The advertising industry has faced significant challenges this year, marked by agency consolidations at major holding companies and sweeping headcount reductions. Between August 2025 and August 2026, the industry recorded a loss of 6,900 jobs, per Emarketer.
While there are many factors behind the cuts, one of the most prominent has been the rise of artificial intelligence across all aspects of the industry. From data analysis to campaign generation, AI’s adoption has been swift across nearly all marketing disciplines, leaving many executives apprehensive about the future.
Still, 66% of agency-side strategists agree there are clear reasons to be optimistic, according to WARC’s Future of Strategy 2026 report.
“We’re not saying the problems are solved, but we are saying the tides may be turning,” said Lena Roland, content director at WARC Strategy. “After a period of layoffs and consolidation, there’s a sense that things might be stabilizing and strategists can [begin] to look forward again.”
The reasons for the guarded positivity are simple: Clients are seeing a need for thinking that is rooted in human insights, Roland explained. Strategy influence with clients jumped to 50%, up from 41% in 2025, per WARC.
“This indicates that clients are increasingly recognizing the value of strategy, particularly at a time when growth is harder to achieve,” Roland said. “AI can help us understand the world as it is; strategists can help us understand what it can become.”
Ironically, AI is helping fuel strategists’ confidence. Nearly two-thirds, 65%, of the 489 agency-side strategists surveyed said AI gives them time for more nuanced, strategic work. Simultaneously, 55% believe the tech will refocus strategy on human perspectives. WARC’s report was fielded in August.
“Strategists are positioned as the best people to be guardians of reality by grounding ideas in real human insights,” Roland said. “In an age of AI, humanity is a competitive advantage. AI can’t replace human judgment or intuition, and it can’t ask the questions that are really worth asking.”
Not yet, anyway. Despite their optimism for the near-term, strategists are more wary about the long-term. More than half of the strategists polled in WARC’s study — 56%, up from 41% last year — are concerned that AI will eventually advance enough to replace them.
“They’re more optimistic about the future, but they’re also realistic about the scale of change,” Roland said. “The strategists that will thrive are those who learn to use AI well, while still bringing the human perspective, critical thinking and commercial understanding that makes their work valuable.”
However, the technology could become a double-edged sword: The same tools that strategists are using to move upstream with clients could also be leveraged by account executives, explained Michael Farmer, chairman and CEO at marketing consultancy Farmer & Company.
“When agencies talk about AI [right now], they’re not talking about how they can do a more strategic job for their clients,” Farmer said. “If they have the will, the senior account executives can [use AI] to offer more strategy.”
Doing so would elevate account executives to more of a business partner role, rather than one more akin to a traffic manager whose job is to get stuff out the door, Farmer said. He explained that over the past 30-some years, the account executive role has been diminished through the rise of programmatic negotiating, the unbundling of media and creative and the introduction of strategists in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
“They took away a responsibility that the account people already had,” Farmer said. “They used to tell me when I first got started that the strategist was ‘the conscience of the consumer’ … They were there to kind of provide discipline between caring about the brand and caring about the brief that they got from the client.”
Often, that meant rewriting the briefs accordingly, Farmer said. Now, AI can often write those briefs as well — if not better — than a strategist can, which is reflected in the sentiment from strategists that they have more time to think beyond the brief. Agencies and their strategists will need to find how to prove their value beyond their traditional remit.
“Strategy as a discipline has too often been treated as a supporting function, or even thrown in for free, rather than recognized as a valuable service in its own right,” Roland said. “There’s an opportunity now for strategists to become genuine growth partners, helping shape not just how a brand communicates, but where the business goes next.”
Fortunately for strategists, many are already aware of the need to prove business results. In WARC’s survey, 80% of strategists said they must develop stronger evidence to prove their business impact, and 57% said they need a new value proposition and compensation model.
“AI is a great opportunity, but you have to be a strategist to realize that it could help you tap that unrealized potential,” Farmer said.
Which is ultimately why strategists see hope in the face of AI’s headwinds. Businesses will always be under pressure to demonstrate growth and will always need people who can find new ways to achieve it, whether that is on their own or with the help of AI, Roland explained.
“Businesses will always need people who can diagnose and solve problems,” Roland said. “The best strategists will use AI to get beyond the obvious and connect creativity to commercial outcomes, helping businesses see possibilities they couldn’t see before.”
Editor’s note: Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Marketing Dive’s publisher Informa TechTarget, is also invested in WARC. Informa has no influence over Marketing Dive’s coverage.
