The Wrong Kind of Busy

What a year of consulting with agencies taught us about AI adoption — and the platform it led us to build.

Last May I spoke at the Mirren Live conference about AI agents and the changing nature of the agency/client relationship. After the talk, a line formed — agency leaders, one after another, asking some version of the same question: how do we actually adopt this stuff?

That's when it clicked. AI wasn't a nice-to-have for agencies. It was existential, and most of them didn't know where to start.

Up to that point, my focus with Loop had been helping marketers in healthcare and higher ed find their footing with AI. But a friend put the stakes in a way I haven't been able to shake since: "If a hospital marketing department doesn't adopt AI, the hospital won't go out of business. But if an agency doesn't, it might." I decided to go all in on agencies.

More tools, less value

Months of consulting with agencies made one thing clear: AI wasn't making them more efficient. It was making things worse.

Not because the tools don't work. Because agencies were buying AI everywhere — one tool for research, another for drafting, another for reporting — and none of them talked to each other. Time and money went into a pile of parts that never added up to a whole, let alone something greater than the sum of the parts. Worse, every new subscription put the agency more squarely at the mercy of the frontier labs building these tools, with no leverage and no plan of their own.

That's a business problem dressed up as a tooling problem. And it's the reason Signal78 exists.

What we're building

We just incorporated Signal78, Inc. — the formal, legal signal of a pivot that's been building for a year. The idea: a platform that unites the disparate AI systems inside an agency, handles the block-and-tackle operational work that eats up so many hours, and only signals a human when their judgment is actually needed.

That last part matters more than it might sound. This isn't about automating agencies out of existence. It's "human in the loop" by design — AI doing the work that doesn't need a person, so the people can do the work that does.

Where things stand

We've just kicked off a business-development-focused pilot with real clients. We're raising a Friends & Family round to fund the next stage of development. And we have a seed round planned for early 2027.

We also rebuilt our website to reflect all of this, because the old one no longer reflected what we do and who we serve.

None of this changes the original bet: AI should make agencies sharper, not just faster. That's the conversation people kept starting with me after Mirren Live, and it's the one Signal78 exists to answer. If you run or work at an agency and you're trying to figure out where to start, get in touch.