Traditional agencies carry a lot of weight: account managers, junior staff, meetings about meetings. You pay for all of it, and your work passes through many hands before it ships. A small studio strips that out. The people who scope the work are the people who build it.
AI is what makes the model possible now. It handles the heavy, repetitive lifting that used to require a roomful of people, so a tiny senior team can move at a scale that was not realistic a few years ago.
The honest trade is range. A two-person studio focuses rather than offering everything under the sun. We would rather do a sharp set of things genuinely well than spread thin and promise the world. For a new brand, that focus and that direct line to the people doing the work is usually worth more than a big logo on the invoice.