Ninety-two percent of Fortune 500 companies run their AI through the same handful of tools. So does every agency. Same models, same prompts, same outputs — and a differentiation gap that’s narrowing fast.
Anthony Romano, CEO of Ad Age Small Agency of the Year Laughlin Constable, and Stu Amos, founder of Universal Agents and creator of Interplay, have a line that stops you cold: “Your AI strategy is a subscription. It’s not a strategy.” So they built something to change that.
Efficiency is a dead end — amplification is the move
Romano draws a sharp line between two questions agencies should be asking. “Efficiency asks, how can we do the same things faster and cheaper? Amplification asks, what can we do now that we couldn’t do before?” He’s far more interested in the latter.
That distinction drove Laughlin Constable and Universal Agents to build Interplay — an intelligent operating system designed for the way agencies work. Not faster outputs. Sharper thinking, new debates, more imaginative connections. “A lot of people use the phrase amplifying talent,” Romano says. “How to manifest that and make it a reality is what an AI operating system does.”
Lego blocks for strategy — how Living Blocks changed the game
The core of Interplay is what Romano and Amos call Living Blocks — containers of intelligence that can be shared, combined, archived and reused across teams. Think Lego blocks meets distributed agents.
Here’s how it played out on a recent brief: a major beer brand wanted to become more relevant to Gen Z in the Texas market. Laughlin Constable’s Chief Strategy Officer pulled a brand DNA block, a Gen Z persona block, a Texas market dynamics block and a beer category analysis block — all created by different team members at different times — and combined them to build a strategic North Star. “That’s where the human in the loop fun happens,” Romano says. “All that is an input to our human process. That’s where the debate begins.”
Tend your AI like a bonsai garden
Amos sees the real skill of the future in something almost meditative: tending. “The skill of the future is to tend to your prompts and the processes that you share with others,” he says. Left untended, even the best models hallucinate and rot. The agency that builds a culture of continuous tending — collectively shaping and refining its agentic brain — creates IP that no subscription can replicate.
The rebels will always beat the Empire
Publicis is dropping $12 billion-plus on proprietary AI. The 25-to-150-person indie can’t match that. But Amos points to the numbers: seven of Ad Age’s top 10 agencies are independents. “The technology is accessible to everyone,” he says. “The key is harnessing it in the right way — train your agentic brain in your brand DNA, your processes, your philosophy. Then you will compound your unique agentic IP that no one else can offer.”
Stop giving away your skills for free
Asked for one thing every agency should stop doing with AI immediately, Amos doesn’t hesitate: “Stop giving away your skills for free.” Romano goes a different direction — and a counter one: “Stop thinking AI will replace your junior staff. Our obligation as leaders is to focus on how to make them better, how to amplify, how to invest in them, not divest them.”
The message from both: independence isn’t a limitation. It’s an amplifier — if you build the intelligence to prove it.
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