Cold outreach has never been part of how Wondersauce gets clients. The New York agency is 15 years old, 100 people, built one referral at a time. So when co-founder and CEO John Sampogna talks about how agencies are spending their hours on AI, he comes at it from a different angle.
“The most important AI decision your agency will make isn’t where to use it. It’s where not to.”
What he won’t build
His phrase for the trap is “doing things with AI that you didn’t do without AI.” Take the AI outbound tool any agency could throw together in an afternoon and use to fire off 6,000 emails. Wondersauce hasn’t done outbound in 15 years. Sampogna isn’t about to start. The micro-tools agencies are building to shave five minutes off small tasks fall into the same bucket. Rounding errors, he calls them. Every hour another agency burns building one, he argues, is rope handed to a competitor.
Rebuilding the agency-client model from zero
Wondersauce sells two things: digital transformation work, where the agency rebuilds clients’ infrastructure, products and websites; and revenue acceleration through paid, earned, content and influence. The question Sampogna keeps putting to himself and his team about both is harsh.
“How does AI ruin both of those things, and how do I use it to rebuild it from the ground up?”
He pictures the rebuild as a circle running from kickoff to deployment. As the team figures out where AI belongs at each stage, that part of the circle gets filled in. The day the whole thing is one color, the new way of working is set.
Two circles are in motion now. One for digital products, one for revenue acceleration. The work is unglamorous: whether Figma is still the right design tool, how files should be annotated so Claude Code can read them, where the back end fails when more of the build is automated. Sampogna’s team is working through those one at a time.
Two months instead of six
The rebuild changes the shape of working with clients. A digital product Wondersauce used to deliver in six months can now be done in two. The new model goes like this: a kickoff. Two weeks later, the team comes back with a product requirement document, three creative directions and a competitive read. A week after that, a fully built, fully designed app. Two weeks of testing — internal, automated, with recruited users. Then a final session to plan the next round.
“Imagine the idea that every single time the agency and the client come together, it’s high-value moments,” Sampogna said.
The hour-long status calls go away. So do 18 rounds of creative revisions. What’s left is a smaller number of working sessions, each one carrying weight, with room for the part of the job that’s hard to outsource to a model.
On authority and bad vibes
There’s another agency move Sampogna isn’t sold on. The repositioning play, where every shop claims authority on creative, on tech, on trends, doesn’t add up to him. If everyone is the authority on something, the word stops meaning anything.
He has the same problem with how agencies are talking to CMOs about AI. Walking into the meeting and justifying a stack of internal tooling work strikes him as the wrong instinct — not a lie, but a posture.
“It’s not a lie. It’s more like, why does everything have to be defensive? It’s a bad vibe on both sides — agency coming in trying to justify a bunch of stuff. Prove your value. Keep it simple.”
Coming from an agency that hasn’t sent a cold email in 15 years, the advice carries some weight.
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