Consultancies tell you how to drive.
Agencies take your keys.
We call shotgun.

We're an Actancy. You keep the wheel — we take the passenger seat, bringing the map and the AI expertise, until your team can drive completely on their own.

No handovers, no black boxes. We work inside your live data and your actual workflows, right next to your people — not instead of them.

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Not a consultancy. Not an agency.
An Actancy.

Consultancies tell you what to do. Agencies do it for you. An Actancy does it with you — until you can do it yourself.

You cannot outsource your AI transformation and expect your team to learn new reflexes. That's the quiet flaw in every "done for you" pitch: the day the agency leaves, the capability leaves with it.

Much of the industry wants to sell you a proprietary AI Ferrari and charge you for track-level performance 24/7 — expensive overkill when some tasks are the equivalent of the weekly grocery run. We don't believe in over-engineering your stack, and we definitely don't believe in automating your soul.

So we refuse to take over your dashboard. We take the passenger seat — the map, the AI expertise, the eye on the live traffic — while your talent stays behind the wheel, working on your real data and your real workflows until the reflexes are theirs.

Why? To protect the craft. When AI absorbs the busywork, your team gets its bandwidth back.

The machines handle the volume. Your people get back to what actually builds the brand: judgment, quality, and taste.

The market doesn't need another agency.
It needs an Actancy.

You don't learn to handle a high-performance car in rush-hour traffic by sitting in the back seat while an agency drives. You learn by doing — with someone beside you who knows the road.

That's the seat we take. We sit right next to you, map the live AI traffic, and tell you exactly which workflows to skip so you can focus on the road that matters.

We build internal muscle memory, not dependency. When the engagement ends, the skill stays in your building — because your hands never left the wheel.

And "we call shotgun" means one more thing: we go first. We drive these tools every day in our own shop, before we ever navigate yours.

The rules of the road. Five things that don't move.

  • The human stays behind the wheel.

    AI is the accelerator, but the person makes the call. There is always a human "yes" or "no" before anything ships.

  • The front door is the business problem.

    Every engagement starts with your business reality and your point of view. Never with a tech demo, and never with "implementation."

  • No content factory.

    No assets-at-scale, no infinite volume plays. We are the exact opposite of outsourcing everything to the machine.

  • We don't drive off when the software lands.

    Agencies hand over a login and walk away. An Actancy stays in the passenger seat and builds the workflow with you, until your team can drive it alone.

  • A definition of done on everything.

    Fixed scope, a real deliverable, a clear end. No endless retainers, and no scope bloat motivated by increasing billable hours.

One route. Five legs. Your team drives every one of them.

flagship

AI Position & Charter

Your company's stance on AI, written down. What you will and won't do, and the rules that govern it. This is the front door, and everything else hangs off it. We turn a vague worry about AI into a clear position your whole company can stand behind.

The foundational rules. If you don't have an AI policy yet, we start here. The charter is the document that decides what your company says yes and no to from this point on.

the starting point

AI Diagnosis

We ride along through a week of your real work, map where AI actually helps and where it's just traffic, then hand back the route. Part of the fee credits toward the next leg.

with the network

Campaign Production

Campaigns produced with The Non-Conformist Network. One master idea versioned across markets, or fast reactive work inside lanes agreed in advance. A human signs off before anything ships.

people

Team Enablement

Upskilling sessions, working sessions and coaching for leadership — so your people learn by driving, not by watching demos.

build

Workflow Build & Run

We build the few workflows worth building, then keep them running until your team drives them alone. Few, on purpose.

Who's in the passenger seat? Meera and Toni.

An Actancy needs a specific collision of skills: the rigour to protect a global brand, and the operational grit to rewire how it works. That's why we built We Call Shotgun.

Meera Sanghvi

Narrative & brand

Meera

"You cannot mandate AI adoption. You have to market it to your own company."

Meera brings 15+ years of brand and communications rigor from the Google Creative Lab, YouTube EMEA, and Publicis. As Regional Business Director at Monks, she led business-critical campaigns for Netflix, Decathlon, and Bacardi, including AI marketing solutions, working directly with the C-suite.

At We Call Shotgun, she's the strategic filter. As you automate the busywork, she keeps your internal AI strategy fiercely aligned with your brand culture, inside and out, turning executive mandates into clear, human narratives that give teams the confidence to actually change how they work.

Meera on LinkedIn ›
Toni Dos Santos

AI & build

Toni

"We don't demo the Ferrari. We get in the passenger seat and teach your teams how to drive."

Toni has sat in your seat. With a background spanning corporate banking, product management, and founding his own SaaS company, he understands how work actually operates. He also literally wrote the book on this: Teach Them to Drive.

He's enabled entire departments at L'Oréal, Essilor, ZELIQ, and IGN by approaching AI through a human-first lens rather than a technical one. At We Call Shotgun, he ruthlessly edits your workflows, finds the high-impact use cases, and turns complex AI concepts into actionable systems, so your teams don't just get generic tool demos, but role-specific habits that reclaim hours of their week.

Toni on LinkedIn ›

We don't ride alone.
We're part of The Non-Conformist Network.

A coalition of independent shops that share a single way of working: cut the bloat, protect the craft, and only put experts in the room. Advertising, social, media, branding — and us riding the AI side. When you hire one of us, you get seamless access to the rest. It's how we deliver the massive range your brand needs, without the rigid borders and blind spots of a traditional agency.

The advertising agency. Independent since 2014, a Cannes Gold Lion on the shelf, offices from Paris to Los Angeles.

Visit site ›

The social media agency. Less daily posting, more getting brands into the conversation people actually have.

Visit site ›

The branding agency. Non-conformist to the bone — the full story drops soon.

Visit site ›

The media agency. Built around attention, and against media plans that all look the same.

Visit site ›

The AI Actancy. You're looking at it.

That's us ›

Straight answers.

What exactly is an Actancy?
Not a consultancy — they tell you how to drive. Not an agency — they take your keys and drive for you. An Actancy takes the passenger seat: the map and the AI expertise are ours, the wheel stays yours, and the engagement ends when your team can drive alone.
We already bought enterprise AI licenses and nobody uses them. Why spend more?
Unused AI licenses are expensive twice over: they drag on productivity now, and your competitors are laying the groundwork to pull ahead later. We aren't here to sell you more tech. We're here to rescue the investment you've already made. We find exactly why your team is stalled, rewire their daily workflows, and turn money down the drain into actual hours saved.
My team is drowning right now. How do they have time to learn AI?
That's exactly why the passenger seat exists. No bloated, theoretical "future of work" seminars. We sit next to your team, look at the tasks they hate most on a Thursday afternoon, and show them how to automate them. The goal isn't to add to their plate. It's to give them back the bandwidth to spend on work that actually moves the business.
Are you going to lock us into a retainer?
No. The traditional agency model relies on making you permanently dependent on their people. An Actancy is built on the opposite: we do it with you until your team can do it without us. Dependency is the agency model, not ours. Fixed scope, real deliverables, a clear end. Most engagements land between €6k and €45k.
We're in. Where do we actually start?
Not with a tech demo. We start with a 20-minute Diagnosis. We look at your current setup, map where AI helps your specific workflows and where it's just traffic, and hand back the route.

You take the wheel.
We call shotgun.

Start with the diagnosis. We'll map where AI actually helps you, hand you the route, and ride beside your team until they don't need us.

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