Productise the middle, protect the top

AI is swallowing the middle of service work first: the troubleshooting, repackaging, diagnostics and campaign assembly that used to fill agency retainers. (diginomica.com) At Adobe Summit this week, Adobe launched CX Enterprise, a system built around agents, agent skills and automation for customer-experience work that brands once staffed manually. Diginomica reported the package as an “end-to-end” set of agentic automations aimed at orchestrating work across teams and systems. (diginomica.com) Klaviyo is selling the same direction in marketing operations. Its K:AI Marketing Agent says it can create launch-ready campaigns, turn on core flows in three clicks, and keep generating weekly campaign ideas from a brand’s own site and past performance. (klaviyo.com) In Klaviyo’s Spring 2026 product update, the company said Composer can build audience, copy, email, short message service, and flows from a prompt, while Customer Agent now handles order edits, returns, subscription changes and loyalty lookups out of the box. Those are the exact kinds of repeat requests that agencies and in-house teams used to bill by the hour. (klaviyo.com) The economic logic has been visible since 2023. McKinsey estimated that about 75% of generative artificial intelligence’s annual value would land in four functions: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development. (mckinsey.com) By June 2025, PwC said industries most exposed to artificial intelligence saw revenue per employee grow 27%, versus 9% in the least exposed industries, and found job postings still grew 38% in the more exposed roles. The work did not disappear on schedule; the mix of work shifted. (pwc.com) That is why agencies and consultants are moving toward productized offers instead of custom labor on every task. If a platform can draft the email series, spin up the landing page structure and answer the first wave of support tickets, the sellable asset becomes the package, the quality control and the business judgment around it. (klaviyo.com) The parts that hold price are the parts software vendors still describe as supervision, governance and brand control. Adobe’s enterprise pitch centers on an intelligence layer and governance layer, while NBCUniversal said at Summit that adopting assistants and agents is “exciting and really complex to navigate.” (diginomica.com 1) (diginomica.com 2) That leaves a narrower premium tier: positioning, taste, exception handling, client communication and the promise that the machine-run system will not break. White-label reliability is easier to defend than raw production speed when the major software vendors are turning production speed into a standard feature. (whatstrending.com) (klaviyo.com) The firms that keep charging for the middle alone are lining up against Adobe, Klaviyo and every other platform vendor shipping automation into the workflow. The firms that package the repeatable layer and reserve humans for the calls that change a client’s odds still have something scarce to sell. (diginomica.com) (klaviyo.com)