AI is shifting from chatbots that give answers, to agents that perform tasks, to agencies that achieve goals.
An agency takes responsibility for achieving a goal and delivers the result end to end. An advertising agency is measured on spend and ROAS. A third-party logistics (3PL) agency on volume, speed, and recovery value. A research agency on whether the voice of the customer (VOC) turns into insight a team can act on. These are goals, not tasks, and exactly the kind of work agents, which require constant supervision and prompting, were not able to deliver.
Seel sits on the far side of this shift, and we got there in an unusual way. We are not a software company that sells tools to help companies deliver services. We are the service business. For thousands of brands and tens of millions of shoppers, we run the messiest parts of commerce ourselves: returns, refunds, resale, support. We are measured on whether the outcome actually happened, not on whether a dashboard looked good.
What building this taught us is that some experiences can't be bought with headcount alone. The best teams in the world deliver wonderful service, but no team alone can settle a refund the instant a shopper reports a shattered item, resolve an address change in five minutes before the package moves, or hold the same standard across millions of interactions at once. These can’t be brute forced. They need a different kind of infrastructure. So we built AI-enhanced agencies to run our own operation, and the result is service that is both excellent and at scale. We've run them in production for nearly a year, for our own business and our own data, achieving CSAT scores 12% above industry benchmarks, and now we're opening that same capability up.
Here is why that matters. Every brand and every marketplace already runs on a deep layer of outsourced agencies. They hire advertising agencies to manage their ad spend, PR agencies to earn organic attention, research agencies to understand the voice of their customers, third-party logistics agencies to handle returns and liquidation, and local counsel in every market they operate in to stay compliant with local law. The list goes on. Each one has a distinct goal that a brand pays it to own, and expects it to achieve. Taken together, brands and marketplaces spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on these agencies.
This is why we are committed to building super agencies for brands. Every brand already knows how to work with an agency. We don't sell SaaS tools or agents that need prompting and supervision; we deliver the end service that’s being asked for, the way an agency does. The first of these agencies are coming online now, with more arriving over the coming weeks, each built on the same infrastructure we ran our own business on. Our goal is simple: to be the best damn agency a brand can hire.
