Agencies aren’t being replaced. They’re being redefined. Here’s what top agency leaders say about talent, insight, and the new business model. Goddie Ofose writes.
Two years after ChatGPT walked into every creative room in Lagos, the question is no longer “Will AI take our jobs?”
The question Nigerian agency leaders are answering is sharper: “What kind of agency do we become now that the machine can draft, design, and deliver in minutes?”
Across boardrooms at TBWA/Concept Unit, Prima Garnet, Up In The Sky, and Bluebird Communications, the answer is remarkably consistent. AI has not emptied seats. It has changed what sits in them.
Augmented, Not Replaced
In 2023, entry-level copywriters and designers worried their first job was a prompt away from extinction. In 2026, those same juniors are being hired — but with a new line on the JD: “AI literacy required.”
Kelechi Nwosu, Former MD/CEO at TBWA/Concept Unit, is direct: “We have not swapped out any roles yet for AI, but we have hired a Creative Technologist to help with AI and technological transformation. We are still hiring entry-level copywriters and designers because we need trained talent with good skills to prompt well and even evaluate the outputs from Generative AI.”
Lolu Akinwunmi, Group CEO, Prima Garnet, calls it augmentation. “Some routine and repetitive tasks have clearly been automated. Early-stage copy drafting, basic visual explorations, mood boards, and even first-level media analysis can now be done faster with AI tools. What used to take hours can sometimes be achieved in minutes.”
But the flip side is elevation. “Strategic planning, brand thinking, creative direction, and client advisory have become even more important. The ability to interpret, refine, and apply AI outputs intelligently is now a core skill.”
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New titles have appeared that didn’t exist in 2023: AI prompt specialists, content curators, data interpreters, and “creative technologists” — people who sit at the intersection of creativity and code.
At Up In The Sky, Co-Founder/COO Idiare Atimomo says they haven’t automated roles. “AI is a tool that our copywriters and art directors use to get their ideas approved easily approved by the clients.”
Kayode Ebatamehi, GMD/CEO, Bluebird Communications, puts it in terms of expectations. “At the strategy level, AI supports data analysis, visualization, and thought structuring. In copywriting, AI is useful as a starting point. In design, AI has been a visible efficiency booster. Overall, roles have been elevated rather than replaced. What has changed is the expectation: creatives today must be both conceptually strong and AI-literate. The career ladder is evolving, not disappearing.”
The ladder is steeper. Prima Garnet is “more selective, and expectations are higher. Young creatives are now expected to come in not just with talent, but with AI literacy and strategic thinking from day one.”
No one is declaring the death of the junior. They are declaring the death of the junior who only executes.
Can The Machine Feel Papilo?
If there is one place where Nigerian agency leaders agree without hesitation, it is here: AI cannot yet do “Papilo.”
Great Nigerian advertising is not built on demographics. It is built on lived truth. Peak Milk’s grandfather. Indomie’s “Like No Other.” The proverb in the radio jingle. The shared memory in a market.
“Great Nigerian advertising… is rooted in lived cultural experience, emotional nuance and societal context,” says Akinwunmi. “AI, as powerful as it is, does not live culture. It processes data. It recognises patterns. It can remix what already exists.”
Nwosu agrees: “Currently, the AI campaigns tend to be generic and conventional. It is felt that deep human insights and creative twists can only, for now, be achieved by the real creative minds that understand the audience and the cultural context.”
Atimomo is blunter: “I don’t believe such insights can come up from scratch by AI. Maybe as a byproduct of research carried out using AI, you can gain clarity on an issue and then have an ‘aha.’”
Ebatamehi frames AI as “collective intelligence, a synthesis of data, perspectives, and experiences that exist online. The depth of insight it can generate is therefore limited by the depth and authenticity of the data it has access to.”
The consensus: AI is a research assistant, not the author. It can surface trends, cluster conversations, and flag patterns. But the spark — the intuition that a Nigerian mother buying seasoning is tasting her grandmother’s kitchen — still comes from humans immersed in the culture.
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That said, the gap is closing. Ebatamehi notes: “As more of human behavior, expression, and culture becomes digitized, AI is gaining richer context about how people think, feel, and behave. In time, AI will get better at surfacing deeper human truths. However, translating those truths into compelling, culturally resonant ideas will still require human instinct, judgment, and creative interpretation.”
For now, the formula across agencies is the same: Data tells you where the people are. Culture tells you why they move. AI can do the first. Nigerians must do the second.
When Clients Bring the First Draft
The most immediate disruption isn’t inside the agency. It’s in the client’s inbox.
“Clients are now coming with AI-generated materials, decks, scripts, even rough animatics,” says Akinwunmi. “That is already happening.”
What does that do to scope, time, and money?
Scope: It has shifted from pure creation to curation and correction. “What they bring is often unrefined, inconsistent, or strategically weak. Our role has shifted from just creation to evaluation, refinement, and strategic alignment,” Akinwunmi explains.
