Will Procurement Judge Agencies On Speed Instead Of Headcount?
Every agency rate card rests on one assumption: that people are the unit of value. Procurement has spent decades refining how it counts them, and AI has quietly removed the link between how many there are and what comes out.
The mechanics are familiar. Named roles, seniority bands, an hourly or monthly rate each, a scope estimating how many of whose hours a piece of work needs. It is auditable, comparable across agencies, and it made sense when output really was a function of people multiplied by time.
What Procurement Would Have To Count Instead
The obvious substitute is speed, and it is a worse metric than it looks. Turnaround is easy to measure, easy to promise and almost impossible to hold anyone to, because the thing that takes time in good work is not production. It is deciding what to make.
An agency optimising for a speed clause will get faster at the part that was already fast. That is not a hypothetical failure mode. It is what happens whenever a measurable proxy replaces an unmeasurable outcome.
Counting people at least measured something real. Counting days measures the easiest part of the job.
What Agencies Should Be Proposing
A unit that is neither a person nor a day. Some agencies are trying deliverable-based pricing, others a retainer against defined outcomes. Both are harder to audit than an hourly rate, which is precisely why procurement resists them and why an agency that can evidence its version has an advantage.
The More Likely Path
Procurement rarely abandons a model it can audit. What it does instead is keep the old structure and add conditions: a headcount-based fee, with service levels on turnaround, and a clause on AI disclosure.
That is the uncomfortable middle. Agencies would be paid for people while being held to timings that assume the people are not doing the work. Whoever writes that contract first will set the pattern for everyone, and agencies would be better off proposing the terms than receiving them. Related: How AI Is Changing The Economics Of Advertising Pitches
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