Marketing Procurement

Agentic AI, the client-agency relationship and what it means for Procurement

Blurring the Boundaries
Agentic AI will make procurement more autonomous, more data-led, more auditable. But it will also blur the boundaries between procurement, marketing and media in ways we’ve never seen.

Let’s start with gin. Always a good place to start.

In an agentic world, if my bottle’s running low – actually, let’s be honest, when my bottle’s running low – my agent will clock it and order more before I even notice. Easy. Magical even. But that is precisely where the simplicity ends.

Agentic AI pushes us from interruption marketing into invitation marketing. We won’t go looking for information anymore – we’ll each have a network of connected agents doing it for us. Mini personal agencies quietly running our lives: sourcing, negotiating, filtering, rejecting, approving. And we stand in the middle like conductors.

And that shift creates an awkward moment for brands. Because if we all have our own agents, brands run the risk of being cut out of the loop entirely. Which has big implications for the client–agency relationship, and even bigger ones for procurement.

Platforms like GEP and Fairmarkit are already promising agentic systems that can autonomously manage vendor selection, risk detection and approvals. They’re dangling shorter cycle times, tighter compliance, real-time auditability…all very grown-up, very tempting.

But there’s a catch. Procurement suddenly moves faster and becomes far more data-driven. Criteria get stricter. Processes get harder. Efficiency goes up while nuance, creativity and human judgment quietly edge toward the exit.

The Agentic Pitch

We’re seeing early signs everywhere. People using agents to book holidays, chase refunds, negotiate utilities. Once consumers start doing it, business behaviour follows.

Now picture a pitch where a client’s agent negotiates directly with an agency’s agent, both running simulations at machine speed to find the optimal deal. Sounds sci-fi, but it’s already happening in pilots across logistics, software, and other procurement categories.

And let’s face it, agencies have historically been terrible negotiators. But an agentic system won’t. It’ll be annoyingly good at understanding value exchange, pricing dynamics, market comparables. It may even unlock pricing models we’ve been wanging on about for years – pay for ideas, not hours.

Would a client’s agent better understand an agency’s actual value than procurement? Maybe. Depends on the data. Depends on the model.

But it also exposes the real existential question: If the machines handle the negotiation…what happens to the human relationship between marketer, agency and procurement?

Agentic automation will creep in through the lower-value work. Small production jobs, content commissions, marginal media buys. Exactly where marketing procurement often sits today. As those processes become autonomous, the classic RFP or pitch becomes… well, two machines exchanging structured data.

At the same time, Reuters reminds us that agentic claims are often overstated. Up to 40% of these projects may be scrapped by 2027 and genuine end-to-end autonomy remains rare. Data quality, context, judgment and trust are all still very human problems.

Which is exactly the point. Automation doesn’t dissolve accountability. Someone still needs to define the rules, guard the brand, and make sure creativity and strategic value don’t get flattened into a spreadsheet.

If agents can evaluate, compare and negotiate with suppliers, the CMO’s job shifts dramatically. Instead of choosing agencies, they’ll define the parameters their agents optimise for, what data they use, what values they prioritise, and what behaviour the brand will and won’t accept.

Procurement, meanwhile, moves from buying things cheaper to designing the system that buys things smarter. Their power comes from setting the guardrails and frameworks that balance efficiency with creativity, cost with value…automation with humanity.

Which brings us back to my gin. The only reason my agent orders the right bottle is because it knows me, knows my tastes, my habits, my brands. There is still room for influence. But brands now have to reach either the agent itself or the human who defines its rules.

And that’s where future brand influence – and future procurement value – will live.

Agentic AI will make procurement more autonomous, more data-led, more auditable. But it will also blur the boundaries between procurement, marketing and media in ways we’ve never seen.

The winners will be those who move quickly, not just automating the process, but shaping what that process stands for. In the age of agents, procurement’s power won’t lie in buying things cheaper, but in buying things smarter.

About the author

Jon Williams is the CEO and Founder of The Liberty Guild