Ellen Whitmore
Whitmore & Bennett
Overall Maturity
Level 2: Efficiency-First
AI is back-office or unadopted. No commercial strategy.
AI tools adopted for productivity. Same services, faster.
Commercial question is on the table. Some pieces in place, nothing systematic yet.
Commercial posture is advanced. Pricing model shifting.
Your Profile
The Capability Gap
You have what it takes to build new offerings. You haven’t built them yet.
Your answers point to a firm with the pieces in place: a team of the right size, AI already in use, and a decision-maker with the authority to act. What’s missing is the offering itself. You haven’t launched something new that AI makes possible, and because client and competitive pressure is still quiet, little is forcing the question. That’s the gap. Your capability is ahead of what you’ve put in market.
The opportunity
Build a new AI-augmented offering while you still have room to do it deliberately. Not an existing service relabeled, but one with a different delivery model, a different price structure, and a value proposition that wasn’t possible before AI.
The risk
Quiet conditions don’t last. When clients start asking and competitors start moving, the firms that built while it was calm are the ones with something to sell. Capability that never becomes an offering is just overhead.
Maturity Snapshot
Mostly hourly billing. Exposed to margin compression as AI speeds up delivery.
Significant staff time spent on work that doesn’t require senior expertise.
Some combination of team scale, AI adoption, or decision-maker authority.
Real pressure: clients questioning value, competitors moving, or fees under discussion.
No new service offerings in recent years.
Key Findings
You have a lot of routine, automatable work but you're still billing hourly for most of it. AI makes that work faster, which under hourly billing means smaller invoices for the same output. The billing model is the bottleneck.
Your service mix has a lot of automatable work, but AI adoption at the firm is still early. Getting tools in use across the team is the prerequisite before new offerings can take shape.
Your firm hasn't launched new service offerings recently. This is the widest gap. Whether AI compresses your margins or creates new revenue depends on what you decide to sell differently.
What’s Happening in Your Market
S4 Capital (parent of Monks) reported net revenue down 12.7% in H1 2025, with headcount cut 8.9%. Its CEO stated: "The reality is AI is eating the agency business."
What Most Firms Haven’t Done Yet
The numbers below describe your field, not your firm. Your own snapshot is where you stand today. What follows is where the market is heading, and the room you still have to move first.
Most agencies have adopted AI tools internally. Revenue has not changed because they have not changed what they sell. Search Engine Land reported in April 2026 that agencies are being squeezed from both sides: they automated delivery, but their clients adopted the same tools. The efficiency advantage evaporated. Clients are bringing AI-generated drafts and asking agencies to "clean them up" at editing rates. The gap is between using AI and selling differently because of it.
What Firms Like Yours Are Building
AI content strategy and governance service
Clients generate content, you provide the strategy, quality control, and brand governance. Retainer-based.
Performance marketing with AI-driven optimization
Real-time campaign optimization using AI. Sold on performance outcomes, not deliverable volume.
AI-augmented brand intelligence subscription
Continuous competitive monitoring, sentiment analysis, and market positioning. Monthly recurring revenue.
The Numbers Behind It
60% of marketing leaders spent less on agencies in 2025 as a direct result of AI
Typeface, via eMarketer 2025
83% of marketing leaders would reduce agency spending if they could fully automate content creation
Typeface, via eMarketer 2025
Only 29% of agency clients want reduced fees as AI matures; 52% want better ideas
Agency Edge 2026 (AMI / Audience Audit, 400 client-side decision-makers)
The Big Six holding companies' share of US ad spending fell to 29.6% in early 2024, from 44.6% in 2019
Advertiser Perceptions, via eMarketer
Your Next Steps
- 1
List what your firm could build with the team and AI tools you already have. You can already build these; the hard part is choosing which one goes first.
- 2
Identify where AI changes the delivery model, not just the speed. A service that uses AI to monitor something continuously, flag issues proactively, or synthesize across data sources is a different service from one that produces the same report faster.
- 3
Spec one new offering where the delivery model, pricing, and value proposition are all different from what you sell today. If it looks like an existing service with AI bolted on, start over.
Go Deeper
Two ways to take this further.
The Map
$2,500
Two hours on your own service lines, and a map: which of them AI is about to change, and the two or three moves worth making first. Credited toward the Workshop.
The Workshop
$15,000
Two days from start to delivery, one on site with your senior team, then 2–3 offering briefs, specified and priced. Each names the first client to call, so you test before you build.
This is the gap between where your fees are and where they need to be. The three steps above are the what. The Workshop is the how. One day, and you leave with two or three offering briefs to close it, specified and priced.
AI Commercialization Assessment powered by the Upshift Maturity Model. Dimensions informed by research from McKinsey (State of AI 2025), Thomson Reuters / Georgetown (Legal Market Report 2026), AICPA (CAS Benchmark Survey 2024), and Hinge Research Institute (High Growth Study 2025). Maturity levels describe observable firm behaviors, not percentile rankings.