There’s a project I’ve been working on. I’m calling it Agency for now, and weirdly, as a 25-year veteran in this marketing game, I am in a weird position of… not caring even what it is called?
It is strange times indeed.
At this point, I am more interested in the concept itself, for it goes well beyond marketing.
I’m not ready to open the doors fully yet – but I am ready to tell you what it is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. Because the “what it isn’t” matters just as much.
I worked in an advertising agency from 1999 to 2006. I ran my own marketing agency from 2006 and beyond. I’ve ran one person consultancies. I spent a few years productivizing myself, 2022-2025. I wrote Strategic AI SEO last year, and I published Agentica (skills) weeks before Claude announced Skills. I even wrote a kind of paper on skills, and how skills would manifest in the future as the natural augmentation for AI.
Making an agentic agency is just the next step for me, to connect all this together, at this old age.
What Agency Is
Agency is a fully operational, multi-agent AI platform built around one central idea: you should be able to run a complete digital operation without needing a room full of people to do it.
Not by chatting with a chatbot. Not by pasting prompts into a box. By managing a team.
When you log into Agency, you’re not opening a chat window. You’re stepping into the role of CEO of a virtual digital marketing agency. Your team is already at their desks. They have names, roles, seniority levels, personalities, and specialisms. Some of them are opinionated. Some of them will push back if you feed them dodgy content. One of them will crack a joke at the worst possible moment.
They communicate.
They argue about quality.
They route work up the chain.
They produce deliverables.
And they get better the more they work.
What Your Team Can Do
This isn’t a list of “features.” These are active capabilities in the system right now:
- Write content – Articles, briefs, reports, campaign copy. Multiple writers with different grade levels are intelligently assigned based on what they already know about your topic. A senior editor reviews their work before it reaches you.
- Audit your website – A structured, multi-step analysis of your site’s quality, technical health, topical depth, trust signals, and entity recognition. Not hallucinated opinions — actual findings grounded in your real traffic data.
- Answer your phone – A live AI receptionist that picks up calls to your actual phone number, speaks instantly with no dead air, and handles conversations in real time.
- Manage your inbox – An AI assistant that works through your Gmail, triages what matters, escalates what needs your attention, and silently discards the noise.
- Post to social media – Write, schedule, and publish across multiple platforms simultaneously from one place.
- Handle compliance – A legal specialist and a compliance officer who exist specifically to audit content before it goes anywhere near a publish button.
- Book travel – A dedicated personal assistant with live access to real flight and hotel data.
- Run ethics checks – Every single workflow passes through an ethics gate before it executes. Hardcoded. Auditable. No exceptions.
- And there’s a lot more….
It is a completely Multi-Actor Agentic System.
What Makes It Different
It’s Not a Chatbot
The interaction model isn’t “ask AI a question, get an answer.” It’s “assign a task to a team, watch the team work, receive a deliverable.” The difference sounds subtle. It isn’t. The moment you watch an agent pick up a task, route it to a colleague for review, get pushed back by the lawyer, and land an approved piece in your creative library, you understand what changes when you replace a chat box with a workflow engine.
These Agentic Employees Don’t Forget
Most AI platforms treat every session as the first session. Blank slate, every time. Agency’s agents build a professional history. Every piece of work is stored. The system tracks what topics each writer has worked on, what clients they’ve handled, and routes future work accordingly — the same writer, the same voice, the same specialisation, compounding over time. They build portfolios. Like real employees.
The Output Is Grounded, Not Guessed
There’s a serious problem with AI-generated content: confident fabrication.
I wrote about the failings of AI at length some years ago now. I’ve worked with AI day and night since 2022. I certainly will not be adding to the Sloppening.
Agency attacks this at multiple layers – from injecting your real website data and live traffic figures directly into the agent context, to immutable knowledge bases that certain specialists cannot deviate from, to live web search grounding that requires citations.
The agents don’t get to make things up. The architecture won’t let them.
Enterprise Telephony as a Standard Feature
Real-time AI phone calls — with no transcription lag, no robotic pause before answering, no dead air — is the kind of integration companies once paid enterprise contracts to achieve. It’s a department inside Agency. You connect a phone number. It answers.
The Interface Is Gamified, Deliberately
You manage your team through a visual office grid. Avatars pulse when agents are working. A live event scroll shows you what’s happening in the background in real time. Agents push proactive messages into your group chat as they complete tasks – you find out your SEO audit finished because the analyst told you, not because you refreshed a page. The UX was designed to feel like a company, not a dashboard.
Four Ethical Laws, Visible and Enforced
Agency operates under four Prime Directives – inspired somewhat by Asimov (and Robocop), adapted for reality. They govern what the system will and won’t do, at the workflow level, not buried in model weights. Every task goes through an ethics gate. Every decision is logged. Every blocked request tells you exactly why it was blocked. There is no hidden Directive Five. There are no classified overrides.
NB: Agency will also be able to run and analyse any Hobo SEO tools in Google Sheets, naturally, including Hobo SEO Dashboard. Full integration is expected in the Spring of 2026.
What Agency Is Not
It’s not an MVP. It’s not a proof of concept. It’s not a demo dressed up in screenshots. It’s production software with authentication, billing, a credit system, background job queues, a test suite, end-to-end monitoring, and real integrations with real external services.
It’s not just for technical people. The system is designed to be managed by someone in a business operations role, not an engineer. You’re the CEO. You don’t need to know how the pipes work.
It’s not a black box. Every decision the team makes is logged. You can open the filing cabinet and read every intermediate draft, every research note, every audit result your agents produced. You can trace the full production chain of any deliverable from the first draft to the approved version. No mystery. Full auditability.
It’s not trying to replace human judgment. Agency is designed around human direction. You set priorities, approve final outputs, configure what the team knows about your business, and maintain final authority on what ships. The human is still the CEO – Agency provides the team.
Agency is the Marketing Cyborg Technique made tangible.
Who It’s For
If you run a business – any kind of business – and have ever paid separately for an SEO tool, a content writer, a social scheduler, a phone answering service, and a compliance review, you’ll understand why Agency exists.
It’s also for the solo operator who wants to punch well above their weight class. The freelancer who needs a full production pipeline, not just a writing assistant. The agency that wants to scale output without scaling headcount proportionally.
There is a LOT more to Agency than just a fully agentic system at your command.
Could it be configured to be a black hat seo workhorse? Yes. Will I let you? No.
In fact, the entire aim of the project is to create helpful content accurately and quickly, so Google’s quality guidelines are kind of baked in.
What Comes Next
I’ll be sharing more about specific parts of the system as we move toward full launch, which is days, rather than weeks away – the agent hierarchy, the grounding architecture, the telephony integration, and the marketplace where you’ll be able to extend what your team can do.
If you want to be among the first to access it, get in touch.
Agency is real. It works. It ships.
And PS – This entire review was written by Claude after reviewing the codebase.
PPS Agency is being sent to some of the best SEO in the world to review over the next few days and weeks.