The RPA Margin Split: Why Agencies Must Pick a Lane Before Agentic AI Picks One for Them

Rule-based automation used to be a defensible retainer line because the tooling was hard to learn and clients could not self-serve it. Agentic AI is collapsing that moat from both ends: enterprise suites bundle governance and compliance that SMB clients will never pay for, while prompt-driven utilities let a client's ops lead build a scraper in an afternoon. Agencies that straddle both ends end up competing on hourly bot-building against tools that cost less than their day rate.