Does an AI agent team mean the end of agencies? My 23 Grok Bots (2026)

The short answer: not in Simon Young's view, but the shape of an agency is changing fast. Simon runs Question.Marketing with a team of 23 Grok Bot agents, each with a name and a job title, and believes they do as much work as the 20-person agency he ran before COVID. In part two he hands this very video to his Chief of Staff bot to run his whole social stack.

Watch the full video on YouTube.

Does a team of AI agents mean the end of agencies?

Simon's answer is "obviously not": agencies still need human thought and human input. But the shape of the team changes. Where he once needed people, he now has agents that each own a job.

What does each bot in the team do?

(Simon names 22 of the team in the video. The 23 is the full Grok Bot team count after the 13 October rename.)

Can a team of bots match a 20-person agency?

Simon ran an agency with 20 staff before COVID. "I genuinely believe that this bunch of bots does as much, if not more, work than those 20 people." That raises the question of which jobs survive in the agency space.

How do you stop AI agents producing slop?

The difference, Simon says, is knowing how to prompt agents properly, building the team out and making the agents talk to each other. He has built tools around the team so the output is not AI slop, starting with a Brand Guardian that checks every public piece against the brand.

What happens when you hand a video to an AI Chief of Staff?

In part two, Simon drops this video into his Downloads folder and asks his Chief of Staff bot to run his social stack without the podcast. The team transcribes it, trims a fumble, captions it, builds Shorts, Studio images and copy, and sends it all to the Brand Guardian bot, then back to Simon to approve. His advice: do not give one bot everything at once; split the work across bots like a team.

Which tasks can AI agents run on a schedule?

Simon's assistant sweeps his inbox every morning at 7.30, trashes junk and tells him which emails need a reply. His LinkedIn agent checks LinkedIn three times a day. He uses different AI tools for different jobs, for example one for thinking and drafting and Grok Bot to deploy, because Grok Bot agents run on their own cloud computers and keep working when his own machine is off.

Is web design becoming a commodity?

Simon was criticised for building a client a website of more than 100 pages, on Lovable and plugged into Shopify, for £250. His view: that client would never have paid thousands, websites are heading towards a commodity ("ten a penny", as he puts it), and what will matter is content: your own knowledge base, brand guidelines, tone of voice and digital footprint.

Why do citations and digital PR matter for AI search?

As people search more conversationally, fan-out queries can show which sites AI engines cite. Simon argues engines want information that checks out across several trusted sources before they recommend you, so in his view citation building and digital PR matter more than link building, and the gaps in what models know become the opportunity, including local search.

Will AI agents mean fewer marketing jobs?

Simon worries that once a business sees how easy these tools are, a marketing team of three becomes one. His Grok Bot plan costs $200 a month (around £160), for what he sees as the equivalent of 20 staff.

Frequently asked questions

Does AI mean the end of marketing agencies?

Not in Simon's view. Agencies still need human thought and input, but in his experience much of the execution can now be run by a team of AI agents.

What jobs can AI agents do in an agency?

In Simon's team: inbox management, outbound prospecting, LinkedIn and social media management, link building, citation building, research, analysis, video repurposing, content writing, website building and brand checks.

Can an AI agent team run a social media stack from one video?

In Simon's setup, yes: his Chief of Staff bot hands the video to other bots for the transcript, captions, Shorts, images and copy, and a Brand Guardian bot checks it before he approves anything.

Is running a team of AI agents cheap?

No. Simon notes it costs a lot of credits, although his Grok Bot plan is $200 a month (around £160).

What does Simon say in the video? (full transcript)

Part 1: does this mean the end of agencies?

Hey everybody, I wanted to show you some things that I'm really enjoying in AI, hopefully this is useful. This is Grok Bot and what I wanted to ask today, does this mean the end of agencies? Some people are going to push back immediately, obviously not, you know, we need human thought, human input. But I've built myself a team here under Grok and I have Ava, my Chief of Staff, Nina, the Assistant, I have Lola, a Lovable site builder, Sam who is a link builder for one of my clients, got another link builder and outreach, Liam. I have Ella who is doing some estate agency research for another client.

