How Fergus Dyer-Smith reshaped enterprise video production with AI-enabled humans

Before GPT-3 changed marketing forever, Fergus Dyer-Smith was posting about the AI future.

Now, he’s my go-to voice for learning how AI will change marketing (and the world).

In this edition:

🎬 How Fergus Dyer-Smith reshaped enterprise video production with AI-enabled humans
🤖 Agents are taking websites’ jobs
📈 Digital pulled 2025 ad spend upward

🎬 How Fergus Dyer-Smith reshaped enterprise video production with AI-enabled humans

Fergus Dyer-Smith is the founder of Wooshii, a company that’s evolved from video tech platform → agency → tech-enabled production powerhouse.

We sat down for an interview, where I dug into how AI has evolved Wooshii from the inside out — from how they operate internally — to how client expectations have changed.

His take? We’re moving from “Software as a Service” to “Service as Software.”

Here’s what that looks like at Wooshii:

Internally, the team is split into two clear tracks: tech vs. production. No more wearing two hats.
AI now accelerates every step of the process — client discovery, scriptwriting, storyboards, translations, even sales decks. Proposals that used to take weeks now go out in a day.
AI lifts the creative ceiling. It gets teams to “first base” faster, helping them break through creative blocks and deliver better ideas, faster.

Clients feel the difference.

They’re getting more deliverables, faster turnaround, and higher-quality creative. And on the backend, Wooshii is tracking the gains going from pre‑AI to post‑AI workflows.

The result? Massive time savings. Some clients are even reporting EBITDA gains tied directly to AI-powered output.

So is AI replacing jobs?

Fergus thinks many roles will evolve or disappear — especially low-leverage, computer-based ones. But the bigger shift may be this:

“Companies keep the same headcount, but expect more from everyone.”

Fergus’ future vision: “Humans will still be in the loop, but not the center of it.”

If you’re a service provider: Specialize. Show the value of what you do. Don’t charge for hours — charge for outcomes. If clients know AI exists, they’ll expect you to use it. And they’ll expect a better price unless you prove your edge.
If you’re in-house: Get clear on what stays in-house (governance, brand, compliance, measurement, etc.) and where you’ll lean on outside AI-augmented specialists with deeper expertise.

Want to see how this works in practice? Fergus and his team built and use Wooshii Assist internally to streamline video production with AI — from scripting to delivery. It’s the backbone of how they work faster and deliver more.

🤖 Agents are taking websites’ jobs

Agents are moving fast from experiment to default.

The global AI agents market was $5.4B in 2024 and could hit $50.3B by 2030.

Longer term, forecasts stretch from $7.6B in 2025 to nearly $199B by 2034.

AI is quickly being woven into decision-making processes (aka the customer journey).

Could they be doing more selling than websites in the future?

Clicks are fading as answer layers thicken. Pew found link CTR drops to 8% with AI summaries versus 15% without.
Premium publishers saw Google referral traffic slide 10%, while MailOnline reported CTR down 56% on desktop and 48% on mobile when summaries appeared.

My prediction is that our content’s first-order goal should be to help LLMs understand HOW they should “sell” our product for us. Clicks will decrease but not disappear, so content should still have a quality “human user experience” for those who dig deeper.

📈 Digital pulled 2025 ad spend upward

WARC just raised its 2025 ad-spend forecast to 7.4% growth or $1.17T, the first upward revision in over a year, helped by a Q2 pre-tariff rush and a digital surge.

Digital will take 9 in 10 incremental dollars.
Social captures 40.6% of new spend, with a 20.2% YoY spike in Q2.

WARC’s global forecast is bullish, while eMarketer trimmed the U.S. outlook by two points to 9.5% digital growth.

👋 Popped into the “quick sync”

It’s a 60-minute brainstorm about MQLs. Bye.

🗞️ Stories to not doomscroll

Schema won’t win you extra visibility in AI Mode. A study of 107k cited URLs found that only baseline schemas (Organization, Article, Person, Breadcrumbs) matter — no special markup gives an edge.

AI referrals are tiny but sticky. ChatGPT drives only 0.21% of visits, yet brand recommendations can reach ~74.2M weekly users in AI answers.

OpenAI is gearing up to monetize ChatGPT. A new growth team is building ad infrastructure so brands can run campaigns across ChatGPT’s 700M weekly users.

Threads is catching X. Similarweb shows Threads matching or exceeding X in daily actives on some days, though X still leads in web visits.

AI cuts video ad costs, but don’t forget the humans in the loop. AI-only ads cost $591, human-only ads cost $4,874, while AI + human ads cost $2,694 and deliver the highest ROI.

🤝 Need a hand with your content marketing?

I run Stat Digital, a fractional content marketing team for B2B SaaS companies.

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