3am. Cold sweat. Heart pounding.
I sat up in bed with a single thought: We're going to miss it.
Generative AI wasn't coming. It was here. And we were still thinking like a traditional consultancy. I'd spent ten years building something I was proud of, and suddenly I could see how fast it could become irrelevant.
That night, I started writing. Not a strategy document. A reckoning. With where we'd been, who we'd become, and what we had to do next.
The Dream
But to understand why that 3am panic mattered, you need to know where it all started.
"We love consulting. We love creating. We love helping clients win."
Get Shit Done. Think. Inspire. Enable. Craft. Learn. Adapt. Care.
In 2015, I started Kablamo with a single client, Origin Energy, and a belief that felt almost naive: boutique studios could compete with the giants if they actually gave a shit.
Not a startup chasing funding. A services business from day one. Real clients, real problems, real revenue. The model was simple: find brilliant people, give them interesting problems, stay flat so we could move fast.
In 2017, Angus Dorney joined as co-CEO. Suddenly I had a partner who challenged everything I thought I knew. We built something together that neither of us could have built alone.
Over a decade, "Get Shit Done" evolved into something deeper. We crystallised it into three words that captured who we'd become:
Build things that matter
Care deeply about the humans
Think rigorously, execute precisely
We built Firestory for emergency services. CoDA for media archives. Speech AI tools that changed children's lives. Every product had purpose. Every client relationship was built on trust.
Ten years of connecting data to consumers in powerful ways. Enterprises, B2B, B2C. That was our throughline. That was what we were good at.
And then the world changed.
The Reckoning
Back to that night in December 2024.
I started writing what I really believed about where AI was taking us. Not the sanitised version for investor decks. The truth. When I shared it with our leadership team, it wasn't popular. But I cared too much about these people to pretend.
Traditional software is dying. In ten years, businesses won't buy software. They'll describe what they need, and AI will generate it.
The 100x engineer becomes the norm. One person with AI will do what teams do today. Middle-tier knowledge work disappears.
The winners won't own infrastructure. They'll own intelligence. AI agents will decide which businesses matter.
I set a target that felt impossible: Kablamo needs to become a brand name in AI.
Not "doing AI projects." Not "AI-enhanced consulting." Actually known for it. First call when enterprises need to transform. A seat at the table with Google, AWS, Microsoft.
The window was 18 to 24 months. Miss it, and we become another consultancy that used to matter.
This wasn't a pivot. It was recognising that what we'd always done, connecting data to consumers, was exactly what the AI era needed. We just had to do it bigger, faster, and with technology that didn't exist when we started.
That was December 2024. Twelve months ago.
What Actually Happened
It's just before Christmas. I'm writing this with a feeling I didn't expect: delight.
Twelve months ago, "become a brand name in AI" felt like a stretch goal. The kind of thing you say to rally the troops, knowing the odds are against you. We were a consultancy that happened to be good with data. Now?
A new partnership with Google Cloud that's exceeding every expectation
Re-engagement with AWS at a level we've never had before
Media and enterprise clients lining up for agentic AI and complex content workflows
Our own IP being distributed by cloud vendors
A year ago, this felt impossible. Now it's happening.
And here's what I realised:
We didn't pivot. We evolved.
At its simplest, what we've always done is connect data to consumers in powerful ways. Enterprise, B2B, B2C. That was the throughline from day one.
That data journey has now become the GenAI story. The thing we were always good at is suddenly the thing everyone needs.
The Bet Paid Off
Ten years ago, I wrote a manifesto about boutique studios that give a shit. About finding brilliant people and giving them interesting problems. About staying flat so we could move fast.
All of that is still true. But now we're not just building great products for clients. We're building the tools that will define how businesses operate in the AI era.
The 3am panic was real. So is the delight.
We build products that matter, care deeply about the humans involved, and think rigorously about every decision. That's who we were. That's who we are. That's who we'll be.
Allan James, Founder & CEO
December 2025