---
title: "Stop Asking for Permission: Why the Agentic Wild West Belongs to Marketers Who Just Build"
id: "18285"
type: "podcast"
slug: "stop-asking-for-permission-why-the-agentic-wild-west-belongs-to-marketers-who-just-build"
published_at: "2026-07-21T03:03:00+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-06-29T16:07:50+00:00"
url: "https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/stop-asking-for-permission-why-the-agentic-wild-west-belongs-to-marketers-who-just-build/"
markdown_url: "https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/stop-asking-for-permission-why-the-agentic-wild-west-belongs-to-marketers-who-just-build.md"
excerpt: "Shane Colella, an Emmy-winning cinematographer turned marketing director at automation firm Westfalia Technologies, makes the case that the agentic era has no historical analog — and that the marketers who win won’t wait for permission to find out. He walks..."
---

#### Episode 400

**July 21, 2026**

Shane Colella, an Emmy-winning cinematographer turned marketing director at automation firm Westfalia Technologies, makes the case that the agentic era has no historical analog — and that the marketers who win won’t wait for permission to find out. He walks through the agentic infrastructure he’s actually building, from research dashboards to a Claude-and-n8n pipeline that erases hours of list-building, and argues the real bottleneck isn’t technology but getting everyone else on board. Along the way he reframes the fear of lost jobs and vanishing entry-level roles as a perception problem, and lands on a provocation: this moment belongs to disciplined creatives with the clearest vision.

##### *Stop Asking for Permission: Why the Agentic Wild West Belongs to Marketers Who Just Build* Transcript:

**Jeff White:** Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

**Carman Pirie:** Look, I am doing well, and I want our listeners to know that if they hear massive amounts of construction behind my voice, it’s, they’re just getting a flavor of the Halifax construction skyline these days as, as is happening to, uh, the building that we’re currently recording in. Now, maybe you’ll never hear it, and you’ll be like, “Wow, that was a really sharp, uh, episode audio. It was great.”

**Jeff White:** Everything was fine.

**Carman Pirie:** But, but we, you just don’t know because it’s getting, uh… Outside these headphones, it’s something else out there.

**Jeff White:** Yeah, it is. It’s been, it’s been a couple of months.

**Carman Pirie:** But it is good to be recording with you. I really am looking forward to today’s show. Um, absolu- you know, I don’t know that we could be recording on a topic that is more near and dear to my area of focus over the last while.

**Jeff White:** For some extremely exciting times

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah. Or maybe what it means is just because I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, and our guest has, and we’re just gonna bitch and argue like, you know, against each other for 30 minutes. That may, maybe make an entertaining show regardless. So let’s do it.

**Jeff White:** Absolutely. So let’s dive in. So joining us today is Shane Colella. Shane is the marketing director at Westfalia Technologies. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Shane.

**Shane Colella:** How you doing, Jeff? Uh, glad to be here. How you doing, Carman?

**Carman Pirie:** All as well. Good to have you on the show, Shane. Thanks for joining us.

**Shane Colella:** Likewise. I know it’s been a, it’s been a minute since, uh, we’ve been trying to align, but, uh, yeah, definitely looking forward to it.

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, we, we had to get this in the hopper sooner rather than later or else there’d be too many more models released or something, and then it was e-everything that we th- we’re thinking about would be completely outdated.

**Shane Colella:** Yeah, we might be in a post-Transformer world by the time we ended up talking.

**Jeff White:** Who knows?

**Carman Pirie:** Exactly. Shane, look, let’s let’s understand first, Westphalia Technologies, what do y’all do there? Can you maybe let our listeners know what the firm does?

**Shane Colella:** Westfalia Technologies is an automation company. Uh, we provide automation solutions for warehousing and distribution centers. We also do automated parking and automated EV charging. Uh, basically putting storage retrieval machines in warehouse solutions, or excuse me, warehouse operations to, uh, make more efficient the, uh, the operation.

