A friend still at my old shop sent me their refreshed capabilities deck last week and asked, with real sincerity, whether it landed. Slide four is the founding story. Slide nine is the client logo wall. Slide fourteen is new this year, and slide fourteen is about machine learning.
It has a neural network illustration, the kind with the glowing nodes. It has the word augmented twice. It does not say what anyone at that agency will do differently on a Monday.
I asked her that directly. She was quiet for a second and then said, honestly, we brought in a data science partner for one pharma pitch in March.
Which is the whole thing.
Since Duplex called that hair salon on stage at I/O in May, every capabilities deck in this city has grown a page like slide fourteen. I understand the pressure. Procurement asks. Clients ask. Nobody wants to be the shop that seemed asleep in 2018.
An AI page in a deck is not a capability. It is a hedge against being asked a question you do not want to answer, and clients have learned to smell the difference faster than we have learned to fake it.
Kubrick built the best image we have for this. The monolith arrives, nobody understands it, and the entire tribe reorganizes around it anyway. That is the accurate picture of most agency AI strategy right now. Something appeared, it is clearly consequential, and the response has been to gather around it and make noise rather than to touch it and find out what it does. The monolith at least changed the apes. Slide fourteen has not changed anybody's Monday.
The shops I have seen do this credibly did something unglamorous instead. They picked one narrow, boring, repeatable job and automated it, then talked about that job specifically. Media mix modeling. Creative variant testing at volume. Social listening that actually clusters instead of counting mentions. One of them told a client, in a pitch, that they did not use machine learning for concept development and would not pretend to. They won.
Because specificity is the only proof available. Everyone can say augmented. Almost nobody can say we cut two weeks off the reporting cycle for this client, here is the before and after, here is who ran it.
Slide fourteen has not changed anybody's Monday.
I told my friend to delete the slide and replace it with the pharma pitch story, all of it, including the part where they hired the partner because they could not do it in house. She said that made the agency look small. Maybe. It also makes the agency look like it has been in a room with the actual work. Truffles reorganized around a cardboard box this week with roughly the same reverence, and at least she eventually got inside it.