The advertising business has always required a certain faith in the future — a willingness to believe that the client who is cautious today will be bold tomorrow, or at least the day after. This year, that faith is being tested in ways both familiar and novel.

According to a survey of 62 agency professionals conducted by Digiday+ Research in the fourth quarter of 2025, the industry's anxieties have settled into a kind of uneasy equipoise: 38 percent of respondents named reduced client budgets as their greatest concern for 2026, while an identical 38 percent pointed to the effects of artificial intelligence. It is the first time the two worries have achieved statistical parity, and the shift says something about where the business believes it is headed.

The budget pessimism is not new — 47 percent of agency professionals cited spending constraints as their top concern last year — but it has softened somewhat, down nine percentage points from 2025. More striking is what some agencies report hearing in new-business pitches: promises that 2027 will be different.

"A couple of new business pitches have noted the 2026 budget is X, but the 2027 budget is already projected to be X times, plus 50 percent," said Rob Davis, president and chief marketing officer at Novus. The message, as Mr. Davis described it, amounted to a polite request for patience. (One might call it an I.O.U. written on optimism.)

Scott Shamberg, president and chief executive of Mile Marker, said he had encountered the same phenomenon. "I'm interpreting that as, 'I know the budget for next year is not exactly what you would want, but the next year, I swear, is going to be huge,'" Mr. Shamberg said.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has graduated from curiosity to preoccupation. The survey found that 29 percent of respondents worried specifically about external A.I. developments, such as new tools entering the market, while 9 percent cited internal concerns like workforce development. In 2025, by comparison, only 11 percent selected external A.I. effects, and none mentioned internal ones.

The holding companies have noticed. WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, Havas and Dentsu have all been deploying similar language on earnings calls — agentic orchestration, human-supervised automation, layered intelligence — with the result that their strategies have begun to sound, to clients at least, rather alike.

"The honeymoon around A.I. and agencies is essentially over," said Jay Wilson, a vice president analyst at Gartner. A year ago, he noted, agencies promised cost efficiencies; now, chief marketing officers reviewing scopes of work say they are still waiting for the savings to appear.

The industry, it seems, is being asked to believe in two futures simultaneously: one in which budgets will bloom in 2027, and another in which artificial intelligence will eventually justify its hype. Whether either arrives on schedule remains, as always, a matter of faith.

Original story published in Digiday: "Digiday+ Research: Agencies punt budget growth expectations to 2027 -- while AI worries intensify"