Procurement

Agency scopes for 2027 are being drafted over the next six weeks, and most of them still price deliverable counts and hours—the two things AI made cheap. Procurement has noticed and will ask for an efficiency discount. Taking that discount naively strips out the senior judgment you were actually paying for and leaves the production you could have automated yourself. Here is what is genuinely scarce in an agency relationship now, how to structure a scope around it, and the contract terms nobody has updated yet.

Renewal season opens in the next few weeks, and the quotes coming back look different: AI capabilities that arrived bundled and free are now metered, and the meter runs on units most marketing teams have never measured. This is the same transition infrastructure teams went through with cloud a decade ago, with one added complication—agents consume without anyone asking them to. Here is how to instrument, forecast, and negotiate consumption before you sign a contract you cannot budget.