Many agency conversations about AI still swing between panic and denial. Modupe Sanni, Managing Partner of Digital Square Limited, has a sharper answer: her team is now expected to deliver work five times faster because of AI.
“You cannot spend five days doing something that technology can help you accomplish in 30 minutes,” she told BusinessDay. The point is not speed for its own sake. It is to free people for the work tools cannot do—diagnosing business problems, reading culture and knowing when a strategy needs to change.
The speed bar is a value shift
Digital Square, which operates in Nigeria, the US and Canada and has worked with brands including Gokabet, Branch and FXCG, says content creation, research, reporting and campaign optimisation are increasingly automated. That changes what clients should be paying for. If an agency charges for production that a tool can handle in minutes, the pricing model is exposed.
For growth teams, this is both pressure and opportunity. Speed becomes table stakes. Differentiation moves to strategy: what to produce, who it is for and why it should convert.
Diagnose before you prescribe
Sanni says the first question when growth stalls is not about ad budget. It is about where the business is losing opportunities. Low visibility and weak conversion can look similar but need different fixes. A brand can be known but still not trusted, or can drive traffic to an offer that was never market-ready.
That matches a core performance marketing rule: find the leaking stage of the funnel before you scale spend. Digital Square even turns down brands whose products are not ready, because paid media cannot fix a fundamental product problem.
- Attraction: are people discovering the brand at all?
- Conversion: does the website or store turn interest into action?
- Retention: is the experience strong enough to earn repeat revenue?
Chase fewer trends, own more assets
Search behaviour is moving beyond Google toward TikTok and AI platforms, Sanni notes. But she argues the fundamentals stay stable: value, understanding and trust. Brands that depend entirely on social algorithms are renting their growth. Email lists, customer data and communities are assets they control.
She also rejects the idea of adopting every new platform. The right question is whether a channel fits the brand and the buying journey, not whether it is trending.
For our readers, the practical move is to set an explicit AI speed baseline for repetitive tasks, then reinvest the saved hours in customer conversations, cultural insight and creative judgment. That is where the next competitive edge sits.
Source: businessday.ng