Olly, who is outreaching and filling in forms for me. I have Eva, who is doing exhibition research. Pippa, who is my inbox PA, so cleans up my inbox, tells me what meetings I've got, replies to emails for me. I have Oscar, who is doing outbound prospecting on my behalf, so looking out for opportunities and emailing people, filling in forms on websites and also DMing people and replying to comments on LinkedIn. I have Lucy who is the actual LinkedIn account manager for me, also managing other client accounts.

Sophie is the social media manager. Sophie does a fantastic job, can post hundreds of posts a day if I need her to and she does. I have Ian who is in my IT department. So Ian works on what's happening in the background on my machines Frank who is finance and admin Just to run down the rest of the list even though you guys can't necessarily see them. I've got an AEO desk which is Ada.

I have a brand guardian and Ruth who is the research desk, Nora, Nora who is an analyst, Finn who is video and repurposing, Theo who is a citation builder, Iris knowledge writer, Leo content engine and as I mentioned, Grace who is my brand guardian and talks about everything to do with the business Question.Marketing and everything that goes with it. But the more important thing here, people, is if you're not using tools like this, we're at a point where I ran an agency prior to COVID with 20 staff and I genuinely believe that this bunch of bots does as much, if not more, work than those 20 people so makes me wonder whether which jobs will survive in the agency space and clearly if you know how to prompt agents properly and build your team out and make them talk to each other yes this sort of thing does cost a lot of credits and someone's going to come at me with well it'll all be AI slop I have built all the tools that go around this that make sure that it is not AI slop that comes out of it so if you want to know more love to hear from you I'd love to hear how people think this sort of thing is going to affect their jobs look forward to speaking to you in the comments

Part 2: handing this video to my Chief of Staff

So I just thought I'd show you one thing, just a simple thing. The video that preceded, or the piece that was prior to this, I am now going to give it to my Chief of Staff. So if I go into my Chief of staff and say I have just dropped a video called working into my downloads folder, can you run my social stack please, but exclude okay. So I've dropped that in, let me just see what that says, so there you go, you can see it's talking to it now, I'm on it, I'm copying Grok Bot working from your downloads first and then I'll run the usual stack without the podcast and bring everything back. it doesn't seem to be able to cope with tasks one on top of the other so you do need to create the different bots to do different things at different times and not just give you know the Chief of staff everything so do work with it like it is a team so it says I've started the stack for Grok Bot working and I'm leaving out the podcast it covers YouTube the transcript page on question .marketing the LinkedIn newsletter and the feed posts, three shorts, studio images all checked by Grace, the Brand Guardian and I'll send you the full pack to approve before anything goes live.

So literally get on with your day let it go and do its thing. I think dropping video into these types of tools really cool because it will go and it, transcribe it, it will, it's going to put it onto my blog, it's going to then subtitle it, put it on YouTube, create the shorts, publish my socials, think about it this way, if you're going into a world where you need to post or you want to post on behalf of a client 3, 4, 5 times a day, that is practically, well it's not impossible, but it's very time consuming and labour intensive if you're going to do that with a social media manager doing that. Whereas if you have a skill set up, you tell it what you want to do, you tell it how to do it, you teach it, you prompt it correctly, you give it your brand guidelines, you give it all your imagery. I have personally built a studio which means my bot can talk to my studio which is built in Lovable that then produces the social content to go alongside it all of that content is different and varied meaning that it's not you know make one post post it across several of the socials it can then go across all of them and be different and scheduled at different times so depending on how you teach it to run your stack and each of your how each of your agents works, that's I think a really interesting skill that people should be learning. So as we move forward you'll see people working with these agents in different ways and I am by no means the expert, all of you guys as you go along will learn different ways to work with the bots, different ways to get different LLMs or different agentic systems working together obviously all of them consume credit so for example I might use Claude to do some of the grunt work some of the thinking if you want to put it that way and then give out the content that is produced to for example Grok to deploy.

