Does this sound familiar? Claude is helping some people write briefs, a strategist in the team uses Perplexity to support their research, and a talented creative team love using Midjourney to bring their vision to life. In most agencies, none of those three knows the others exist.
Each one is an island of competence, good on its own, but disconnected and siloed from the rest of the project team. The brief gets sent around by email, or Teams, or Slack, the research moulders in a deck, the creative gets assembled on the team's laptop, and the time saved in each island gets spent again moving between them.
Grant Thornton's 2026 AI Impact Survey put a number on what that costs. Organisations are winning on breadth, more experiments and more use cases, and losing on depth. The ones that have actually integrated AI into how the work flows are around four times more likely to report revenue growth, 58 percent against 15. The survey also found that much of the activity is driven by not wanting to fall behind competitors, rather than a clear view of where AI changes anything.
The tools get adopted long before the workflow around them does, so you end up with a lot of capable islands and no bridges. That is how the output can look so similar to a year ago, even when the tooling has changed completely.
Depth is the unglamorous work underneath all of it: who owns each step, where it sits in the process, what it is allowed to touch, and where you should invest in the bridges to connect the team.
That is where readiness either exists or it does not.
If you want a read on where your organisation actually sits, there is a free five-minute Diagnostic on the site.