Agency (noun):
the ability to take action or to choose what action to take.
a business that provides a service to other people or organizations.
Last week I shared a memo with my OpenTent team about the “Agentic Era” and how we’re approaching it as a company. I thought I’d share it here too in case it is helpful to anyone thinking of writing something similar to their team.
The wordplay of agency/agents points to why this moment is so intense for me and my team right now. As an agency we are asked by our clients to do things on their behalf. Now that both we and our clients can start asking our AI agents to do things directly, our role is increasingly muddy.
In the meantime: we must remember we still have our own agency (definition #1) and can choose how we respond to this Agentic Era rather than ceding our agency to the technology and the very small number of companies who control it. Our choices must be grounded in our beliefs, our values, our purpose as a team. That’s where this memo is coming from.
I’d love your thoughts and feedback.
May 4, 2026
Teammates,
We are entering a new era of work: humans and AI agents working together. We have the privilege of living through this Intelligence Revolution and helping our clients navigate what this means for them.
An open tent is a place where humans are welcomed and connected, where we look around and see caring community. OpenTent exists to help those community builders do their work more effectively with great technology. We believe AI can be a transformative companion for leading community builders, freeing them up to spend more time face to face and making sure no relationship falls through the cracks.
But/and: to borrow a capital letter from Sara, there are a lot of Feelings here. We see big companies reacting to this moment with fear and eagerness to shed humans in pursuit of short-term profit gains. We all see how AI might do parts of our jobs but what if those are the exact parts of our job we LIKE doing with our own hands? What then? And we all feel behind, alternating between wanting to keep up and wanting everyone to take a damn breath and chill.
I get the fear and feel it myself many days of the week. Then I think: how can we OpenTentify this moment? And the answer comes: we gotta Make Work Suck Less. Instead of fear, we will react with love and a hearty eagerness to do more for our clients and improve the quality of our human jobs.
Building our AI capabilities as a company means:
Treating our team well, which means equipping each of us with helpful tools and the knowledge to navigate our individual professional futures.
Taking care of our company, which means making sure that what we sell is highly valuable and we can continue to run a healthy business for years to come.
Serving our clients well, which means we have a responsibility to stay one step ahead of them on new tech and bringing new relevant ideas to them even when they don’t know enough to ask for it.
Across all of this work, our Core Values stay the same - including Work Sustainably. We know that the large scale data center infrastructure that enables AI to run have significant environmental challenges, including the use of fresh water and electricity from the power grid. We will do our part to mitigate these challenges, including choosing more environmentally-friendly providers when available.
OpenTent was founded with the belief that the internet can be used to connect everyone and increase empathy, OR it can be used to increase inequality and replicate old hierarchies and biases. AI presents the same set of split paths: it can be used as a highly democratic tool, increasing the intelligence and digital labor available to all, OR it can be used to perpetuate the biases present in its training material and algorithms. We enter into the AI era with full consciousness of this threat and the commitment to educate ourselves and take action to bend the arc of this technology in a justice-centered progressive direction.
Here’s what we’re specifically focused on in the next few months:
Consistent team-wide learning and sharing: this will range from Hikes to Hackathons and moments in between. Sometimes it will have a specific topic and sometimes it will be open sharing/discussion - we believe we need both modes to grow and adapt as a team.
Internal tools: making sure our team is fully equipped with the best new tools that help us do our jobs. We’re already doing this, and we anticipate many more new tools in the months to come that we will learn about and bring into the tent if they are valuable for us.
Intentionally building in AI to our delivery process: at what points in our work will we delegate to AI? When will we have humans + AI in a loop together? Which processes remain human-only?
Rethinking what we can deliver to our clients, which includes:
Exploring additional services we can provide to our clients - including Advisory Services and “service as software” tools our clients can use as part of our subscriptions.
Becoming a Claude Partner. We are curious about being able to help our clients use Claude, in addition to Salesforce. This involves at least 10 of us completing a ~5 hour training on Claude and AI in general, and getting approved into the partner network.
AI Ethics learning and discussion, and taking action when we can to make sure our company values are reflected in how we use these new tools. We are screening experts who can help support this discussion for our team.
Here’s what we’re NOT doing:
Trying to swap AI for humans. When everyone has AI, it’s our humans who make the difference!
Shipping AI slop to clients or each other. The world does not need this. We will personally review and edit everything - communication and configuration - before it goes out the door.
Abandoning our values / vision / mission in a frenzy. We’re here to make a positive impact and if we lose sight of that in pursuit of efficiency, we have lost the thread.
For me as a founder, this moment is full of both deep anxiety and deep joy, often at the exact same time. I pressure myself to figure it all out on behalf of my team but the truth is I am often unsure what to do - and I can’t/shouldn’t try to come up with answers by myself. I need help! So please keep sharing your feedback and ideas. Please share your findings and ponderings in our #ai-learning channel so we can learn from each other. This writing is meant to clarify where OpenTent places the bumpers on this bowling lane - but rolling the ball in the right direction is a group effort.
Sam
Also! I have started what I’m going to treat as a “living” doc where I summarize my current best guesses as to where our field is headed. It’s living because I will keep updating it as we all learn more. I’d love your reactions and feedback on it - does this feel accurate to you based on what you are learning? What else are you thinking about that we should include here? Fair warning that the doc brings up a TON of feasibility questions but set those aside for now - we will figure them out when the time comes. First we try to wrap our heads around Where the Heck Are We Going.1
In-person photo just for fun. At the Small Giants Summit in Detroit last month with Hillary, Sara, and Thomas.
1 If you’d like to read that linked vision doc let me know, I’m not sharing it widely but can give you direct access.