Alex Paquin, founder and CEO at Zerotrillion discusses why the agency of the future will be built around highly capable expert generalists who never stop learning

It's been a weird and rough couple of years for creative agencies.

We've all watched the once-admired titans of the industry collapse into the holdco brand seemingly overnight, and then watched those holdcos retract into shells of their former selves.

For the better part of two decades, we've lamented the glory days of advertising and blamed the 'broken agency model' for their demise. Brands' growing appetite for 'in-housing' and the 'brain drain' to Silicon Valley didn't help. Then AI arrived, and it felt like the final nail in the coffin. We were the cannon fodder for a generative creative tidal wave, and our entire industry would supposedly collapse under its weight.

We don't see it that way.

Let me be clear on where I stand on AI.

Artificial intelligence is the single greatest discovery of our time, and we're deeply invested in it directly through our AI company, Trillioncore Technologies.

But as the wave of this new era washes over our industry, most of what I see being swept away are things we humans already needed to let go of.

The fact that workflow management and variant-generating tasks occupy so much of the modern workday inside any agency is why advertising has lost its shine and, to the young generation of talent, its allure.

Let AI take the endless churn of performance ad formats.

Let AI design the CRM flow.

Let AI create the A, B, C, and D test product landing pages.

Let AI write the body copy for those forty-seven supplemental paid social ads.

Maybe even let it take the first pass at the press release.

But don't rely on AI to create meaningful difference, because it won't.

We're already seeing the results of brands trying to cut corners that can't be cut: eerily similar, sycophantic campaigns across every major customer touchpoint.

These are often the result of skipping the creative process and letting 'the team come up with ideas themselves' using a freemium ChatGPT subscription.

To make good work you have to let humans be just weird enough to be cool.

Let humans bathe in the zeitgeist and reflect back whatever culture is needed to meet the moment.

And let those of us with leading taste help the brands reaching for a piece of culture actually grasp it.

Isn't that what a creative agency does?

Human beings will always be a prerequisite for creating culture, because without humanity there is no culture.

The digital-first era of marketing (late 2000s) has broadened the scope of our tactical deliverables so much that there's been less and less time spent inside agencies for sheer human creativity and culture-making.

So shouldn't we welcome the chance to hand a lot of that sloggy work back to the machines that demanded it of us in the first place?

That's what we're doing at Zerotrillion.

The team photo accompanying this article represents both the present and future of our company. Everyone in it is a multidisciplinary expert in areas like strategy, creativity, design, publicity, and production.

We believe the agency of the future will be built around people like this: highly capable expert generalists who never stop learning. Our job is to help the next generation develop that same level of expertise while using new tools to remove administrative friction and focus on what matters most: creating great work.

Our ultimate vision is simple. Human beings as the taste-makers, trend-spotters, and brand philosophers, with agentic business systems handling the administrative and tactical work, so we have maximum time and brainspace to be the best culture creators we can be.

More than ever we need that time to consider, and reflect. Because so much of the means of creation is commoditised with generative AI, our role as deeply considerate brand and business consiglieres matters more than ever.

Zerotrillion is here to answer one question for our clients: in an era where your brand can make anything, be anything, who should you be?