Three-person teams will start to outperform 30+ person departments. How are they going to do it?
I'm calling this concept: The Atomic Agency. And I think that we are going to see hundreds of them next year.
The math isn't mathing anymore
AI tools arrived in 2024 and became more and more agentic in 2025. You remember the cute demos as well as I do. Now they're actually useful.
Tactical work that used to require a mini army of junior coordinators, trafficking managers, and reporting analysts can be handled by a single strategy with the right set of AI tools.
All of the button pushing and line item tweaking got highly automated in just the last 8 weeks.
✅ Spreadsheet wrangling
✅ Tag implementation
✅ Weekly report decks (that no one reads)
All of it. Automated.
What's left? The good stuff. The "hard" things that all of us actually wish we got to spend most of our time working on. Strategy, creative, client relationships, etc. are all the things that require a human brain and a functioning soul.
Why three?
I keep coming back to three as the magic number. For me, it is the minimum viable human unit.
- One person is a freelancer
- Two is a partnership
- Three is a team.
Three seems to be the magical point where coverage begins. Someone can take some vacation. Someone can go deep working on a client project while others keep the lights on.
You also start to get interesting dynamics with three. There's good creative tension in the room, and you shed the inevitable mirror effect of being a solopreneur.
In an AI native agency, three roles define the model for me. Account directors, media planners, and creative leads are done. That's the organizational structure and titles of the past. Here is the new configuration:
1️⃣ The Architect
This person barely spends any time making tweaks in the DSP. Instead, they're writing the logic gates. They will be defining the AdCP parameters as agentic buying tools mature. They'll configure the client's buyer's agent so that it focuses on actual business goals. They are the ones who manage the machines that manage the campaigns and spend zero time managing the actual campaign itself.
They are the "Prompt Lead" for the whole crew. When something gets a little squirely, they know how to change the promts because they know which instruction set broke.
