---
title: "The Future of PPC Agencies: Adapting to AI and Automation"
url: https://adtech.lol/articles/f5f78964-7c8f-4197-b7d0-8b89d8d1c2ab
source_url: https://searchengineland.com/what-the-ppc-agency-of-2027-will-look-like-495573/
source_site: searchengineland
author: "Robert Simpkins"
published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00
tags: ["PPC", "AI", "Data Engineering", "Advertising", "Automation"]
publisher: AdTech Radar
---

# The Future of PPC Agencies: Adapting to AI and Automation

> The role of PPC agencies is evolving dramatically due to the rise of AI and automation. While traditional roles centered around manual account management, the future requires agencies to blend technical capabilities with marketing expertise. This shift could lead to fewer operational roles and a greater emphasis on strategic decision-making and data engineering.

## Introduction

For most of the history of PPC, the agency model has been fairly simple. You hired people who understood the advertising platforms. Those people managed the accounts, analyzed performance, made changes, and reported back to the client. The better the hires were at navigating Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, or Meta, the more value the agency could provide.

That model is starting to change.

As the platforms take on more of the operational work and AI becomes capable of handling increasingly complicated tasks, the value of having someone manually operate an account starts to fall. Conversely, the value of having someone who understands what the system should be doing, what information it needs, and where it should go next starts to rise.

That’s going to change what a PPC agency actually is.

The agencies that will do well over the next few years are those that sit somewhere between traditional agencies and software companies. They’ll still need genuine performance marketing expertise, but they’ll also need the data engineering and technical capability to build systems around that expertise.

## What is the purpose of a PPC agency these days?

There’s a strange uncertainty in the market at the moment. We haven’t settled on what a PPC agency is supposed to look like when the platforms themselves can do so much of the work.

At one end, you have people who are still skeptical of AI and would rather rely on the experience and judgment of a good PPC practitioner. At the other, you have the increasingly automated vision represented by people like Mark Zuckerberg: Connect your business, give Meta your money, and let the system handle the rest.

Most businesses are somewhere in between.

They want the efficiency that automation can provide, but they’re not necessarily comfortable handing complete control of their advertising over to a black box. They still want someone who understands the business, can challenge the output, and can make a decision when there’s no obvious answer.

That middle ground is where the agency opportunity sits.

## The problem is what sits underneath AI

One of the realities that gets lost in the excitement around AI is that a lot of the problems agencies are trying to solve are actually engineering problems.

You can put an AI tool on top of almost anything. There are now hundreds of products that will analyze your campaigns, produce reports, make recommendations, or automate parts of account management. But if the data underneath those systems is poor, the output is going to be poor too.

That becomes particularly important as the advertising platforms become more automated.

Performance Max, Advantage+, and the systems that follow them are already doing a huge amount of the tactical work inside campaigns. The question increasingly becomes less about which button an agency practitioner should press and more about what information the platform is being given to make its decisions.

That’s a data engineering problem.

If an agency is relying entirely on the data a client happens to provide and whatever functionality an off-the-shelf tool happens to offer, it’s not really controlling the system. It’s working within somebody else’s infrastructure.

That’s going to become a problem as more of the account becomes automated. If a generic AI can pull the data, analyze it, and make a routine optimization, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify charging a client for a person to do exactly the same thing.

Which means that the value moves elsewhere. It sits in the quality of the data, the systems built around it, the creative, and, ultimately, the people deciding what all of it should be doing.

## Where agencies and SaaS businesses are starting to converge

Historically, there was a fairly clear dividing line between PPC agencies and SaaS companies.

A SaaS company built software and sold access to it. A PPC agency sold expertise and service. It knew how to use the SaaS companies’ platforms and software, understood the client’s objectives, and translated those objectives into campaign activity. That distinction makes much less sense now.

The technology required to build sophisticated software has become far more accessible. Things that once required a team of expensive developers can now be built by much smaller teams, including businesses whose primary business model has historically been selling services.

At the same time, the advertising platforms themselves are taking over more of the work that agencies used to perform.

That puts pressure on both sides.

A SaaS company can’t rely on simply having software as its competitive advantage when agencies can increasingly build their own technology. Equally, an agency that only provides expertise is exposed when more of the work those experts perform can be automated.

The interesting position is in the middle: the technical capability of a software business combined with the client knowledge, strategic judgment, and service of an agency.

I don’t think anyone has completely figured out what that model looks like yet. There are plenty of businesses experimenting with it, and some are changing their models quite dramatically to try to work it out.

That’s one of the reasons the next couple of years will be particularly interesting. The blueprint for the next generation of PPC agencies is being designed right now.

## The PPC manager becomes a decision-maker

This inevitably changes the role of the PPC manager. The job becomes less about sitting in spreadsheets, pulling data, and making hundreds of individual changes in an account. Instead, the practitioner becomes the person directing the systems doing that work.

That means telling agents what to look for, deciding which problems actually matter, assessing the options they produce, and turning all of that into a coherent strategy for the client.

Some of the skills agencies have traditionally hired for will become less valuable. Pulling and manipulating data, building complex spreadsheets, writing repetitive code and formulas, and implementing routine changes in ad accounts are all things that increasingly lend themselves to automation.

The skills that become more valuable are the ones that are much harder to reduce to a repeatable process. Consider these questions:

- Can someone take a complicated business situation and turn it into a strategy?
- Can they look at three viable options and understand which one makes sense commercially?
- Can they recognize when the data is telling them something important that the system has missed?

That’s a different definition of a good PPC practitioner. 

The best people won’t necessarily be the ones who can operate an advertising platform fastest. Instead, they’ll be the ones who can understand a business, make good decisions, and direct the technology effectively.

