The future of the in-house agency
30 Sep 2026
Why the future of the in-house agency depends on how well all the moving parts work together.
This article is written by humans for humans.
There is no shortage of ways to add capacity to a creative department.
Hire a freelancer.
Call an agency.
Build an offshore studio.
Create a nearshore team.
Automate the repetitive stuff.
AI.
The options have never been greater.
And yet at Reconfigure, our recent IHALC workshop in Old Street, capacity was the issue every table kept coming back to.
Planned work colliding with emergency briefs.
Growth outrunning the ability to resource it.
Permanent teams stretched.
Freelancers arriving just when everybody is too busy to onboard them.
Creative people spending valuable time on things that aren’t particularly creative.
Which led to one of the most useful thoughts of the day.
The join is the job.
Extra hands aren’t much help if you have to hold them
Adding capacity looks simple on a spreadsheet.
Real life is messier.
Somebody must find the person.
Someone has to Onboard them.
Give them access to the right systems.
Explain the brand.
Brief them.
Tell them who really approves the work despite what the org chart says.
Explain why that thing everyone else thinks is blue is our particular blue.
And teach them all the other things nobody remembers to put in the brand guidelines.
Reconfigure exposed onboarding as a genuine hidden cost of flexible talent. The lag between securing someone and having them become genuinely productive can undermine the very speed they were brought in to create.
Which changes the capacity question.
It’s no longer simply:
Where can we find more people?
It’s:
How quickly can these people become part of us?
The challenge isn’t simply finding more capacity.
It’s turning that capacity into capability.
Keep what needs to be close
The Core, Flex and Flow framework explored at Reconfigure gave us a useful way to think about that.
Core is the capability that depends on context, trust, judgement and deep brand knowledge.
Flex is the expertise that can expand and contract around demand.
Flow is repeatable work that can move through nearshore, offshore and increasingly AI-augmented systems.
And when the tables tested that thinking against reality, something interesting happened.
The things people most wanted to keep close weren’t necessarily the things that took the longest to do.
They were the things that required the deepest understanding.
Creative leadership.
Strategy.
Brand.
Judgement.
Context.
In other words, the value of proximity wasn’t physical. It was intellectual and cultural.
That’s an important distinction.
You don’t necessarily need everyone sitting together.
You need everyone understanding the same thing.
Keep the creative chemistry.
Change the formula.
AI isn’t just changing the jobs. It’s changing the work.
AI inevitably entered the conversation.
But again, this wasn’t theoretical.
Some organisations represented in the room had already reduced headcount because of AI. Creative teams were building their own agents and tools, combining AI with existing creative software and designing workflows around templates rather than blank pages.
And roles themselves were changing. In some organisations, responsibilities previously held by specialist creative or motion leads were being absorbed elsewhere.
This matters.
Because the temptation is to take the creative department we already have and simply sprinkle AI over it.
A licence here.
An agent there.
A new workflow.
A workshop.
Job done.
Except the technology is changing the nature of the work itself.
So perhaps the more interesting question is:
If you were building your creative department today, would you build the one you have?
Not fewer people for the sake of fewer people.
Not more technology for the sake of technology.
A team deliberately designed around what humans should do brilliantly and what technology can now do better.
How do you put a KPI on a killer idea?
Then came perhaps the most beautifully creative contradiction of the day.
When the conversation turned to measurement, creative excellence was named as the thing that mattered most.
There was only one small problem.
Nobody felt they could properly measure it.
Teams can measure campaign uplift, content performance and stakeholder satisfaction. They can measure cost, throughput and turnaround time. They can even count awards.
But there is still no universal KPI for creative excellence.
And perhaps there never will be.
You can count the number of assets.
You can time how long they took.
You can calculate what they cost.
You can measure engagement.
But none of those numbers tells you whether somebody had a bloody good idea.
That distinction becomes more important as AI makes production faster.
Because when everyone can produce more, producing more stops being particularly impressive.
The work that stands out, changes minds, and even behaviours, becomes the thing worth producing.
You can count the output.
But does the output count?
The room’s discussion pointed towards a more useful balance between efficiency and effectiveness.
How efficiently was the work made?
And how effective was the work when it met the world?
One without the other isn’t much of a victory.
There isn’t much point producing forgettable work efficiently.
Cheap work can become very expensive
The same principle applies to offshore and nearshore models.
Cost matters. Of course it does.
But the conversations at Reconfigure made clear that location alone doesn’t create a successful model.
Different markets bring different combinations of cost, time-zone compatibility, cultural understanding and suitability for different kinds of work. Quality problems can wipe out apparent savings when work has to be corrected or recreated closer to home.
Again, the answer is in the join.
Brief quality.
Context transfer.
Onboarding.
Workflow.
Decision rights.
Quality control.
Relationships.
All the unglamorous things that determine whether a collection of talented people actually behaves like a talented team.
The future creative department may not look like a department
Perhaps that’s the bigger lesson from Reconfigure.
For years, we designed creative departments around where people worked and who employed them.
In-house.
Agency.
Freelance.
Offshore.
Those boundaries are becoming less useful.
The better question may be what needs to remain Core, what should Flex around demand and what can Flow through a different system entirely.
Then engineer the joins so well that the people commissioning the work, creating it and receiving it stop noticing them.
That’s the thinking behind KindredTeams.
Not simply finding creative people somewhere else.
Building dedicated marketing, creative and design capability around the organisation. People who become familiar with the brand, the business, the standards and the culture, while HelloKindred takes responsibility for making the model work.
Because finding capacity in another postcode, country or time zone isn’t particularly difficult anymore.
The difficult part is making it feel as though it was there all along.
The best operating model isn’t the one with the fewest joins.
It’s the one where nobody notices them.
And perhaps that is the most useful thing we brought away from Reconfigure.
The future of the in-house agency isn’t simply in-house.
It isn’t offshore.
It isn’t AI.
And it certainly isn’t adding more people every time the workload goes up.
It’s designing all those capabilities to work together.
The join is the job.
HelloKindred.
Human by Design.
About HelloKindred
At HelloKindred, we believe the future of marketing isn’t human or artificial. It’s about knowing where each adds the most value.
We help organisations build that balance into the way they work.
Through KindredTalent, KindredCreative and KindredTeams, we provide everything from individual specialists and project-based creative support to dedicated marketing, creative and design teams built around your business.
People with the judgement, experience and imagination to make technology more valuable, not compete with it.
Because as the tools become more powerful and accessible to everyone, we believe the things that make us human become more valuable, not less.
If you’re rethinking how your marketing or creative team should work in the age of AI, we’d love to be part of the conversation.
HelloKindred.
Human by Design.
