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| Chris Donahoe |
Last month, a prospective client asked me what felt like a trick question: “What’s your hourly rate?” I gave an honest answer. There was a pause. Then: “That’s significantly more than our current agency.” I asked what they were paying in total for the deliverable in question. Another pause, longer this time. When they did the math, the number was nearly identical.
That exchange captures something the PR industry has been slow to confront. The billable hour has long been the common currency of agency economics, and for decades it functioned as a proxy for value. More hours meant more work. More work, presumably, meant better outcomes and more substantial outputs.
But artificial intelligence, combined with experienced human judgement, has severed the link between time spent and value delivered. The implications for how agencies price, staff, and compete are arriving faster than most firms want to acknowledge.
Here is the uncomfortable question: If a two-person team using AI can produce in an afternoon what a traditional agency team of six takes two weeks to deliver, and the total cost to the client is roughly the same, what exactly is the client paying for during those extra nine business days?
This is not a thought experiment. The teams I work with are seeing productivity improvements on the order of ten to twenty times what was possible just six months ago. A traditional agency team might spend 40 to 80 billable hours producing a full communications plan. An experienced practitioner working with purpose-built AI workflows can produce work of equal or better quality in a fraction of that time. When you compress 40 hours into four and the project cost stays the same, the implied hourly fee – given prevailing rate cards for senior teams – exceeds $7,000. That figure sounds absurd by traditional standards. But the client is paying for the same deliverable in each case, just getting it on Tuesday instead of two weeks from Tuesday.
The instinct is to frame this purely as a speed story. It is more than that. AI does not just make communications work faster; it makes it richer. A junior staffer might spend 15 hours manually reviewing media coverage and building a summary. An AI-powered approach can ingest thousands of articles, surface sentiment shifts, and flag emerging narratives, cross-reference them to the communications objectives and client preferences, then present findings a senior strategist can pressure-test in minutes. The human judgment is the same. The raw material feeding that judgment is dramatically richer. What gets eliminated is the busywork, the hours of manual assembly that padded agency invoices but never actually constituted strategic thinking.
None of this eliminates the need for experienced communications counsel. It does the opposite. It makes senior judgment more valuable because there is more and better information to apply it to. What it eliminates is the busywork, the hours of manual assembly that are added to agency invoices but never actually constitute strategic thinking.
For communications leaders evaluating agency partners, the old questions are becoming less useful by the quarter. Instead of asking about team size or hourly rate, ask what the actual workflow looks like. How much is manual assembly versus strategic thinking? Is a Thursday deadline a fire drill or a normal Tuesday? The answers will tell you more than any capabilities deck.
A $7,000-per-hour rate sounds provocative until you realize the cost is the same either way. The only difference is whether you get what you need today or next week. And in communications, where timing can determine whether you shape the narrative or react to it, that difference is everything.
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Chris Donahoe is Head of AI at Stillpoint Global Advisors.
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