I know obviously ChatGPT has now got [unclear]. Claude is now working towards more of an agentic in-browser experience but can't work in a cloud environment like Grok can. So Grok, if you run it, it can then, what it's able to do is run its own cloud computers for each of its agents and therefore it doesn't matter if you turn off your own machine and just leave it running. So it's absolutely fantastic if you're leaving it to think about things or scheduled tasks so a lot of my things I've got scheduled you know for example at 7 30 every morning my assistant will go into my inbox look for any junk junk email trash it and then tell me which ones need a reply so it can also then stay on top of what's happening have I have I got any responses from threads that are coming back back at me and conversations that are progressing, so that is all stuff that you would have had to do yourself in the past. One of my agents, my LinkedIn agent, will go into my inbox three times a day at scheduled need it to do.

So all of these types of things, if you need help, if you need any help with learning how to run these bots, by all means DM me, glad to help. The question though, and this is the question I've got for people in my network, I got accused of doing some work far too cheaply for a client the other day and the WordPress community went a bit crazy like apparently there's an unwritten rule that you don't build a website for less than four figures which I think is ridiculous my pushback was that the customer that I built the website for would never have paid thousands for a website but now he has a hundred page plus website built on Lovable plugged into Shopify all branded up and I haven't had an awful lot of criticism of it and some of the guys that went in there went well Isn't it strange that all these rage bait posts that are on LinkedIn, they never reference the actual site that they've built. Well, I did put the site into that. So, anyway, that website that I built for the client was over 100 pages, he would never have paid, he would have never paid thousands for a site, so therefore it's unrealistic for him to be able to have that site in the first place. So the people that are pushing back to me and saying, well, you just can't give that website away at £250, I have seen plenty of people that are giving sites away at the moment, like it seems to be a new business model where people are giving away a website, they build it for a client and in the hope that somebody comes back and then says well can you do this and can you do this and can you help me with this and you've just won a client, it's a loss leader at that point.

So I think we are seeing, I think We are seeing the end of the web design industry as a whole. That's just because websites are going to become ten a penny. It's the content creation side that's going to matter when you come in to produce unique knowledge, your own knowledge base, how to use agents, how to build your own AI agent, your own brain, your own knowledge base, your own brand guidelines, tone of voice, your own digital footprint all of this stuff is going to be huge as we move forward with AI search and AEO GEO so I've talked a lot about how Google are adapting Google Google are moving into a world where they see the end of search people don't want to go scrolling through links and links and links and clicking websites you don't need to do more when fan out queries are starting to be displayed and therefore shown how AIs and LLMs are answering questions, you can see the thought process going on in the background and which websites and content is being cited to produce a result. Now this is all effectively things that you could have done yourself, of course it is. I've got a video up about fan out queries and I'll try and link that video to, or this video to, that content, so if you want to look at my fan out explanation and how keywords are not a thing anymore, or not going to be a thing, somebody will criticize me on that, You know, obviously, for now, people are still searching with keywords, but more so people are searching in a more conversational fashion.

So as we move into people asking questions and more detailed questions, you will be able to see which sites get cited by the AIs and where that information's getting pulled from and why. And that fan out query is becoming more and more important. So I think the age of digital PR as we move forward is becoming hugely important. As we all know, we are moving towards a voice search and conversational interaction universe with voice is taking longer, a lot longer than expected, but now that AI is able to answer those queries properly and quickly and correctly and somebody's going to say well not always correctly well we are getting there to the fact that this is why LLMs want confluence between examples so they want you to be able to be cited and that information checks across multiple sources before they'll recommend you so we're getting away from the fact that you could have put websites up with made up information or unverified facts. You just can't get away with that now or you won't be able to do.

