Nearly one in four people globally now participate in the creative economy. AI has made production near-universal. Platforms have flattened distribution. SXSW continues to pull together the group that reflects that shift—creators, brand operators, AI researchers, neuroscientists, agency leaders—all in the same rooms, working through what creative value looks like when high-quality production is no longer the constraint.
Five days, one consistent signal: agency value is being relocated.
The capabilities that once defined advantage—production, speed, access—are now widely available. The work is still getting done. The question is where the leverage sits.
At CES in January, we mapped five archetypes for how leaders process technological change. Those same patterns showed up again at SXSW, with a different underlying issue. The creative economy has expanded. Participation is no longer the barrier. The challenge is leading inside that reality.
This complex puzzle ties directly back to the two futures we outlined in our Look Ahead 2026: is agency value captured via technologies and platforms that power the creative majority, or as a higher-order strategic consultant that orchestrates these moving pieces?
Agencies Helped Build the Creative Majority. Now What?
Every agency leader we spoke with was working through the same underlying question: where does agency value concentrate when creation is abundant?
Creators bring audience proximity. Platforms bring data. AI brings speed and scale. None of those are scarce.
What surfaced in conversations was a different kind of capability—less visible, harder to productize and more dependent on how organizations are designed.
Where many agencies are now focusing is the ability to connect creative decisions to business outcomes across a portfolio of clients and categories. To align inputs from creators, platforms and AI systems into something coherent. To make decisions with accountability attached.
Kate Rush-Sheehy of GSD&M described it as a bird’s nest—interdependent components woven into a structure that holds. That description stuck because it captures the nature of the work. It’s not a single output. It’s an architecture.
“We are no longer the keepers of everything. If we can be the keeper of strategy, that’s where our value lies.”
— Matthew Smith, Charts and Darts
Across eight agencies, the language varied. The shape of the answer didn’t.
Orchestration is the job.
It shows up in how inputs get selected, how they get combined, and how they connect to outcomes that clients actually care about. It shows up in decisions—what gets made, what doesn’t, what gets scaled, what gets killed. That layer remains scarce.
The direction is increasingly clear. The constraint is structural. Many agencies are set up to deliver outputs efficiently; orchestration requires them to own decisions across the system. That shift touches org design, incentives and how work gets evaluated—and most models haven’t caught up yet.
Watch more conversations from the series “Look Ahead: SXSW 2026 – The Creative Majority”
Responsible AI Adoption Takes on a New Dimension
AI amplifies what we bring to it. Bring curiosity, judgment and genuine creative pressure — and you get leverage most people haven’t experienced yet. Bring passivity — and you get passivity at scale.
That dynamic is visible at the individual level. It becomes more consequential when it scales across teams and across the industry. Shared tools, similar prompts, similar outputs. Over time, the work starts to converge.
AI is very good at producing the mean of what already exists. Uniform usage patterns reinforce that tendency. The result shows up in the work—less variation, less tension, less edge. For agencies, that lands as a competitive problem.
Research presented at SXSW put language around a related behavior. A Berkeley neuroscientist revealed findings from a study of 450 students: people with higher phone dependency were 30% more likely to defer to AI outputs, even when those outputs were wrong. She called it cognitive surrender. Accuracy didn’t break the pattern.
What sits underneath that is effort.
Effort tends to get framed as friction. Something to remove. In practice, it’s also how skills develop. Pattern recognition, instinct, taste—those are honed through doing the work, not skipping it. Removing effort feels efficient in the moment. Outsourcing it feels like productivity. Over time, it compounds into something closer to atrophy.
Performance data points in the same direction. OpenAI research shows power users outperforming casual users by a factor of seven. The gap isn’t about access. It shows up in how the tool gets used.
One presenter framed it in terms that resonated. Artificial Intelligence handles tasks—summarizing a market, drafting a memo, building a deck. Augmented Intelligence expands the role—asking the system to model second-order effects, to take on different stakeholder perspectives, to stress-test decisions before they get made. The difference is intent.
You can see it inside teams. Some people are actively shaping outputs, verifying them, owning decisions. Others are moving faster through familiar workflows with a different tool. Individually, those look like workflow choices. Cognitive surrender isn’t just a professional development problem. At scale, it’s a creative homogenization problem. It’s how an entire industry loses its competitive texture.
The Creative Majority amplifies that dynamic. More people creating. More tools in circulation. More output competing for attention.
The next layer is architectural. The organizations that move beyond prompt-level usage and start designing systems—workflows, guardrails, embedded values—are operating in a different category. Most are still early. Estimates at SXSW put most organizations (95%) at the first level, focused on outputs.
The leverage sits higher up. And is a good reminder of the ongoing importance of humans in the loop: we need to exist in the process, and resist the draw towards cognitive surrender and the risk of output homogenization.
Trust Is Still the Infrastructure
More creators. More content. More volume moving through the system.
Signal gets harder to find. Trust carries more weight.
The data reflects that shift. Seventy-seven percent of people trust their own AI outputs. Sixteen percent trust AI-generated content from others. Ninety-four percent want AI content labeled.
“You can spend two decades building trust, and one misstep not in favor of your consumer can make it all fall down.”
— Christie Bishop, Harris Poll
“AI slop” came up in multiple conversations—high-volume, low-quality content circulating across platforms. It shows up in client work. It shows up internally. It accumulates quickly.
The Creative Majority expands participation and even responsible AI adoption accelerates production. These forces also raise the bar for anything to stand out, leaving trust as the last competitive advantage.
This is exactly why the 4As has been studying content provenance, including the C2PA framework that gives the industry tools to authenticate and disclose AI-generated content responsibly. But provenance is infrastructure, not strategy. It may become the mechanics of trust. But the underlying obligation is harder: bring enough of yourself to AI that the output stays undeniably yours. Taste, discernment, and human judgment aren’t just nice-to-haves. In a world of abundant generation, they enable trust – and become the ultimate differentiator.
The Leadership Opening
The 4As Look Ahead 2026 framed two paths: agency as marketing technology purveyor, or agency as elevated strategic partner.
At SXSW, most leaders were operating somewhere in between.
Orchestration and judgment are where value is moving. Production and delivery still anchor revenue today. Both realities exist at the same time. Agencies are operating in that gap, making decisions about where to invest and how quickly to move.
The Creative Majority expands the playing field. It also compresses differentiation. The distance between signal and noise continues to widen.
The agencies that stood out in conversations weren’t trying to outrun the change. They were making explicit choices about what they stand for and then aligning their organizations around those choices—talent, workflows, systems, incentives.
One presenter closed with a line that stayed with me: “If you focus on the tools, you will suffer from whiplash. Focus on your values.”
That shows up in architecture. In how decisions get made. In what gets reinforced over time.
The next phase of this won’t be won by adopting tools faster. It will be won by agencies that make deliberate choices about what they value, redesign their organizations around those choices, and bring that standard to every piece of work that leaves the building.
Jeremy Lockhorn is the SVP of Innotvative Technology at the 4As. He spearheads the creation of several 4As GenAI resources such as the GenAI Blueprint, the GenAI Maturity Assessment Tool and more. Jeremy often speaks on AI and emerging tech at 4As conferences, webinars and other industry events, writes about emerging tech in advertising and can be spotted interviewing agency leaders and innovative thinkers at events like CES and SXSW.
