The advertising industry has spent decades assuring itself that it is prepared for the next technological upheaval, and then being surprised when the upheaval arrives anyway. Now comes agentic AI — the kind that does not merely assist but acts on its own — and the customary declarations of readiness have given way to something more candid.
"I don't think readiness is the right frame," said Charles Yang, the chief executive of Vibe, an AI workspace company. "The right frame is: Are you in the water? Because you can't learn to swim from the shore."
Mr. Yang's aquatic metaphor surfaced in a survey of 34 chief executives conducted by Fast Company, and the responses suggest that most of the industry is, at present, standing on the beach in sensible shoes, watching the tide come in.
The survey found executives divided between enthusiasm for what autonomous AI tools might accomplish and anxiety about what they might do unsupervised. Helen Andrews, the chief executive of Johannes Leonardo, the independent agency whose clients include Volkswagen, offered a view that would have sounded heretical on Madison Avenue not long ago: that most of the technology adopted in the past two decades has simply created more work, not better work.
"More platforms, more formats, more reporting, more coordination," Ms. Andrews said. "Most of it shallow. Agentic AI is the first thing in a long time that could actually subtract from that pile."
(One imagines a holding company somewhere quietly updating its PowerPoint decks.)
But Jason Harris, who leads the creative agency Mekanism, warned that the greater threat may not be the technology itself but clients who convince themselves it has already replaced the need for human judgment. "A procurement team looking at a spreadsheet can't tell the difference between work that's efficient and work that's alive," he said.
The survey also surfaced familiar concerns about data quality, security vulnerabilities, and the question of who bears responsibility when an autonomous system makes a poor decision — questions that have followed every wave of automation since the first mainframe was wheeled into a media department.
Nobody who responded said businesses and consumers are ready for the changes ahead. Most said no. A few said consumers may be further along than the companies trying to serve them.
It is, in other words, the sort of moment Madison Avenue has seen before, if perhaps not quite at this speed. The water, it seems, is rising whether anyone is ready to swim or not.
Original story published in Fast Company: "Exclusive: 34 CEOs on what thrills and terrifies them about agentic AI"