Digiday+ Research: Agencies punt budget growth expectations to 2027 — while AI worries intensify

Between the war in the Middle East’s potential impact on ad spending and the rapid integration of AI tools across workflows, agencies have a lot on their minds in 2026.Overall, agencies’ top concerns this year are client spending and the effects of AI. Thirty-eight percent of agency professionals anticipated that the biggest challenge the agency industry will face in 2026 is reduced client budgets, while 38% said the same about the effects of AI. That’s according to a Digiday+ Research survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2025 among 62 agency professionals. !function(e,i,n,s){var t="InfogramEmbeds",d=e.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];if(window[t]&&window[t].initialized)window[t].process&&window[t].process();else if(!e.getElementById(n)){var o=e.createElement("script");o.async=1,o.id=n,o.src="https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js",d.parentNode.insertBefore(o,d)}}(document,0,"infogram-async"); This continued the trend of spending pessimism from 2025: Forty-seven percent of agency pros said reduced client budgets was agencies’ top concern last year, ahead of other roadblocks such as scope creep (16%) and the external effects of AI (11%).This is a member-exclusive article from Digiday. Continue reading it on digiday.com and subscribe to continue reading content like this.