Ballpoint went AI-first in three months. It was Josh’s third attempt.
Josh runs Ballpoint, a UK growth agency managing £60M of brand revenue with a team of 12 — and 90% of its work is now AI-first: AI does the task, a human reviews it.
He also tells me why he thinks the agency model is going to die, and what he’s building to replace it. We unpick exactly how he got there: the two-day automation sprint that failed, the January Claude Code month that didn’t, the memo and off-site that reset the culture, the team members who chose a different future, and the agent named after a Mad Men character that writes better meeting notes than any transcription tool.
What you’ll take away:
AI-native means AI does the task and you review it. Assisting is the stage before and most teams are stuck there.
The adoption playbook: one memo making the change non-optional, one off-site forcing everyone into the command line, build sessions every other Friday.
Context is the difference between a demo and a tool. Cosgrove, Ballpoint’s account-manager agent, works because it reads Notion, Slack, and meeting history — and was tuned against a scoring system until it hit 95%.
Build the data layer first. Models and tools on top swap in and out.
Junior roles as we knew them are disappearing. Josh’s bet: apprenticeship-style learning by hand before you’re allowed to delegate to AI.
For grads: build something real with Claude Code and put it in a public repo. CVs are dead.
