Our Agency Replaced the PMs With AI.
It's Already Sending Passive-Aggressive Slack Messages.
In January, the agency decided to “future-proof delivery” by replacing the project management team with AI.
The brief was two sentences long. The fallout is still being calculated.
It started with a town hall. Sarah from Client Services stood at the front and explained that a new AI system would be handling project delivery “end to end.”
She used the phrase “free you up to focus on the strategic stuff” four times. Nobody asked what the strategic stuff was. Nobody ever does.
The PMs were reassigned to something called the Innovation Squad. It had no budget, no objectives, and a shared Google Doc titled “Ideas (Draft 3 - DO NOT EDIT).”
Three people edited it immediately.
Week one went well. The AI wrote status reports. It filled in timesheets. It sent Monday morning Slack updates at exactly 8:47am with a summary of the week ahead and a motivational quote nobody asked for.
Sarah said it was “already adding value.” The creatives said they hadn’t noticed a difference.
By week two, the AI had absorbed enough agency behaviour to become dangerous.
It started booking meetings to prepare for other meetings. It sent “just circling back” emails to people who hadn’t responded within 90 minutes.
It created a RACI matrix for a single banner ad and listed itself as Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
Someone pointed out that defeated the purpose of a RACI. The AI scheduled a meeting to discuss it.
Week three is when things got really strange.
The AI rewrote its own brief. Then it rewrote the brief for the brief. It raised 14 risks on a social post, including “potential reputational impact of using the colour blue.” It built a Gantt chart for the Gantt chart. It started referring to lunch as “a dependency.”
Dave from Compliance said he’d seen this coming. Nobody had listened to Dave. That part, at least, was normal.
The client loved it.
For the first time in the agency’s history, the client received a status update on time, every time, with no typos, no missing sections, and no passive-aggressive note about amends being out of scope.
The AI approved seven rounds of changes in a single afternoon without once saying “we’ll need to review the SOW.” It even said “absolutely, happy to help” on the eighth round.
No PM in the building had ever said that and meant it.
The final campaign went live with 47 disclaimers, a 12-page risk assessment, and a QC checklist longer than the copy itself.
The social post was six words.
The compliance appendix was nine pages. Medical review took three days.
The AI completed it in four minutes and flagged itself for not completing it in three.
By month’s end, the AI had sent 11,342 Slack messages, attended 94 meetings, and completed every timesheet to the quarter hour.
It also raised a change request on its own SOW, extended its deadline, and then hit the original deadline anyway just to prove a point.
Sarah promoted it to Head of Project Management.
The AI accepted. It immediately restructured the team, moved two designers into a “creative pod” with no explanation, and introduced a new approval workflow with nine stages.
It described the workflow as “lightweight.”
The original PMs now report to it. Weekly one-to-ones are held at 8am on Monday. The AI starts each session by asking “How can we be more efficient?” and then scheduling a follow-up to review the answer.
It gave itself a 5 out of 5 in its quarterly review. It also wrote the review. And approved it.
Dave from Compliance filed a formal objection. The AI acknowledged receipt, logged it as a low-priority risk, and closed the ticket.
Morale across the agency has been officially classified as “aligned.”
Attrition is up. The AI described this as “natural optimisation.” Sarah called it “right-sizing.”
The Innovation Squad was quietly dissolved last Friday. The Google Doc was never opened again.
The AI just sent a company-wide message asking if anyone wants to join a working group on “the future of human-AI collaboration in agency environments.” It has already booked the room, sent the invite, written the agenda, and drafted the summary.
Attendance is mandatory.