AI is reshaping the marketing industry: my conversation on Samuli Salonen's podcast
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I joined Samuli Salonen’s podcast Turha edes yrittää to talk about what AI, and agentic AI in particular, means for marketing right now. The conversation is in Finnish, and it quickly moved to a bigger question: the whole marketing and communications industry is in the middle of a shift, and a lot of old assumptions about what agencies actually get paid for are starting to crack.
This piece pulls together the threads I keep coming back to. The video is below, and under it I walk through the parts we talked about.
The full episode lives on Samuli Salonen’s YouTube channel.
What marketing agencies actually get paid for
What’s happening in marketing and communications right now is a real shift. The agency revenue model is starting to break, because AI can generate content almost without limit, and clients can increasingly do it themselves.
When content is that easy to produce, the question flips around: what is the service you actually sell as a marketing consultant or an agency? I don’t think it disappears, but it changes. The value moves away from sheer volume of work and toward direction, judgment and quality, meaning someone who owns the outcome.
Hourly pricing does not survive AI
The same shift shows up directly in pricing. In my view hourly pricing was already dying before AI, and AI just speeds it up.
The problem is simple. When AI lets you do more and more, faster and faster, the hourly invoice turns against you: the more efficient you are, the less you bill. It just doesn’t work.
At Parvi our pricing has been value-based from the start, not tied to hours. That lets us pass the benefit of AI on to the client, instead of letting it eat our own billing. Right now that’s one of our clearest advantages over traditional agencies, whose structure doesn’t allow the same flexibility.
What agentic AI actually is
A big part of the conversation was about what agentic AI means. To me it means the AI is an actor inside the process itself. You give it a goal, tools and boundaries, and it works out its own route to get the thing done.
A concrete example from that same day: from a meeting transcript, an agent works out for itself what to update in the CRM, which tasks to log, and what to post as a summary in Slack for Aapo, my co-founder at Parvi. It isn’t just running one command, it’s automating a workflow in the exact place where judgment is required.
I went deeper on how the agents work, and when marketing is genuinely agentic, in my article on agentic marketing.
How AI writes 95% of my LinkedIn
We also talked about how I use this in my own work. LinkedIn is my most important channel, and roughly 95 percent of what’s on it is written by AI. There’s a decent process around that, though.
I built myself a journalist agent that interviews me every Friday, more or less while I’m at the gym. It knows what happened during the week, asks follow-up questions, looks at who I speak to and which topics I cover, and proposes that week’s posts. Then it writes them in my tone of voice and to my writing guide. I fine-tune small things, but by the time the drafts come out they’re already essentially mine.
The same logic runs across the rest of my content. Everything on my channels goes through agents I’ve built, but I always press publish myself. I build the same kind of agents for clients, across marketing and sales.
The first weeks of running my own company
Toward the end, Samuli asked how being an entrepreneur feels after a salaried job. Honest answer: right now it feels great. I left a genuinely good job to start Parvi, and after the first few weeks I’ve been fired up.
There are the occasional freezing dips where you wonder if the whole thing was a crazy idea. But there have been far more ups. As an entrepreneur the good things feel significantly better and the bad things significantly worse than in employment, at least in my experience. A big reason I left was exactly that: you get to build something for yourself and own what you make.
Watch the full conversation
These are the parts I keep returning to, but we covered a lot more in the episode. Watch the full conversation on Samuli Salonen’s channel, and if you want to see what marketing and sales run on agentic AI actually looks like in practice, AI marketing agency Parvi is built for exactly that.
FAQ
Whose podcast did Otso Karvinen appear on?
Samuli Salonen's Finnish podcast Turha edes yrittää, in the episode AI-agentit markkinoinnissa (AI agents in marketing). It covers how agentic AI changes marketing work, the agency revenue model and pricing.
How does AI change marketing agency pricing?
Hourly pricing turns against you once AI is in the mix: the more efficiently you do the work, the fewer hours you bill. So pricing moves toward a value-based model where you charge for the outcome produced, not the time spent.
What does agentic AI mean in marketing?
That the AI acts inside the process: you give it a goal, tools and boundaries, and it works out the steps itself. I explain how the agents work, and when marketing is genuinely agentic, in my article on agentic marketing.
