Nick Hunter.
Nick Hunter, Founder CEO, Paper Moose.
How agencies should be adapting to the AI era (and why productivity is the wrong goal entirely)
As we frantically adapt to this new AI order, companies and people are slowly working out where AI acts as an accelerant and where it becomes pointless productivity theatre.
Globally, we are now seeing leaderboards tracking the number of tokens employees consume, KPIs tied to AI adoption, and bonuses linked to usage metrics. But, as with any measurement framework, what we choose to measure shapes what we get. Right now, many businesses are incentivising adoption over everything else, including outcomes.
At Paper Moose, we set an AI strategy two years ago and have slowly watched it come into focus. Our hypothesis was that AI would quickly become capable at the "intelligent" parts of our jobs, but that the deeply human things, questions of taste, genuine empathy- what makes someone brilliant or terrible at client service, would remain stubbornly ours.
So we set out to build Moose OS: a technology stack that replaces much of our existing tangle of subscriptions with a single piece of software. It continuously adapts to our needs and to our evolving understanding of what agentic technology can genuinely add as an accelerant, both to our work and to our clients' growth.
This is not a matter of plugging an AI feature into a legacy platform and paying a premium for the privilege. This is building purpose-built software with AI as its foundation. That distinction changes not just how you work, but more importantly, how you think.
And thinking is precisely where AI has its largest problem: humans. We are the bottleneck. Adapting to and using this intelligence intelligently requires genuine neural elasticity. It demands that we unlearn large swathes of how we have operated for the past ten to fifteen years and rethink the entire stack. In practice, it means elevating our thinking to become masters and conductors of a swarm of agents that are, in many respects, more capable than we are.
But I do not want to paint a picture of an agency operating as a handful of seniors working in darkened rooms, collaborating only with their agents while projecting the output of a team of one hundred. Counter-intuitively, this kind of productivity frees us to spend more time connecting dots, collaborating face to face, and making this intelligence human.
It is partly for this reason that we are moving to more in-office days. As it becomes easier to do more with fewer, highly empowered people, it inversely becomes more important to run our ideas through the rock tumbler of human debate. That high-friction process, running alongside svelt, intelligent technology, might seem counter-productive on the surface. In practice, it is where we are finding the right balance.
Productivity is not the goal, or at least it should not be. The goal is the elevation of genuinely creative thinking, powered by superintelligence and shaped by human intuition. That is something worth getting excited about. That is wildly effective.