is one account, one person. Someone who knows how to orchestrate AI agents and treat them as a team. Clients will catch up to that, and prices will come down. We're already seeing a race to the bottom in the mid market.

There's not much difference between an agency of five and a single person with twenty AI agents, as long as the workflow is well defined.

Fix price everything. If you're doing Shopify work, there's no reason not to. And come to the negotiation table with a proof of concept. If you don't, someone else will, and you won't win the deal.

I'd rather take a vibe-coded working prototype from a client than a 15-page RFP, any day. That's a sign of real collaboration.

If I joined a 20-plus person agency today, the first process I'd redesign is the discovery-to-delivery handoff. A hundred percent.