Sometimes, yes, and it depends on how you pay. If you pay by the hour and the same work now takes half the time, the bill should show it. If you pay a fixed price, the price you agreed usually stands, but the next quote for repeatable work should reflect what AI has changed. If you’re on a retainer, ask what you’re getting now and whether it still adds up. Under all three, the real question is where the efficiency is going: into the agency’s pocket, or back to you as better work, faster turnaround or a lower price.
I run an agency myself, and we use AI heavily, so I have an interest in this answer.
Why you’re asking
A prospect asked me on a sales call recently, “How much of AI do you actually use, if any?” It’s a fair question, especially if you’ve watched AI produce a draft in seconds yourself. Some agencies are now pitching AI as the reason they’re cheaper. One marketing lead told us a competing bidder had pitched a smaller build, with her own team finishing the rest using AI workflows. It was a little less expensive, she said, and it put a lot more of the work on her team.
So the price is only half of it. You also want to know what you’re getting for it.
Which work AI makes cheaper
How much time AI saves depends on the task and on how much checking the result needs.
AI often saves the most time on work that’s repeatable, well defined and easy to check:
- Production and repetitive work. Resizing, reformatting, tagging and moving large amounts of content. On a large product-catalog migration, our estimate dropped sharply once AI tools and data exports were planned in where the work would otherwise have been done by hand.
- First drafts of routine content. Product descriptions, standard pages and summaries come together much faster.
- Routine reporting. Pulling numbers together and writing the first pass of a summary.
AI also speeds up parts of the thinking work: summarizing customer interviews, reviewing competitors, testing a few ways to position something. The saving there is smaller, because every conclusion has to be checked against what’s actually true about your business, and someone still has to decide which option is right.
Some costs don’t go away. The judgment behind the decisions only you can make doesn’t speed up much, and while AI can shorten some revision rounds, it can add checking too. And someone still has to read the work before it goes out under your name, and stand behind it when it’s wrong. On our own content work, much of the time AI saved on drafting has moved into research and review. That’s a tradeoff we chose. You should be able to see what that extra review is catching or changing, or it isn’t worth paying for.
So a retainer that’s mostly production should feel the change most. Strategy-heavy retainers deserve a look too, especially where research, analysis and reporting make up much of the work.
How the answer changes with how you pay
Hourly. This is the simplest case. If you’re billed for actual hours and the contract hasn’t changed, fewer hours should mean a smaller bill. If the hours haven’t moved, ask where they’re going. A good answer names the work and shows you something from it. A vague one is worth pushing on.
Fixed price. Under a contract you’ve already signed, the agency carries the risk of how long the work takes, and finding a faster way to do it doesn’t normally reopen the price. The next quote is different. If the work is standard and repeatable, and AI has made it much cheaper to produce, the next quote deserves scrutiny, and comparing what other capable agencies now charge for the same result is how you find out.
Retainer. It matters what the retainer buys. If it buys a team’s capacity for the month, ask what that capacity is producing now. If it buys defined deliverables, such as four articles a month, ask what’s changed in how they’re made. Is each one better for the same effort, or the same quality for much less effort? If it’s the second, what is the agency doing with the time it got back?
Where the efficiency should go
Neither side is owed all of the gain. An agency that invested in better tools and processes can fairly keep some of it. Your test is whether you’re still getting competitive value for what you pay. “Better work” only counts if you agree the extra work matters to you. Deeper research nobody asked for, or ten articles where four would do the job, isn’t better value.
When to push for a lower price
Your current price is probably reasonable if the agency can show you what it’s doing with the time AI saves, you agree that work matters, the price is in line with comparable quotes, and the engagement is moving the goals you hired it for.
It’s time to negotiate if you’re paying the same for the same deliverables, the work is largely repeatable, and other capable providers would now do it for noticeably less. The measure is what comparable work costs elsewhere, whatever the agency’s own costs are.
Get other bids if the agency can’t or won’t say how AI has changed the work, or if the work has gotten more generic and you’re catching errors nobody on their side caught.
When you compare bids, compare the same thing: the deliverables, who reviews the work, turnaround, what’s excluded, and how much of the work would move to your team. The lower bid the marketing lead described was cheaper partly because her team would be doing more of the work.
What to ask your agency
You don’t need to wait for renewal to ask. Ask one question now: “What parts of our work are faster now with AI, and how does that affect our scope?” Then make any change to the price at the next point your contract allows.
A good agency should have a clear answer. It might be “drafting is faster, and we’ve put that time into review, and here’s what the review caught,” or “production is faster, so we can lower that line.” Either is an answer you can judge.
Another option for some companies is moving routine production in-house, using AI, and keeping the agency for strategy and review. That works if someone on your team can judge the output. If nobody can, the saving can disappear into rework.
Should I ask my agency whether it uses AI?
Yes. Ask how it affects your work, what company information goes into which tools, whether those tools can use it for training, and who reviews the output before it reaches you. If any of it matters to you, put it in the contract.
If you want someone outside the relationship to check whether your agency’s scope and price still add up, I do that as an agency hiring advisor, and Work With Me explains how.
