Some people give me a hard time about being hyperbolic and my hot takes. I always think that’s unfounded. I’m quite measured in all ways at all times 🙂
But, today I have a hot take: we are in the single biggest technological and professional revolution any of us will see in our lifetimes. I sincerely believe that’s the accurate, unembellished truth.
The past three years have been a rollercoaster for most agencies, I know. And they have been remarkable inside Newfangled, positively and negatively, in ways I’m still processing. Most of it traces back to AI.
So that’s what this is about.
1995 was the last time this happened
Newfangled started in 1995 as a tech partner for agencies. Back then, the web was the scary, mysterious thing that print agencies had no idea how to handle. Literally no idea. We’ve spent 31 years helping agencies with the hard tech stuff, and there are real parallels between what was happening then and what’s happening now.
But there’s one major difference. Agencies had a grace period from roughly ’95 to 2000 to slowly incorporate web into their print offerings. It was mostly an opportunity. Not much threat. They were scared, they were intimidated, but they had the time to figure it out.
We don’t have that now. As soon as we figure one thing out, there’s something new that’s ten times more powerful. Weekly. Monthly. Quarterly. The battle between the major LLM providers is fierce and fun to watch, but it’s dizzying as a business owner.
January 2023
From my perspective, the starting gun was January of 2023. GPT-3.5 had come out in November of 2022, and by January it hit a million users. That was the moment everyone realized: okay, this is real, this is staying.
In those early days it couldn’t do all that much all that well. But we decided right then that AI is coming for this industry in ways we could envision and ways we couldn’t. We knew we had to live in it, to fully steep ourselves in it, and understand exactly what’s possible and what’s not.
Fortunately, that’s how we’re built. We’ve lived at the intersection of powerful, but challenging technology and agencies for 31 years. It’s what excites us, even when it’s also genuinely intimidating. Which it was.
The honest middle
We spent the next year and a half figuring out how to make practical use of this technology.
Then we built a product around it called Magnolia. It was a massive investment in every way. We were proud of what we made, and we learned an immense amount about how to work with AI. But one of the main lessons from that period was that building a fixed product in a field changing this fast is a bit of a fool’s errand. You just can’t keep up.
And while Magnolia was its own thing, we kept pushing on a bigger question: what does a comprehensive application of this technology actually look like? Not a single tool, but a complete rebuild.
May 2025
Claude Sonnet had been maturing throughout 2024, and in May of 2025 it reached a genuinely functional level of reliability. Claude Code matured at the same time. All of a sudden, you could build substantial things. Reliable things. Business-changing things.
We set out to do exactly that. Piece by piece, we reinvented Newfangled from the ground up. How we manage finances. How we work with clients. How we create our work. How we collaborate internally. Every single aspect of the business. The lessons from our first two years of AI immersion allowed us to make rapid progress once the tools matured.
Once you see it working, you don’t go back. It’s a better way of operating in every way that matters.
And watching that light go on for each person inside Newfangled (the moment they realize what they can now do that they simply couldn’t before) has been one of the more remarkable things I’ve witnessed in my time at Newfangled. Each of those moments compounds. The expertise of the organization grows, the capabilities grow, the platform itself gets smarter. It builds on itself every day. I’ve never seen anything like it.
AI-enabled is not AI-native
Most agencies right now are AI-enabled. They’ve given their teams a budget for an LLM license. Twenty to fifty dollars per person per month, pick your flavor: GPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity. They’re under the illusion they’re “doing AI” because they’re paying for some licenses and their staff is using these tools instead of Googling.
An AI-native agency is something completely different. It is a unified platform the whole firm operates on, where every interaction every person has with clients, data, and each other makes the system better. Where the agency is built and optimized around what this technology can actually do, not using it as a smarter Google.
We’ve seen this from both sides now. Inside Newfangled and with the clients we’ve been working with. The difference is real and it’s visible on the bottom line.
I think this could be the golden age of agencies, honestly. Because this is the age of the creator. And agencies create.
What Newfangled Frontier is
We spent three years figuring this out for ourselves. Now we’re bringing it to agencies. That’s Newfangled Frontier. Our AI consulting and development practice built specifically for firms like yours.
It starts with an audit. We look at your situation: your tools, your systems, how you run. What can you actually do, in a practical way, that has real and measurable bottom-line impact? We look for what I call catapult opportunities: things you’ll be able to do dramatically faster, AND dramatically better, in ways that simply weren’t possible before because the man-hours required would have been absurd.
The pace of change isn’t slowing down. Nobody knows what’s coming out next month. But that uncertainty is exactly why getting inside it now matters.