[REDACTED] Episode 11: Getting Humans to Stop Doing the Robot Work

This week on Redacted, we bring on our fourth guest: Ben Eckerson, founder of Agentcy, an AI-enabled consultancy helping small-to-mid-market companies close the gaps between the software they already pay for. Ben spent roughly 20 years in client services, including time at the ad agency McKinney, running Viget's Durham office, and co-founding Savas Labs, before launching Agentcy in early 2026 alongside business partner Eric out of the 24 and Up venture studio in downtown Raleigh.

Most of the episode is a live demo: Ben walks through the internal tool he built from scratch, which turns a raw meeting transcript into extracted pain points, pricing and staffing estimates, and a styled, client-ready proposal deck. From there, the conversation turns into a real debate about whether it's worth building your own AI-native tools instead of buying an off-the-shelf AI CRM, what gets lost when you strip away the UI and go headless, and how much of client work still comes down to a human reading the room.

It's a practical, behind-the-scenes look at how one small agency is actually using AI to run its business day-to-day, ending on a genuinely optimistic note about what all that automation is supposed to free people up to do.

Timestamps

00:00 Cold open

00:43 What Redacted is about

01:09 Meet guest #4: Ben Eckerson, founder of Agentcy

01:44 Housekeeping + an Offline update

02:52 Ben joins the show

03:34 20 years in the agency trenches: McKinney, Viget, Savas Labs

04:58 What Agentcy does and "humans doing the robot work"

05:29 The real problem: tool sprawl at client companies