There's a lot of noise at the moment about AI replacing agencies like mine, and
By Ted Gibson · June 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
There's a lot of noise at the moment about AI replacing agencies like mine, and I actually think it does the opposite, in the sense that it makes the thinking the entire job rather than a nice-to-have on the side.
The way it works for us is that the AI now handles most of the execution. It pulls the reports, harvests the search terms, flags the bids that have drifted out of range, drafts the first cut of listing copy, all the stuff that used to eat a junior's whole week and now takes an afternoon. None of which I'm complaining about, because honestly I want that part as cheap and fast as it can possibly be.
But none of it actually decides anything, and this week is a good example. It's Prime Day, and the system can tell me every ASIN's velocity, every bid and every search term in seconds, but what it can't tell me is which two products are worth discounting hard to move rank and which ones a 50% cut would just burn margin on for no real gain. That call depends on the brand, the category, the repeat-purchase economics and where they're trying to be in twelve months, and it's super hard to get right. That's the bit that's genuinely scarce.
So I'm not worried about the execution getting cheaper, I'm glad it is. The more the machine takes on the doing, the more our time goes where it always should have been, which is working out which lever actually matters for this brand, in this category, right now.