Last week, I completed something in 30 minutes that I used to charge $7,000 to $10,000 for.

Not because I cut corners. Not because I did a worse job. The output was identical—maybe better—than what my team would have produced over weeks of work just a few years ago.

The difference? AI.

For years, I was that agency owner who beat the drum for hourly billing. It felt honest. Transparent. You pay for the time, you get the expertise. No hidden margins, no mystery math. I genuinely believed it was the most ethical way to structure client relationships.

I was wrong.

Not because hourly billing was ever dishonest—but because it's now obsolete. The fundamental assumption underlying the hourly model was that time equals value. More hours meant more work meant more results. That equation held true for decades.

It doesn't anymore.

The tasks that used to fill our production calendars—competitive analyses, content strategies, campaign frameworks, creative concepts—are no longer measured in hours. They're measured in minutes. Sometimes seconds.

I've rigged together AI systems that compress what used to be weeks of agency work into a single afternoon. And I'm not talking about sloppy, AI-generated garbage. I'm talking about the same strategic depth, the same creative quality, the same measurable results.

Production houses are starting to notice. Some are shutting down. The smart ones are pivoting hard. The ones still clinging to "we need a team of 15 for that project" are watching their margins evaporate.

Here's what keeps me up at night—not in a bad way, but in an excited, can't-believe-this-is-real way:

Five years ago, the results I can deliver today would have cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions, depending on scope. Fortune 500 budgets for Fortune 500 outcomes.

Today? We're talking sub-six figures. Sometimes way under. Same outcomes. Same quality. Same—often better—speed to market.

I don't need a giant team anymore. I don't need layers of project managers, coordinators, and junior staff to feed the machine. The machine is the machine now, and it runs on prompts and integrations rather than headcount and overhead.

This is the part I genuinely don't understand.

Businesses are still paying 2019 prices for 2019 production models. They're still hiring agencies that staff up like it's the pre-AI era. They're still accepting timelines measured in months when the work could be done in weeks.

Maybe it's inertia. Maybe it's fear of the unknown. Maybe it's because most agencies have a financial incentive to not tell you this. If your business model depends on billing hours, you're not exactly motivated to find ways to bill fewer of them.

But if you're the one writing the checks? You should be asking hard questions. You should be demanding to know why that project "requires" 200 hours when the actual strategic work can be compressed into a fraction of that.

If you're a growing business that's been priced out of real marketing expertise—the kind that used to require enterprise budgets—the game has changed. The barriers are down. The tools exist. The expertise to wield them is available.

You can get Fortune 500-level strategy, creative, and execution without the Fortune 500 budget. Not "almost as good." Not "good enough for a small business." The real thing.

The question isn't whether AI has changed marketing. It has. The question is whether you're going to keep paying for the old model while your competitors figure out the new one.

The hourly model is dead. The opportunity is wide open.