Our work has continuously focused on what comes next.
For decades, we’ve helped organizations find new growth, go further with new technology, and work in new ways. Doing it directly alongside the leaders and teams who carry the change forward.
We’ve always bet on human agency. AI has only made that bet more consequential.
With clients: Since the first frontier models arrived, we’ve applied that belief to critical transformation initiatives, learning what it takes for teams to use AI to reach outcomes that were not possible before.
Inside our own company: We built Agency the same way, with small, senior teams working directly with clients in rapid learning loops, and AI expanding what we can do.
The Partners behind Agency
Neena Paul, Partner
Neena believes human energy, when unleashed, can accomplish anything and has spent more than 25 years proving it, helping organizations innovate, shape future-ready strategy and turn bold ambition into action. Previously U.S. CEO, Board Member and Chief Innovation Officer at ?What If! Innovation, she helped lead the company’s acquisition and integration into Accenture, her own organization’s most defining transformation. As Managing Director at Accenture, she advised Fortune 500 leadership across technology, healthcare, and financial services on growth strategy, digital transformation and operating model redesign. As AI began reshaping how organizations work, Neena brought the same human-first approach she’s applied to every prior wave of transformation: starting by asking the big questions, then focusing on how people, collaborating with technology, get there. As a board member at ustwo, she helps advise on a new dynamic growth strategy with AI as a core pillar, designing and recruiting the company’s first AI Non-Executive Director; new governance for a new kind of risk. With Fishs Eddy, she’s applying the same discipline to future-ready the organization as it scales. Neena believes transformation isn’t a project organizations finish, it’s a muscle they build. The organizations that win won’t be the ones who move fastest on AI, they’ll be the ones who energize their people to lean into their superpowers and collaborate with AI to solve problems once thought unsolvable. Naturally, Agency followed.
Julian Mancia, Partner
Julian has spent more than a decade helping organizations adapt to change by defining breakthrough strategic directions, building new products and services, and equipping teams to be future-ready. As Managing Director and Futures Practice Lead at ?What If! Innovation (acquired by Accenture in 2019), Julian worked with clients in nearly every industry, including Disney, Google, FedEx, AB InBev, CHANEL, and JetBlue. His work has always sought to make traditional corporate strategy more transformative, by integrating commercial strategy, strategic foresight, product experimentation, and organizational design. As AI began to scale, Julian has applied the same discipline he brings to any transformational technology: focus on the value, not the technology. He has advised a Fortune 50 CTO by first defining the future value they would provide customers, and then investing in AI to enable that value. He has steered a venture capital firm away from companies with only flashy tools, and toward those who offer new value with AI’s lower constraints. And he teaches his BBA undergraduate students at Parsons School of Design to build their critical thinking skills to unlock better collaboration with AI. Julian has developed three strong convictions. That the future of the organization is one in which people explore questions about the future while AI runs the operation of the present. That the uniquely human agencies are what equip people to do it. And that the value of consulting is to create the conditions for clients to develop and apply a new understanding. Naturally, Agency followed.
Fred Sham, Partner
Fred has spent over a decade helping leaders turn ideas into businesses, products, and better ways of working. Previously, as a Director at ?What If! Innovation, part of Accenture, he led the Healthcare and Public Service practice, helping Kaiser Permanente, CVS Health, and Pfizer bring new products and services to market, and United Way and the YMCA better serve their communities. He’s also worked with Vanguard, PepsiCo, and Mondelez, and serves on the board of Feed the Children. When frontier AI models arrived, Fred saw a chance for people to do things they’d once thought impossible. But that takes more than using AI to work faster. It takes the skills, confidence, and freedom to work differently. He’s helping a financial services company build a product that uses AI agents to run capital markets operations, while reshaping its teams so people and agents build and ship together. With a global manufacturer, he’s helping make formulation more predictive, giving scientists more room to experiment and apply their judgment. At home in Brooklyn, he’s learning to build a video game and a tool to make the most of his credit card points. He started with no technical training, and his list of things he wants to try keeps growing. Fred believes helping a business grow means expanding what its people can do. His work is about building both the next product or strategy and the team capable of taking it further. Naturally, Agency followed.
Work with Agency.
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