The AI shift: reinventing the modern agency.
Martijn Vlemmix. Co-founder and COO of a Dutch/Polish digital agency. Operator with a decade of practice translating AI from buzzword into production workflow.
Vlemmix is a Dutch operator who arrived in Poland in the early 2010s and has been quietly building an agency that takes AI seriously as an operational layer, not as a marketing buzzword. The episode is the most practical of the seven. It is the conversation a marketing director should have with their agency before signing any 2026 retainer.
Three useful exchanges. First, on why brands keep failing when they try to in-house specialist AI competencies: it is not about hiring, it is about exposure. An agency that has applied the same technique across eight clients in eight verticals has seen the failure modes the in-house team has not. The competitive asset is shared learning, and brands consistently underprice it. Second, on the risk of becoming the next Kodak: Vlemmix recalls sitting with Dutch grocery retailers ten years ago who shrugged at online (then half a percent of revenue, now fifteen to twenty). The same shrug is happening right now to agentic AI in marketing operations, and will look just as expensive in retrospect. Third, on AI hallucination as a politeness reflex: the models say yes the same way some cultures say yes, and the discipline is to ask "what is your source" before believing the output.
A clean episode for any CMO trying to figure out whether their agency is helping or watching.