## AI could disrupt the PPC talent pipeline

This is probably the least comfortable part of the whole conversation.

A lot of the work traditionally given to junior PPC specialists is operational. Pulling reports, checking accounts, manipulating data, implementing changes, and carrying out basic analysis are all useful ways to learn the trade, but they’re also precisely the kinds of tasks that AI is increasingly capable of doing.

If an agent can do that work more quickly, more cheaply, and with fewer errors, it becomes difficult to make a commercial case for putting a junior human on it instead.

Clients have never particularly wanted to pay for junior people to perform routine work in the first place. They wanted the expertise of the experienced person overseeing the account. If technology can now take care of some of that routine work, it’s fairly obvious which direction the economics will move in.

The difficult question is what happens to the people who would previously have learned through doing that work?

If fewer people enter the industry through operational roles, there could eventually be fewer experienced practitioners coming through the other end. That could make genuinely strong paid media people more valuable, particularly if their role is to oversee increasingly sophisticated agentic systems rather than manually operate accounts themselves.

In other words, we could end up with fewer people doing PPC execution and a greater premium on the people who know how to direct it.

## The economics of the PPC agency will change with automation

There’s another consequence that agency owners should probably be thinking about now: how they charge for the work.

An agency increasingly becomes a system of humans and agents. The economics of the two are very different.

The cost of an agent is largely tied to compute and token expenditure, and those costs are falling rapidly. For any given task, the agency will increasingly have to decide whether it makes economic sense to have a person do it or whether an agent can do it.

For much of the operational work, the answer will be obvious.

That leaves clients paying humans for the part of the job that remains difficult to automate: thinking, judgment, context, and accountability.

That puts long-term pressure on agency fees. In the short term, agencies may be able to use automation to increase their margins, and there’s nothing particularly surprising about a business doing that. But as those capabilities become more widely available, competition should push some of that efficiency back toward clients.

The end result is likely to be less money being spent on routine account management and more scrutiny on what the human part of an agency relationship is actually worth. Every agency should be thinking about that now and having the conversation with its clients rather than waiting for the economics to change underneath them.

If I were a client hiring an agency today, I’d also be very reluctant to sign a typical 24-month contract. The economics of delivering PPC services could look very different in a year’s time. Locking yourself into a two-year model while that’s happening seems difficult to justify.

## Not every agency needs to become a software company

There will still be agencies that don’t follow this model and do perfectly well. However, they’ll need another source of competitive advantage.

That could be access to inventory that other agencies can’t get. It could be deep expertise in a particular sector, proprietary data, or a very specific piece of technology. An agency that has spent years understanding the economics and buying behavior of a niche market may have a level of knowledge that’s genuinely difficult for a generic AI system to replicate.

There will also continue to be a role for specialist human account managers. In some businesses, the relationship itself is part of the value.

But even there, the role changes. The strongest account managers will be those who understand the technology well enough to manage it, challenge it, and ensure it’s working toward the client’s actual commercial objectives.

## Clients don’t care how the work gets done

Ultimately, there’s a fairly simple test for all of this: Clients want results.

If their accounts are consistently hitting their targets and doing so efficiently, they’re not going to be particularly concerned about whether an analysis was produced by an employee sitting in Excel or an agent running overnight.

As agents become better at the work, clients will naturally expect agencies to use them. But that doesn’t mean the answer is simply buying an off-the-shelf AI product and connecting it to an account.

Generic technology is unlikely to understand the nuances of an individual business particularly well. More tailored systems will be built around each client’s industry, economics, customer journey, data, and commercial objectives. Building that properly still requires engineers and developers.

For smaller and midsize businesses, there’s a clear role for agencies that can build those systems for them. Larger organizations with substantial technical teams may choose to build more of this infrastructure themselves and connect it into the wider agentic systems already being developed across the business.

Either way, the opportunity isn’t really to sell another AI tool: It’s to build something that understands the business.

## What if AI never gets good enough?

There’s a perfectly reasonable counterargument to all of this.

What if AI never becomes reliable enough to run meaningful parts of a paid media account? And if it does eventually become that capable, why would the client need an agency at all? Surely the Zuckerberg version of the future wins: Give Meta the money and let it do everything.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

Brands are unlikely to want to give up complete control over their advertising, even if the technology becomes capable of managing it. We can already see this tension in the way brands approach automated creative, targeting, and campaign optimization from the platforms.

There’s a difference between allowing a system to do the work and giving it complete authority over what the business is trying to achieve.

As the systems become more capable, the human role changes rather than disappearing altogether. The person overseeing the account has less reason to be involved in the mechanics of the work and more reason to be involved in deciding what the system is allowed to do.

That’s a very different agency role from the one we have today.

## So what does the PPC agency of 2027 actually look like?

The agency isn’t disappearing. The work is moving.

The PPC agency of 2027 is likely to have much more in common with a software company than the traditional agency model suggests. It’ll need strong data engineering, technical capability, and the ability to build systems around individual clients. But it’ll still need people who understand advertising, business, and strategy deeply enough to know what those systems should be doing.

The important distinction is that those people will no longer need to perform every task themselves. They’ll instead direct the systems that do it.

That creates a fairly fundamental shift in what clients are buying from an agency. They’ll buy less operational labor and more of the combination of technology, expertise, context, and judgment that sits behind it.

There’s no settled blueprint for that yet. Agencies are still working it out, and so are the platforms and the clients.

But the change is already underway. The agencies that recognize where the value is moving and start building around it now will have a much better chance of shaping what the PPC agency becomes next.

Source: [https://searchengineland.com/what-the-ppc-agency-of-2027-will-look-like-495573/](https://searchengineland.com/what-the-ppc-agency-of-2027-will-look-like-495573/)