MIT Sloan Management Review has been read by people running businesses for 67 years. This month it publishes its final issue. Not because it ran out of things to say, but because it decided the format it had used since the 1950s, the long-form quarterly review, no longer matched how the people it serves actually take in information. It's folding into newsletters, podcasts and short-form digital content instead. The decision cost 23 staff and around 20 contractors their jobs, and it has drawn real backlash from academics and practitioners who valued what the old format did well.

That backlash is worth sitting with for a second, because it's not wrong. Something is genuinely lost when a considered, long-form review gives way to shorter, faster content. But MIT Sloan looked at where its actual readers had already moved, and chose to follow them deliberately rather than keep producing something fewer and fewer people were reading in full. That's a harder decision than it sounds. Institutions with a 67-year identity built around one format don't change it lightly.

Most agencies are sitting on a version of the same decision, just earlier and quieter. Somewhere in the business is a format nobody has questioned since the agency started: the research deck that takes three weeks to turn around, the strategy document billed by the hour, the creative review process built around a slower pace of client feedback. None of it is wrong, exactly. It's just the format the business has always used, kept in place less because clients still want it that way and more because nobody has stopped to ask whether they do.

The uncomfortable part of the MIT Sloan story isn't the AI angle, there barely is one. It's that a credible, long-established institution had to make a call about its own format before its audience made the call for it by quietly reading less of it. Agencies have more warning than MIT Sloan did. Clients who now get first drafts, summaries and options back from other suppliers in hours rather than weeks are a visible signal, not a hidden one. The question worth asking isn't whether AI changes the work. It's whether the format the agency delivers that work in still matches what the client actually needs from it.

This is exactly the ground the Opportunities dimension of the AI Accelerator Diagnostic is built to cover: not "should we use more AI," but where the friction actually sits in how the business delivers, and whether the format built years ago is still earning its place. The Turner Agency, a 36-person events and film agency, went through this diagnostic and the six-session training programme that followed, and the shift wasn't about doing the same work faster. It was about noticing which parts of the delivery format were genuinely valued by clients and which had simply never been revisited. Across that programme, satisfaction averaged 4.6 out of 5 from 131 survey responses, with not one dissatisfied response recorded.

MIT Sloan didn't close because it stopped mattering. It closed one format and opened another because it read the room honestly rather than defensively. That's the harder and more useful question for any agency to ask about its own delivery model, and it's a much better time to ask it while there's still room to choose the answer.

Go wisely.