"Can you help us rationalize to our team why they should adopt AI, when invariably the adoption of AI is going to cost some team members their job?"
Several weeks ago, I met with the President of a large independent agency, and he posed this question to me. To which I replied: you care about your best people. You want to acquire, retain, and grow your best people.
Last week I wrote about how to structure an agency's team to get the most out of Gigi. This post is the sequel: why the best people inside that structure should be running toward it, not away from it.
Across every industry, AI is an accelerant for the best people. Software engineering is the clearest example: the best engineers are 10x more productive than two years ago, directing agents instead of writing code. Engineering teams have shrunk. The compensation for the people who stayed has gone up, often dramatically.
The day after that post went up, ClickUp's CEO did exactly this. He cut 22% of staff and reframed the move as an opportunity to redirect those savings to the people who stayed:
"In a world where companies are able to do so much more with less, where does that excess money go? In our case, much of the savings in this new operating model will flow directly back to those that enabled it. We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can't afford to lose them. You should aim to retain these employees for decades. The context they have and their ability to efficiently orchestrate and review will be nearly impossible to replace. Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We're introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems."
Most agencies won't be writing $1M comp plans next quarter. But the principle holds: the operators who drive exponential output should capture exponential upside, and the ones who don't push for that are leaving money on the table.
In services businesses like media agencies, headcount has historically scaled linearly with customers and revenue. We've now seen across our customer base that agencies who staff their teams optimally around Gigi can grow customers and revenue exponentially without growing the team. The effect takes time to materialize, but once it does, the agency reaps the benefits.
Whether the operators creating that exponential output actually capture some of it is the open question. We can't write their comp plan. What we can do is make them irreplaceable, so the conversation with their leadership starts from the right place. We've done the first part. The second part is on them.
So when that agency leader asked me how to rationalize Gigi to his team, the answer is now obvious. Team members should be raising their hands to become the operators of Gigi. The ones who do are the most ambitious people in your org. They're the ones investing in themselves for the future. They're the ones who will reshape your operating model. And they're the ones you will do everything in your power to retain, because they've made themselves indispensable.
Cherry Picked is a monthly newsletter from Adam Epstein, co-founder and CEO at Gigi, covering the AI and commerce media insights you just gotta know.
