RESEARCH / AGENCY AI PULSE / 2026THEAGENCYAIPULSE.
218 SURVEY SUBMISSIONS
INDUSTRY RESEARCH IN CONTEXT
A pulse.
Not a census.
218 people working in and around agencies told us how AI is changing their work, their commercial models and their expectations.
The survey was open and recruited through LinkedIn and Reddit. People chose to participate. That makes the findings useful as signals of what some practitioners are seeing and anticipating, not as representative estimates for the agency industry.
Throughout this publication we separate what respondents say is happening, what they expect to happen, and what other studies report. Those distinctions matter, especially when the numbers are striking.
What respondents report
For example, whether a client has already requested an AI-related discount.
What they anticipate
For example, the pricing model they believe will dominate in two years. Not a forecast.
What other samples found
Different studies, different populations, different questions. Useful comparisons, not a combined benchmark.
AI is changing agency work.
Not everything is changing with it.
The interesting story is no longer whether agencies use AI. It is the distance between what they already do, what they trust, what they expect and what clients actually change.
Mirel Agency AI Pulse 2026, n=218. Use = regularly/most of the time; high trust = 4 or 5 on a five-point scale. Different questions.
The work is changing faster than the rules around it.
AI is already part of everyday agency practice. Every respondent reports regular or frequent use for research and insight. But adoption alone says little about whether an agency has redesigned its workflows, changed who makes decisions or found a new way to create value.
Strategy is being assisted. Judgement is not being handed over.
Nearly two-thirds use AI for strategic support; just 8% rate their trust in its strategic recommendations at four or five out of five. That is a difference in reported use and confidence, not a test of AI’s objective ability.
Agencies imagine a different future. That does not make it the present.
Seventy-two per cent would hire fewer people if they founded an agency today. Three-quarters currently name hourly/FTE retainers as their primary billing model, yet only 17% expect that model to remain primary in two years. The first is a hypothetical staffing choice; the second is a prediction about pricing, not evidence of a completed transition.
Clients may take tasks without abandoning agencies.
The GWA’s separate client-side survey finds widespread interest in bringing marketing tasks in-house, while relatively few expect agencies to play a smaller overall role. That is not a contradiction to resolve with a single number. It is a question about which work stays outside and why. [3, pp. 4–5, 22]
This is a pulse. Not a census.
The Mirel survey comprises 218 self-selected submissions recruited via LinkedIn and Reddit. Its findings describe these practitioners, not the industry as a whole. Throughout the report, OBSERVED means respondents report doing or experiencing something; EXPECTED means they anticipate it; EXTERNAL refers to a different study; and INTERPRETATION identifies a question raised by the evidence.
Everyone uses AI. That tells us surprisingly little.
Adoption is the baseline. Integration is the question.
Mirel Agency AI Pulse 2026, n=218. Research, production and strategy are regular/frequent use; agents indicate at least one in regular use. Rounded to whole percentages.
Everyone in this sample uses AI for research. That is the starting line.
↗All 218 respondents say they use AI regularly or most of the time for research and insight. Ninety-two per cent report that frequency for production. Yet those activities can still be performed as isolated tasks without changing how work moves through the agency.
Having agents is not the same as having an integrated agency.
↗Seventy-eight per cent report at least one agent or automation in regular use. That question records adoption, not whether those systems share data, are maintained reliably or form part of a connected workflow. The response option “5+ deeply integrated” was selected by 25 respondents; it combines agent count and integration depth, so it should not be read as a clean maturity measure.
The outside evidence tells a similar, but separate, story.
In the IAB’s 2025 study, 85% of its cross-industry sample reported general-purpose AI use, but 30% described AI as fully integrated into media campaigns [2, pp. 7–9]. The GWA’s agency sample reported universal generative-AI use for text and images, alongside a lower share using AI process automation [3]. Different populations and definitions prevent a like-for-like adoption comparison.
The next dividing line may be operational, not technological.
What matters next is less whether an agency has an AI tool and more whether it has a dependable way of using it across real work. That is a proposition for future measurement, not a result established by the Pulse.
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