Every Agency Has AI Now. That's the Problem.
There's a moment in every industry when the thing that made you special becomes the thing everyone has. In B2B marketing, that moment is now.
B2B Marketing's 2026 benchmarking reports, covering both the global and US agency landscapes, tell one version of the story. Average US agency gross income hit $23 million, a six-year high. Almost every agency surveyed expects to grow. Confidence, at least among the top-ranked firms given space to comment, seems up.
Our view at Ada of the state of the B2B marketing agency world is more mixed. These reports spotlight the leading agencies, and leaders tend to paint a positive picture. The underlying data tells a different story. Dig into the headcount columns and you'll find agencies quietly shrinking: cuts of 10%, 20%, even 30% at established firms – something we’re hearing anecdotally too. A portion of bigger agencies might report that they’re getting bigger, but there are plenty of firms losing ground. Global agency income fell for the first time since the benchmark launched.
And the big reason is the one hiding in plain sight: the thing that was supposed to set agencies apart, AI, is now something every single one of them has. When the differentiator becomes universal, it stops differentiating. And what you're left with is an industry where everyone arrived at the same party wearing the same outfit.
The great convergence
Here's the stat that should keep agency strategists awake: 100% of US agencies now report using AI for copywriting. Nearly four in five global agencies describe AI as embedded in their client propositions. AI has gone from differentiator to table stakes in roughly eighteen months.
The service convergence is just as striking. When surveyed, every global agency offered demand generation, strategy, and ABM. But when asked to name their top three specialisms, the things they actually lead with, almost nobody chose those services. Instead, agencies are differentiating on brand, content, and thought leadership.
The stuff everyone can do is no longer the stuff anyone wants to be known for. The baseline has risen. And when the baseline rises, being competent stops being competitive.
More content, less connection
The real irony of universal AI adoption is that it's made it easier than ever to produce content, while simultaneously making it harder for any of it to land.
Paul Everett, CMO of tmp, surveyed 1,000 B2B marketers and buyers and found that the top use cases for AI (creating more content and scaling personalisation) are precisely the things slowing buying journeys down. "77% of buyers say their buying journeys are 'very difficult,'" he reports, "and the top cause of that is too much content."
Sit with that for a second. The industry weaponised AI to produce content at unprecedented scale, and the effect on buyers is that they're drowning. The tool that was supposed to help marketers connect is generating noise that makes connection harder. Forrester's research on the invisible buying journey reinforces the point: roughly 80% of the B2B purchase process now happens before a buyer ever talks to a vendor. If your content isn't landing during that invisible window, you don't get a second chance.
Meanwhile, David Jordan, CEO of Bader Rutter, brings independent research that sharpens the picture further. Their Mental Equity™ study found that 73% of B2B buyers now use AI tools to find and evaluate vendors, and in 66% of recent vendor decisions, buyers chose a brand they already knew. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's well-known 95-5 rule tells a similar story: at any given moment, only 5% of your market is actively looking to buy. The other 95% aren't ignoring you because your content is bad. They're ignoring you because it's not their moment yet. The brands that win are the ones already in the buyer's head when that moment arrives.
The audience nobody's looking at
Ada’s co-founder, Jonathon Bates, was at B2B Ignite in London earlier this year and made an observation that stuck with us. AI was in every session he sat in. Orchestration. Efficiency. Doing more with less. But not once, he said, did anyone talk about AI as a way to understand behaviour: what actually drives the people we're marketing to.
"Efficiency saves you money," he wrote afterwards. "Empathy makes you money."
The agency leaders in these reports are circling the same point, even if they frame it differently.
Mark Morse, Executive Managing Partner at Gravity Global, puts it bluntly. Enterprise deals now involve "bands" of 10 to 12 stakeholders, and most agencies are still targeting one. "You've been serenading one person in a room of twelve," he writes, "while the other eleven decided to change the playlist on you. This isn't a targeting glitch; it's an orchestration failure."
Forrester's research on go-to-market alignment underscores the cost: disconnected marketing, sales and product teams are losing organisations an estimated 15% of potential revenue every year. The bottleneck isn't production. It's understanding. Understanding who you're talking to, what they actually care about, what makes them trust you enough to act, and who else in their organisation needs to be convinced before anything moves.
This is something we think about constantly at Ada. We built the platform around a specific conviction: that most AI tools in marketing start in the wrong place. They start with the brief and produce words. But the words are only as good as the understanding behind them. So Ada starts somewhere different. A structured intelligence layer profiles the audience across five dimensions (role psychology, company personality, industry context, cultural calibration, and buying group dynamics) before a single word of content is generated. Not because the writing models aren't good enough. Because writing without audience understanding is just noise with better grammar.
The real differentiator
The age of AI as differentiator is already over. It lasted about two years. What's emerging in its place is something older and more durable: the competitive advantage of genuine audience understanding.
Not persona slides. Not job-title targeting. Not "we ran it through AI." Genuine, structured understanding of how the person on the other end thinks, what they trust, what they resist, and what would make them act.
Every agency in these reports now has AI. Very few have built a systematic way to understand their audience at the depth the market demands. That gap, between having the tools and actually knowing who you're talking to, is where the next wave of competitive advantage lives.
Having AI is a lot like having electricity. Essential, yes. A differentiator? Not anymore.
See what audience-first looks like in practice
Ada is the audience-intelligence platform for B2B marketing and sales. Instead of starting with a blank page and a prompt, Ada builds a structured, evidence-grounded profile of who you're trying to reach: how they think, what they trust, what they resist. Then it works from there. Strategy, content, sales prep, competitive intelligence: all calibrated to the person on the other end.
If you're curious what that looks like for your market, book a demo and we'll show you.