Somewhere in a glass conference room this morning, a brand manager hit generate, watched a ten-page creative brief bloom across the screen in about eleven seconds, attached it to an email and went to lunch feeling productive. On the other end, an agency strategist opened it, scrolled, scrolled some more, and realized there was not a single decision anywhere in it.
This is not a hypothetical. At Digiday’s Media Buying Summit this week, M&C Saatchi’s North America CEO Nadja Bellan-White estimated that about 85% of the client briefs her agency now receives are written with AI. Her verdict was that it’s ridiculous. Another agency executive, unnamed in the coverage, described briefs swelling to ten pages. Length has gone up. Thinking has not.
Tony Russo, who runs innovation and strategy at the indie shop Mile Marker, put it more bluntly. Clients, he said, “have exported all of their thinking to AI.” He isn’t describing a tooling problem. He’s describing an abdication.
And this isn’t a few lazy outliers. A Basis Technologies survey cited by Digiday found that 56.4% of marketers and agencies now use AI to build strategy, media or creative briefs. More than half the industry is automating the one document whose entire job is to say what matters.
We should be honest about what a brief actually is.
A brief is not a summary of everything you know. It’s a record of what you decided to ignore. The best ones we’ve ever received fit on a page and hurt to write, because every line on them killed three other lines that somebody in a meeting loved. That pain is the work. It is the strategic act. Everything that comes after, the scripts, the shoots, the edits, the cutdowns for Reels, is execution against a choice someone had the nerve to make.
A language model cannot make that choice for you. It doesn’t know that your CFO will kill anything that smells like a discount, or that your best customers in Silver Lake roll their eyes at the word wellness, or that the founder hates orange. It can only average what has been written before, and the average of every brief ever written is precisely the brief nobody remembers.
The industry knew briefing was broken long before ChatGPT showed up. In 2021 the BetterBriefs Project, working with the IPA, surveyed more than 1,700 marketers and agency people across 70-plus countries. Eighty percent of marketers said they write good briefs. Ten percent of agencies agreed. Respondents estimated that a third of marketing budget gets wasted through poor briefs and misdirected work. The project’s founders, Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler, said briefs “should direct and inspire, not confuse and frustrate.”
So the brief was already the weakest link in the chain. Then we handed it to a machine that is fluent, tireless and constitutionally incapable of choosing.
What comes out is the creative-industry version of what researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford’s Social Media Lab named workslop, which Allwork summarized as “AI-generated content that looks like good work but is actually low-effort and low-value.” In their 2025 survey of roughly 1,150 U.S. desk workers, 40% had received some in the past month, and each instance took close to two hours to untangle.
Two hours, per document, of a human doing the thinking the sender skipped. That’s the hidden tax inside every bloated brief. The client saved twenty minutes. The agency burns a day decoding it, then a week producing work against the wrong priority, then a round of revisions when everyone finally notices what the brief never said.
And the cost isn’t only time. The same Digiday report cited a GWI survey of 150 British marketers in which 29% admitted that inaccurate or misleading insights had cost their companies money. A generated brief is very good at sounding like an insight. It is much worse at being one, and nobody notices the difference until the media is bought and the comments roll in.
Davies has a number for that loop, too. In the IPA’s write-up of its AI forum this summer, he noted that rework rounds between client and agency have climbed from an average of three in 2007 to five today. More tools, more drafts, more rounds. The machine didn’t shorten the loop. It stretched it, because nobody made the call at the start.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for our side of the table.
It would be easy to make this a story about lazy clients. It isn’t. Agencies are doing it too, and worse, we’re accepting the bloat because it’s convenient. A ten-page generated brief gives an agency cover. If the work misses, well, it was in the brief. Somewhere on page seven. A vague brief lets everyone keep every option open, and an option kept open is a decision avoided. Clients get to feel thorough. Agencies get to feel safe. The work gets to be mediocre without anyone being responsible for it.
WARC’s Future of Strategy report, covered by Marketing Dive this week, found that 56% of agency strategists now worry AI will eventually replace them, up from 41% a year ago. Eighty percent say they need stronger proof of business impact. We understand the fear. But a strategist who accepts a generated brief and answers it with a generated deck has already been replaced. The software just hasn’t sent the invoice yet.
The fix is boring, which is exactly why nobody wants to do it. Bellan-White’s prescription at the summit was almost comically analog: close the laptop, put the phone down, sit across from each other and talk. Von Weiler, in the IPA piece, warned that the face-to-face moments in briefing are being squeezed out of the process. BetterBriefs even built its own AI tool, and tellingly, it’s designed to ask questions rather than answer them.
That’s the right job for the machine. Let it interrogate you. Let it catch the contradiction between objective two and objective four. Let it pull last quarter’s numbers and the comments section from your last three launches. Then close the tab and write the page yourself.
This is how we start every engagement. Before a single frame gets shot, the first thing a client gets from us is one page, written by a person, that says what we’re doing, who it’s for, what we are deliberately not doing and how we’ll know it worked. If we can’t get it to one page, we don’t understand the problem yet, and we would rather find that out in a two-hour conversation than in a six-week production cycle. On a social-first account, where you’re posting into a culture that moves faster than any approval chain, that page is the only thing keeping forty pieces of content pointed in the same direction.
Clients sometimes push back. They want the thick document, because it feels like value. We get it. In a business that sells ideas, weight has always been a proxy for effort. But a fat brief in 2026 isn’t proof of effort. It’s proof that nobody bothered. Anyone can make ten pages now. It costs nothing. Which means ten pages are worth exactly that.
The scarce thing, the expensive thing, the thing a machine still can’t fake, is a person willing to put their name under one sentence: this is what matters, and everything else is bullshit.
Write that sentence yourself. Everything else is autocomplete.
