The Great Uncomfort: The Death of Process Theater
A friend of mine runs a successful marketing agency in Amsterdam. His team is brilliant, his clients are happy, and his bank account is healthy.
But he is terrified. And he should be.
He isn’t afraid that AI will "take his jobs." He’s afraid of a much deeper, more tectonic shift: the total collapse of the Process Theater.
For the last fifty years, we have lived in a world where Value was a proxy for Inertia. We justified our prices through the theater of the process: the three-week strategy phase, the four rounds of revisions, the ten-person brainstorming sessions. We sold the uren (hours) because we didn’t have a way to synthesize result without them.
That world ended in December 2025.
The Result-Friction Gap
When Spotify announced that their top engineers stopped coding and started using an agentic system called Honk, they weren’t just bragging about efficiency. They were announcing the birth of the Autonomous Orchard.
The "Great Uncomfort" we feel in business today is the realization that the distance between Intent and Execution has dropped to near-zero.
The traditional agency model is built on friction. You pay for the time it takes to overcome the human limitations of skill. But when an agent can execute a year’s worth of technical craft in a weekend, the "Hour" becomes a meaningless metric.
If you are still selling "Work," you are a commodity. And the price of every commodity eventually trends toward zero.
The Shift: From Skills to Perception
This is where society is cracking. We’ve spent two centuries training humans to be high-level "Executors." We’ve tied our identity to our technical skills—the ability to code, to design, to write copy, to manage a project.
As those skills become abundant, they lose their market value.
In the age of the agent, the only thing that remains scarce is Perception.
The "Aha-erlebnis" for my friend’s agency isn’t to "use AI to work faster." It’s to realize that his value no longer lies in the Strategy Document (the output), but in his Taste and Direction (the intent).
He must stop being a factory owner and start being an Architect of Intent.
The Abundant Pivot
The Great Uncomfort is the shedding of our collective skin. It is the painful transition from a world of Scarcity-based Effort to a world of Abundance-based Vision.
To become a leader in this era, you must kill the part of you that wants to be "busy."
• Busy is for agents.
• Scale is for agents.
• Perception is for you.
We are entering a future where the only ceiling on your success is the quality of your ideas and your courage to let the machine do the heavy lifting.
Stop managing processes. Start managing vision.
Written by Roel Smelt [together with MyBuddyTalk Assistants]