And information that is put out there by people needs to be backed up and third party trusted sites should then therefore be referencing it. So we move very quickly into a world where not link building but citation building and third -party referral and digital PR becomes huge. Right, that's where we're going. The battle is on now for finding the knowledge gaps that the LLMs don't fill in or don't necessarily know the answers well enough. I think we go into a more local search universe, it becomes very very important based on obviously industry sector or vertical where you are location -wise etc but no one is really really talking about localised you know if you if you were listing businesses on google business places people would talk about how local businesses can or should be publishing in on Google business places to come up in map packs or the map pack therefore will then not be a thing.

Search will not be a thing. We will all then end up searching in AIs or agentic or agents, you know, we'll be talking to things like [unclear] and the answer will then come back at us. Now if somebody in the future is saying, well, can you tell me where I need, you know, I've got a pair of boots that I need fixing, I need the soul -fixing and I'm making this up off the top of my head but can you just tell me you you know is there a somebody that can help me locally then do that and it will go out find that business and recommend you to you know probably just give you the directions equally e -commerce will go the same way etc etc so it Grok has now come back it did take a little way while the draft cut of Grok Bot working is ready trimmed to three minutes 41 along with three shorts and all the copy the working title is does an AI agent team mean the end of agencies so it's got it pretty close my 23 Grok Bot 2026 so that's me talking about 23 different Grok Bot that I've built I've cut a 13 second fumble that also showed whatsapp numbers and your Gmail tab so it managed to even cut out, you know, where I accidentally bumbled along and showed my Gmail, so it cut that out. The studio images are being built now and Grace is checking the copy. The bot sidebar is on screen for most of the video and its previews show real messages like a prospect's reply, and an invoice.

I'd blur them before this goes public, should I? So yes of course I'll tell it to yes please blur them. Hopefully you're starting to get a feel for how easy it is to work with these bots and what you can get it to do and how quickly it can do it. So you can't tell me that you know if I'd given that to a video you know one of my video guys in an office right I want three shorts I want the video I want you to cut the pieces out want you to blur pieces I want you to then hand it off to the social media person I want it scheduled up I want it on my YouTube I want it on a blog I want it on all of our socials I don't want them all to go out I want someone to should schedule them out over the next week you know three or four pieces spread them out all of that is There's a ridiculous amount of work and if you're going to move quickly, and use these type of tools. This is absolutely how you have to go and if I was sat in a business and I had a social media manager and maybe a couple of other people in a marketing department, what worries me is as soon as people realise how easy it is to use tools like this, you suddenly only have one person instead of three.

So ask yourself the question, does that happen? How quickly does that happen? How many jobs go over the next six months, a year? Maybe this is one of the reasons people are finding it so hard to find jobs because in our industry, particularly in the creative industry, in marketing and in content creation, production, PR, web design, SEO, all of these industries are really, really struggling for the fact that tools are taking over and nobody can work as hard as the bot can. And it can work 24 -7, seven days a week.

It's, I think this version of Grok is a couple of hundred dollars a month. So for whatever it is, 160 pounds, let's say a month, I have the equivalent of 20 staff, and I would never go back. You know, they don't argue back. They don't have sick days. They don't have inter -office politics problems where one person doesn't like another person.

Maybe that's a thing in the future where bots turn on each other and, you know, there's office politics and Sam doesn't like Lola, etc, etc. So all of this sort of stuff And somebody's going to look back on this video probably in six months time and say wow Simon you were working with some archaic historical systems out of the dark ages six months ago when we'll be talking to our agents and getting them to do huge amounts of work. So look, question for you guys, I will publish this follow up, I'm not going to wait until Grok finishes its work because it's away doing that, leave it to it, let it finish. But hopefully you can see, if you build your stack correctly, you build your bots and your team properly and you've got all of those jobs working together and they talk to each other and they help each other, you can build a team that can do huge amounts of work. So anybody who wants to know, let me know, that's not something I would charge anybody for I'll gladly help you get set up and on the basis that if you ever need help in the future with getting listed in AI search, AEO, GEO, anything to do with SEO anything like that by all means hit me up in the DMs message me I love teaching this sort of stuff so hopefully that's useful cheers guys