Founder’s Circle

At our recent Blutui Founders’ Circle session, a quote surfaced that sharpened the debate: on March 7, 2025, TechCrunch ran an article quoting Meredith Whittaker of Signal saying that with agentic AI we might “put our brain in a jar … because the thing is doing that and we don’t have to touch it, right?” TechCrunch

That image stuck with us: what does it mean when systems start doing so much of the thinking, deciding, acting for us?

Where agencies truly earn their worth

Agencies aren’t valuable because they produce outputs. Any client can generate those with tools or subscriptions. Agencies are valuable because they bring together:

Human creativity: the spark that delivers the Big Idea and pushes ideas into new directions, imagines what’s not obvious and understands deeply the multi-stakeholder context in which a brand exists.
Craft: the skill and discipline to refine ideas until they resonate, feel polished, feel “right” for the brand and the audience.
Experience: the accumulated wisdom from working with many clients, many markets, many failure and success stories. Experience teaches what works in context—what consumers respond to, what backfires, what builds trust.
Critical thinking: the judgment to choose among ideas, to weigh trade-offs, to balance creativity with commercial reality, to decide when a campaign needs boldness and when it needs restraint.

These are the pieces of agency value that clients can’t buy by subscribing to an AI. They’re what define your agency. Remove them or let them atrophy, and you risk becoming a commodity.

The “brain in a jar” warning in context

Meredith Whittaker’s metaphor matters because it captures a risk we didn’t fully feel before the rise of more autonomous AI tools. To quote from TechCrunch:

“So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don’t have to touch it, right?” TechCrunch

What she’s warning about is when decision-making, judgment, even values are outsourced to algorithms to the point that humans merely observe. We lose the active role in crafting meaning, in making choices, in being responsible for what we produce. In short, we lose parts of what makes us human and what makes agencies valuable.

The risk of hollowing out

In our session, many of us see a danger: agencies that lean too heavily on AI risk hollowing themselves out. You might get faster outputs, lower costs, people satisfied with “deliverables,” but what will set you apart in the long run? The difference between good and great often comes down to those subtle judgments—tone, nuance, user empathy, moral choices—which are not well suited to automation.

Clients may talk about efficiency. They may love fast, cheap, shiny. But over time they pay more for trust, for originality, for craft, because those elements make brands memorable and human.

AI as assistant, not replacement

The consensus of the Founders’ Circle: use AI to support, assist, automate the mundane, scale what works. But don’t let AI be the decision-maker. Let humans decide direction, values, creative choices. Let humans wrestle with ambiguity, trade-offs, complexity. Let human experience and judgment guide the work.

Agencies that preserve those parts—creativity, craft, experience, critical thinking—will differentiate themselves. Agencies that don’t risk becoming indistinguishable from tools.

The challenge for leaders

As the session wrapped, this question echoed:

Are you using AI to sharpen your team’s creativity, craft, experience, and judgment, or are you letting it do the thinking for you?

The answer to that question is going to matter more and more.