Once a week, I pull into the Shell station on Pleasant Street in Belmont, MA where I love to fill up my car. Bill, the owner, knows me. I know him.

Once a month, I drive three towns over to Newton just to get my haircut from Mel Berkachi. My barber. When my classic cars need attention, I text Marc at German Performance Motors—he'll FaceTime me right away to walk through removing a distributor cap or checking the ignition system. If I need my cars picked up for service, I message Derek at Sound in Motion. Sometimes I'll drive to his house first, and we'll go together to drop off the car.

These are the kind of business relationships most people are nostalgic about—the baker, the butcher, the cobbler. Small business owners who knew every customer by name. Who remembered your preferences, anticipated your needs, made you feel valued. Truly personal relationships that get built through business.

In Brooklyn there's Alice, the owner of our co-working space. If I need anything—like pointing out we're running low on toilet paper—she appreciates me bringing it to her attention. I can work with her directly. I like the feeling of being a priority to the businesses I spend money with, and so does everyone else.

But in tech, we've gone so far in the other direction. As business owners, we don't treat customers this way ourselves. We did in the beginning. Those first few customers. But as the business scales, you forget about the personal relationships and start thinking about things like “customer communication at scale.” Now all we do is send automated emails that start with "Dear {{first_name}}." We'll enroll a top customer in a 10 email sequence and call it a day. Or we'll treat them like VIPs during the sales process, only to resort back to the mass communication, automation once they actually pay and become a customer.

The irony is profound. We're supposed to be the innovators, the technologists, the ones pushing the boundaries of what's possible. And yet somehow, the local barbershop delivers a more personal, meaningful customer experience than most billion-dollar tech companies.

Consider this: these small business owners remember hundreds of customers' preferences, anticipate their needs, and make them feel valued—all without a CRM, without AI, without any technology at all.

Meanwhile, B2B companies with seemingly unlimited resources and cutting-edge technology treat customer relationships like a numbers game, convincing ourselves that adding a {{first_name}} token to a mass email campaign counts as personalization.

The more sophisticated our technology becomes, the more we distance ourselves from our customers. Sales representatives shower prospects with attention until they sign—then suddenly they're just another ticket number in the system. We've built powerful tools to scale our businesses, but somewhere along the way, we scaled away the humanity. We have lost the personal touch.

Peter Drucker said the point of business is to create customers. Not to acquire them, not to process them – but to create them. That means building relationships that last, treating each interaction as an opportunity to strengthen the bond between your company and the people who trust you with their business. We all know it’s better for business to retain existing customers vs. spending all of our time acquiring new ones, but our actions don’t match this insight.

Let’s go back to my guy Marc at German Performance Motors. When I text him about my car trouble, he doesn't forward me to a support queue or send me to a knowledge base. He gets on FaceTime and walks me through the solution himself. That's not just customer service—that's customer partnership. That's treating every customer like they're your only customer.

Imagine this was possible in B2B? At scale?

The conventional wisdom says we can't scale this kind of personal attention. It says that as businesses grow, relationships must become more automated and distant. That to serve thousands of customers, we need thousands of employees drowning in manual work.

But what if technology could flip this equation? I think we’re entering an era with AI that will make this possible.

What if AI could handle the heavy lifting, giving us back the time to actually talk to our customers and build better products? What if a billion-dollar company could deliver personal service with the same authenticity as a local business owner?

This is what has driven me to start Agency. I’m a customer in those examples above, but I’ve also been on the other side too. As an entrepreneur in tech, I’ve spent the last 20 years building the software products that I see Agency disrupting today.

Is it possible to deliver this 1:1 personalized attention at scale? I believe it is now with AI, and this is what we’re building at Agency. I refuse to accept that technology should make relationships more distant rather than more meaningful. Because every business should be able to treat every customer like their first customer.

The technology exists. The capability exists. What's been missing is the vision—and the will—to make it happen. Until now.

We've spent decades using technology to automate customers away from us. It's time to use technology to bring them closer.

Agency is building the future of how businesses engage with their customers.

Agency is the AI-first Customer Intelligence platform that helps businesses analyze, predict, and act on customer data with precision. By building the ‘customer brain,’ Agency transforms insights into action, enabling teams to deliver proactive, personalized engagement at scale. So you can treat every customer like your first—with Agency.