"Charging for Bodies and Hours Will Become More Challenging" — The Death of Time-Based Agency Billing
The 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies) report on agentic AI identifies the core business model challenge facing every agency.
Real-World Examples
Target
Key Insight
Agencies that cling to hourly billing are essentially betting against their own AI adoption — as explored in the growing gap between AI tools and AI strategy — . The more efficient they become, the less they earn.
Agencies that cling to hourly billing are essentially betting against their own AI adoption — as explored in the growing gap between AI tools and AI strategy — . The more efficient they become, the less they earn.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
