The in-house versus agency debate comes round every few years, and AI has made it louder. Some say AI means you no longer need an agency. Others say it means you no longer need much of a team. Both start from the wrong end. Start with the work, then decide who should do it.
Keep inside what needs to know the business
Recurring work that depends on knowing the customers, products and priorities is usually better done inside: campaign planning, briefs, product content, email and the website. Every handoff to an outsider costs context, and context is where most of the quality comes from.
Buy in what you can’t justify full-time
Specialist skills, production peaks and a fresh perspective are what agencies and contractors do well. I’ve worked most versions of this. At AWS Legal I ran the firm’s marketing and communications without a marketing team of my own. At Active Safety I managed marketing staff alongside external agencies and contractors. At The Gift Group I worked with agency partners while doing the Shopify development myself, because the storefront changes were too closely tied to the campaigns to hand off.
Where AI changes the answer
AI does move the line. A small internal team can now research, draft and test more options than before, so some work that used to go out can stay in. But AI helps an agency in exactly the same way, and it doesn’t remove the need for expertise or review. What it really does is raise the value of whoever holds the context.
Make the handoff part of the plan
Whoever does the work, the business should keep the brief, the source files, the logins and the reasoning. An external partner needs enough context to do great work, and someone inside needs to understand what came back and why. Clear deliverables and review points matter more than any general preference for one model.