The Power of "Last Mover Advantage"

Everyone told you the first mover wins. It's a bloody lie!

The first mover advantage assumes the rules stay the same. Right now the rules are being rewritten and there is no chance those cumbersome change management programs are going to keep pace.

The evidence is hard to ignore. One hundred thousand employees, fifty years of brand equity, the deepest client relationships in the industry. WPP still lost 65% of its value in a single year and got booted from the FTSE 100.

Scale isn't the advantage it used to be. In fact, right now it's a liability.

NoBrakes seeks to explore “what really influences people in this world of AI”.

In a continued quest to try and form some sort of answer I’ve had the joy of connecting with lots of v. lovely people; founders, CMOs and agency owners.

The same question just keeps surfacing: is right now a good time or a bad time to be building a business?

The obvious answer, “Nat, it’s clearly a terrible time, don’t do it!”

I mean yeah, the world is at war on multiple fronts, oil prices spiking, supply chain costs are up, consumer spending is down and brand marketing spend is being squeezed on all fronts. So granted, there are a fair few reasons to “approach with caution”. Ever the optimist, I wanted to dig deeper….

Companies like Salesforce are down 25 to 30 percent in the last few weeks. They’re calling it the “SaaSpocalypse.” Market consensus: AI is going to kill the software industry.

What we’re seeing is that the cost of building software has collapsed. The barrier that once kept services businesses out of the software game, six-figure dev budgets, long lead times, dedicated engineering teams, is gone.

Y Combinator put out their Spring 2026 Requests for Startups. Buried in it was their thesis on AI-native agencies. It succinctly confirmed the beginnings of what I believe to be a very real trend that will soon define the operating model for any new agency:

"Agencies have always been hard to scale - low margins, slow manual work, growth only by headcount. AI changes this. Instead of selling software to help customers do the work, you [build the software yourself] and sell the finished product." Y Combinator, 2026.

Queue lightbulb moment for me. 

((Crack team of people) X (tech as the multiplier)*(charge based on the outcomes)) = NEW AGENCY MODEL

The golden age for independent agencies.

I spoke to one agency owner who told me they’re ripping it up and starting again. They’re building the operating model which is listening, learning, constantly adapting to new stimuli. A move, they hope, will allow them to move at the speed of AI.

They have various external systems be it Google Drive for storage, Notion for project management and slack for instant comms connected via Model Context Protocol’s (MCP’s) to their LLM of choice. On top of this, they’re building proprietary software that links into these data sources and together with wider context, owned reasoning and a deep understanding of client requirements they are hoping to bring a really differentiated value proposition to their clients. An agency that has a point of difference? How very novel!

So theoretically agencies are super well placed to:

Surely it’s the first movers that win? The likes of WPP, those with the deepest pockets, easiest access to clients, ability to attract the best talent?

The truth is speed will be the key determinant of success.

The advent of the internet and online connectivity was really the last time our industry faced a shift of this magnitude. This change took the best part of a decade to actually reshape how businesses operated. That gave the big networks enough time to run change programmes, update job descriptions, retrain teams, acquire scrappy digital agencies and bolt the capability on. 

This time round, we’re talking months, not years. The non-profit research institute, Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR), assesses the software development capacities of different AI models.

According to METR,  AI growth is exponential. It’s capability is doubling every seven months and that gap is closing.

Clearly for any large scale business mass advocacy of their employee base is the only silver bullet. The problem is that the big networked agencies simply can’t do this quickly enough. The chasm between what their most capable people and their general population grows faster than any internal comms programme can close.  It’s the speed of this technological shift that makes it almost impossible for large organisations to bring their people with them. 

It’s this gap between AI adoption and AI capability that becomes every independent agency's competitive advantage.  Dare I say it, this might even be a golden age for independent agencies.

Do not listen to the doom mongers

The fear is real but it is our worst enemy. I trained as a biochemist and I’m acutely aware of the chemical reactions that fear induces. Our body tries to protect itself. It sharpens our focus on what we stand to lose rather than what we might be able to build. There are people out there that seek to feed your fear. These people do not serve you, rather they seek to ramp up your anxieties in order to serve themselves. We can’t let this influence the conversation we are having every day.

I reckon the rules are changing. They’re falling in your favour.

So build.

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