Ebatamehi sees the same problem from the other side. “Briefs generated through AI are either too broad or misaligned with actual business needs. Because these inputs are not always properly interrogated, agencies end up responding to expanded or inaccurate scopes, deploying significant man-hours on directions that may not ultimately be required.”
There’s also the “sameness problem.” Nwosu tells a small story: “Three agencies were briefed somewhere in Africa by a Client, and they all produced the same BIG IDEA. Coincidence or great minds thinking alike? How will brands be differentiated — the core of marketing — in that scenario.”
Timelines: Expectations have collapsed. “AI has accelerated expectations. Clients assume things can be done faster, and in some cases, they are right,” says Akinwunmi. Atimomo confirms: “In some specific areas with respect to timelines, there is an expectation that you can turn work around faster because of AI.”
But speed without depth is dangerous. Agencies now spend time pushing back, adding rigor, and ensuring the fast output is also the right output.
Fees: This is where the model is breaking and rebuilding. “The traditional ‘time and output’ model is under pressure. We are gradually moving towards a value-based model, where clients pay for thinking, judgment, and impact, not just production,” says Akinwunmi.
Ebatamehi notes the disconnect: “There is now a demand for faster turnaround and increased output. However, this has not yet translated into a corresponding increase in fees. For now, agencies are adapting by becoming more time-efficient, optimizing internal processes, and reallocating saved time to maintain value.”
In short: AI is commoditizing execution. It is making the premium on strategic intelligence and creative leadership more expensive.
How Nigerian Agencies Are Leveraging AI for Greater Output
If AI cannot originate Papilo, what can it do? Leaders point to four leverage points:
Speed to Insight: AI can analyze thousands of social conversations, sales data, and cultural signals in hours. That gives strategists rawer material to find the human truth faster. It doesn’t replace immersion, but it accelerates it.
Production Scale: Design teams use AI to generate tailored visuals, reduce asset sourcing time, and produce multiple executions for TikTok, radio, WhatsApp, and TV from one core idea. “It makes us more flexible, faster, and often more precise in execution,” says Ebatamehi.
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Testing and Iteration: Before a campaign goes live, agencies can use AI to simulate audience reactions, test headlines, and adapt copy for different platforms. This is where the “broken calabash” media landscape becomes manageable — one cultural idea, dressed differently for each platform.
Building Culture-Native Tools: The most forward-looking play is not using American-trained AI, but building AI that understands Nigeria. The challenge leaders flag is that most generative models “were trained on a world that does not fully see us.”
The next step for the industry is investing in models trained on Nigerian languages, proverbs, humor, and context. That is how AI moves from generic to genuinely useful.
The New Skills Nigeria Needs
Across all four interviews, three competencies emerge as non-negotiable for 2026 hires:
Prompting as Craft: Not just typing commands, but knowing how to interrogate, iterate, and judge AI output. Strategic Judgment: The ability to say “this AI idea is wrong for this brand” and explain why in business terms.
Cultural Fluency: Deep immersion in Nigerian life, because that is the moat AI cannot cross yet.
“We are not eliminating entry-level talent; we are redefining it,” says Akinwunmi. “The industry still needs fresh minds; it just needs them to be more adaptive and more intellectually prepared.”
The Big Warning: Differentiation in an AI World
If every agency and client uses the same three AI tools, where does originality come from?
Nwosu’s anecdote about three agencies landing on the same “BIG IDEA” is the warning. When inputs are the same, outputs converge.
The answer leaders keep returning to is human authority. “The SOW, even if generated by AI, will not be done by AI. It still requires domain authority and human moderation by Creative minds,” says Nwosu.
Akinwunmi puts it as a mandate: “AI WILL NOT replace agencies. But agencies that do not understand and integrate AI will struggle. The future belongs to those who can combine technology with human insight, speed with depth and efficiency with originality.”
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Nigeria’s Creative Advantage
Nigeria’s creative industry has always competed on one thing the world cannot copy easily: cultural specificity.
AI can generate a clean visual in 30 seconds. It cannot yet generate the feeling of Sunday rice, the tension in a danfo conductor’s shout, or the weight of “welcome home” for a returnee.
That is the opportunity. Nigerian agencies that treat AI as a power tool — not the architect — will produce more work, faster, and with more cultural precision than ever before. Those that outsource thinking to the machine will produce faster, blander work.
The Top 50 Companies of Impact are being selected not for who has the best AI subscription, but for who uses it to build businesses, jobs, and brands that last.
As Ebatamehi says, AI supports. Humans decide. As Akinwunmi says, execution is being commoditized. Judgment is being premiumised.
And as Nwosu reminds us, the core of marketing is differentiation. In a world where anyone can generate 10 ideas in 10 minutes, the agency that can find the one true Nigerian idea — and sell it with conviction — wins.
The machine has arrived. The market is still human. And in Nigeria, that is still the advantage.
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