Originally published by ‘Google’ Dave Hazlehurst founder of Agenctic People. Read the original article here.
I’ve spent the last six months listening. Here’s what we built because of it
A lot of people have asked me the same question lately. Old clients, old colleagues, people I’ve worked alongside for years.
“So, what have you been up to?”
I’ve spent the last six months listening. Or maybe it’s simpler than that.
Connecting.
Connecting with people I know, friends and senior leaders I’ve always admired. Connecting dots. So many conversations, digi-brews and quick catch-ups with people whose judgement I trust.
Different rooms. Same disconnection.
That’s part of why, this week, we launched Agentic People.
Not because we had a neat answer ready, but because the same pattern kept showing up, in different words and in different organisations, and I couldn’t stop noticing it.
What I kept hearing.
Strategy that sounds right at the top, doesn’t feel true further down. Managers get handed a story they were never really equipped to carry.
Siloed teams doing genuinely good work, all heading in slightly different directions, with very little joining it all up.
Employer brand promises that look beautiful in a 73-page brand guidelines document… but never really see the light of day.
They were all different expressions of the same thing.
A connection problem.
Not connection in the fluffy sense. The practical connection between an employer promise and someone’s working day. Between a leadership ambition and what a manager can confidently explain. Between the customer experience a company wants to create and the employee experience required to deliver it.
Underneath that, there was a second pattern.
More for less. Faster.
Budgets that have shrunk, not grown. Companies moving so quickly that by the time an EVP project is signed off, it risks answering last year’s question. A static photograph of a moving target.
What people want, underneath all that pressure, are three things. None of them particularly complicated.
- Speed to value, not a six-month process before anyone sees anything real.
- Plug and play, able to drop into a specific challenge anywhere across the talent lifecycle, in weeks not months.
- Human judgement doing the deciding, with AI doing the heavy lifting underneath it. Not the other way round.
Here’s the practical version.
Agentic People can help an organisation understand its employer brand and experience without disappearing for three months of research first.
Retune an EVP in weeks, not months. Parachute senior people into one part of the talent journey or help join the whole thing up.
And build in how something will be used from day one, rather than leaving that as somebody else’s problem once the launch video’s done.
None of that is especially complicated either. It’s just rarely how agencies are built to work.
AI helps us get there faster. It gathers and connects signals, digs through research and tests ideas in ways that would have needed a small army a few years ago.
But it doesn’t decide what any of it means. That’s still us, working out what deserves attention, what matters, and what people will genuinely believe.
The work has changed shape.
The agency world is changing fast, just like everyone else’s. Big networks are trying to simplify and cut costs. Internal teams are becoming more capable. AI is changing what clients can do for themselves without picking up the phone to anyone.
For years, agencies sold scale. More people. More departments. More process. More capability.
Clients are increasingly asking whether that scale creates value or simply adds friction.
The logo above the door is less relevant than it has ever been. It’s the people. How many times have I heard that this year alone? The people you actually work with. The ones in the trenches with you. The ones who bring experience, judgement and trust, and who are still there when it gets hard.
I don’t think big is bad, and I don’t think small is automatically better. I used to believe scale was mostly the point. Looking back, I’m not sure it was.
Sharp, not small.
We didn’t build Agentic People to be a smaller version of a bigger agency. We built it because the work itself needed a different shape, and nobody else was going to redesign the model around it for us.
Small isn’t the strategy.
Sharp is.
Close to the problem. Senior in the actual work, not just the pitch. Flexible enough to build the right team around a challenge, instead of forcing the challenge through someone else’s org chart.
Fewer layers between the brief and the work. More senior specialist attention. Less structural cost.
So, why these ‘fab’ four?
Well, what can I say…
Nat, Jules, John and ‘our’ Mike. Different disciplines. Different instincts. Different ways of seeing the same problem. We’ve worked together for well over a decade, and I still learn something from each of them every week.
Some of the most talented, creative and even occasionally funny people I ever worked with 😊
For us, connection isn’t just a word. It’s an instinct and a trust we’ve built over that decade, the kind you can’t fake or shortcut.
What connects us isn’t a job title or a shared employer from years ago.
It’s a belief that if something is worth making, it’s worth making properly.
Shaping Agentic People with you has been genuinely exhilarating, emotional, and one hell of a ride. There’s an energy between us that makes this fun, even when it’s been bloody hard, and somehow, we always find a way through. And I wouldn’t want to do this with anyone else.
It isn’t about the agency. It’s about the people. There it is again.
Designed with, not just for.
None of this was built in a room on our own. Over the last six months, a small group of senior leaders gave up their time, honestly and generously, to pressure test what we were thinking. Some of it they liked. Some of it they told us to bin. Both were useful.
If you’re one of the people who took a call, had a digi-brew or gave me an honest reaction to something half formed, thank you. Genuinely. You shaped this more than you probably realise.
That isn’t a launch week nicety. It’s how we intend to keep working. The agency and the offer have been shaped with that community, not created in isolation from it, and we want to keep building it that way, openly, as we go.
The thing I keep coming back to.
One of the patterns we talk about most is what we call the through line nobody owns. The business strategy says one thing. The brand says another. The internal comms say a third. And the experience people have, day to day? Fragmented. Well, that’s putting it politely. Nobody in the organisation is actually responsible for making sure any of it connects.
That’s the gap we want to help close. Not with more noise. Not another platform, another campaign, or another six-month process that ends in a launch video nobody watches by month two.
Senior people, close to the signal, using AI to help us hear more, and human judgement to work out what matters.
One strategy. One connected experience.
Simple and clever. Not brilliant and complex.
There’s more to come. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share more about how we work, the problems we’re trying to solve, and some of the things we’ve been building quietly behind the scenes. Some of it, I think, will start to make a lot of sense.
We’ve called the company Agentic People.
Not because AI is fashionable. Because we believe organisations need more agency.
More clarity. Better judgement. Better connection.
Technology can help us move faster. People decide where we’re going.
That’s what we’ve built. And we’re only just getting started.
Agentic People
P.S. If we haven’t caught up for a while and you fancy a digi-brew, drop me a message. I’m always amazed where a good conversation can lead.