By: Matt PraterOuterBox built its name in digital marketing. That’s still true today. But we’ve always focused on meeting businesses where they are and helping them grow. Part of that is to evolve with technology and market trends. In conversations with our clients, we found AI was solving marketing problems well through agents and chatbots, but much more was impeding growth. We realized those same marketing capabilities and AI experts on our team could also solve other problems.
It became the report someone on the team updated by hand every week. The system that didn’t talk to the other system. The software license nobody had checked in months. None of that was marketing, but it ate away at time that could be spent growing the business.
We Made Ourselves the Test Case
Take the monthly performance report, the document that tells a client the results of their marketing strategies, including campaigns, and what comes next. Putting this together was an entirely manual process: pulling data from every platform, building the deck, and writing the analysis story by hand. We turned it into a workflow where an agent assembles data from all sources and creates a foundation for analysis in minutes. The real work of analysis, strategy, and talking these through with a client can get more dedicated time.
The system built is called OBxOS. It runs on three connected layers:
- Layer 1: holds our data in a single place instead of scattered across platforms
- Layer 2: turns our own team’s workflows into agents instead of generic prompts
- Layer 3: moves finished work through review and out the door without anyone chasing a handoff
Using our own agency as the test case meant we found out what worked in terms of workflow AI solutions. “Anyone can buy the model,” said Matt Prater, EVP of Innovation at OuterBox. “What we own is the judgment about how to use it.”
At that point, it only made sense to offer what we’d built to our clients.
Custom Is Where It Starts
Most companies have already put someone in charge of figuring out AI. What that looks like from company to company varies widely, from leadership positions and teams to a volunteer researching different platforms. Having a plan is key.
“Giving everyone access to Claude or ChatGPT doesn’t solve the problem,” Prater said. “There needs to be a framework: how people get trained, how the work stays unified across the company, and real clarity on which problems you’re actually trying to solve.”
We asked ourselves a version of that same question: which workflow was costing us the most time, and where were the errors actually showing up? The model came after that question.
“Our approach starts with understanding the business first,” Prater said. “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves by picking a model or locking into a solution before we understand the specific challenge.”
That’s the whole premise behind OBxFrontier: not an off-the-shelf AI platform with a client’s logo added, but a custom AI development solution built around whatever is slowing a business down.
The Offering: What It Looks Like Built for Someone Else
In practice, that approach looks different depending on what’s slowing a company down.
“We had a client trying to analyze years of data pulled off an old server, work that would have taken their team weeks,” said Josh Blankenship, VP of Business Development at OuterBox. “Once we integrated their systems, they did it with a single prompt in an afternoon.”
A case study from a steel manufacturer is a good example of what that looks like end-to-end. Their sales and operations team was splitting the day across a CRM, an accounting system, email, and spreadsheets, with no single place to ask a question across any of it. Instead of adding another tool to that pile, we built an AI layer into the systems they already had, with agents trained on the specific questions their own teams ask. Now a question that used to mean checking multiple systems and asking around gets answered on the spot, correctly.
“AI can touch every department: legal, accounting, sales, marketing, operations,” Blankenship added. “The mistake is putting it in a box before you even start.”
The same pattern shows up elsewhere in:
- Proposals and technical assessments that used to eat a full day now drafted in minutes
- Inventory math that used to run off last week’s numbers, now running off today’s
- A customer-facing assistant that finally answers from what a company actually publishes instead of guessing.
Different business, different bottleneck, same starting point.
Hear How It Works, Straight From the Team Building It.
OBxFrontier provides custom AI integrations built around your business.
A New Frontier
We’re still a marketing agency, and that won’t change. But growing a client’s business has never stopped at the marketing department, and our internal AI department has made it easier to act. As a company, investing in this team lets us commit to keeping up with the technology and growing client projects as needed.
“You can buy a model this afternoon,” Prater said. “A system like this is something you build, and keep building.”
A workflow bottleneck in operations or sales can hold a business back just as much as a weak campaign can, and the same disciplined approach that started as an internal fix is now available for those problems too.
That’s the Frontier in the name: a place our own work led us to and a way to fix whatever is slowing our clients’ businesses down.