**Carman Pirie:** Pretty cool. How’d you end up there?

**Shane Colella:** Well, I had a production company for about 15 years as a director, DP, editor, colorist, um, rather small production company, three or four people. And, uh, I had a bunch of corporate clients, a handful of which were in the automation and logistics industry. And I had actually been working, Westfalia was one of my clients for some time, and, uh, they basically the, the older marketing director, uh, there before me basically said, “Hey, we got a lot of stuff coming up. I’d love to have you on staff.” And I said, “You know, I’ve got a great gig going here. I work from my house. It’s fully remote. I have a bunch of clients. Everybody’s happy. I don’t think you can afford me.” And they said, “You know what? Make us an offer.” And, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

And, uh, here we are a couple of years later, and I’m still working remote, and I still get to shoot, I still get to direct, and, uh, kind of all wrapped into robots and automation, which is my other favorite love as well. So I, I cannot complain. And that’s where I am.

**Jeff White:** That’s pretty fun. I mean, uh, a- and honestly, I think you’re burying the lede a little bit. If you go to your LinkedIn bio, it talks about how you’re an Emmy award-winning cinematographer as well. There’s a level of quality that we’re talking about here that you’re bringing to video.

And honestly, when we first met to chat, I figured that was where we were going to go with the conversation. But I think we’re gonna head down a slightly different path.

**Shane Colella:** It’s been a, a long and winding road for sure, and, uh, yeah. That’s part of the interest, you know, bringing the quality to an industry that typically doesn’t have that kind of storytelling and quality really is super exciting, and it helps our mid-size company compete with the multi-billion dollar competitors, that really have to spend a lot of money to make, uh, their media look anything like ours that we now have in-house.

So that’s kinda cool.

**Carman Pirie:** It is very cool. Now everybody wants to talk about that, and we’re gonna completely pivot and talk about agentic and what’s going on. I find it fascinating too, because the video background obviously and thrust of your work, um, but it’s with an automation company, which is probably a little bit more, uh, you know, most people would see as a bit more in alignment with, uh, some agentic principles.

But so when we were chatting about this earlier, I don’t wanna put too words, many words in your mouth, Shane, but you were like: Look, I’m all in on where agentic is going. I couldn’t be more doubled down on this. And, the whiners that are complaining about AI taking jobs can go pound sand, uh, because they c- either get with religion or get, or they’ll be left in the dust.

But this is where it’s going, and you were pretty damn excited about it. Anything changed since that last chat?

**Shane Colella:** No, it’s only getting more exciting. Um, actually, you know, that was about a month ago, I wanna say, at this point almost. And, never before have we seen this kind of, uh, movement. This pace of change is, is really — it’s not slowing down. Agents, models, platforms, you know, it’s the stuff that just in the last month — we talked about Fable a minute ago.

Um, it’s, uh, the pace of change is what’s so exciting. Um, I don’t think we’ve ever experienced anyone alive right now experience the kind of tool and, uh, technological change that I would liken it to something like the Wild West or, or the Gold Rush, where, you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 50 company or a 14-year-old in a basement with an idea, we have access to this frontier of tools that is the same.

And, um, that to me is the most exciting part at the, at the very high level of agentic opportunity and LLMs and the transformer and, you know, wrapped into other neural nets and machine learning and what that means for everything from protein development to material discovery to, uh, marketing automation.

So the W- the Wild West is what excites me the most because no one’s ever experienced this, and we have no, we have no roadmap for this. This is — There’s no historical analog at all. Super cool.

**Jeff White:** We all have lived through the, uh, the internet becoming a thing and social media becoming a thing, and all of those seemed huge at the time. Huge. I mean, they, they were. But this is bigger, and it- it’s different in a way that I think a lot of marketers don’t yet grasp. When did you begin to see that this was going to be the future that you wanted to kind of hitch yourself to?

**Shane Colella:** I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I, I also remember all of those advances and thinking, “Holy crap, the internet.” Having all that information, the dawn of the information age and how dramatic that was, and it seems minuscule compared to the precipice we are standing upon right now. Um, you know, I, I use a, a metaphor.

We talk about, you know, an elephant in a room. This is a planet. This is Saturn sitting right next to us, and our human brains really can’t we can’t even wrap our head around the, the conceptual container. This is a, a completely new framework. What we thought we knew, um, we’re now seeing this entirely new world.

And, so I guess the way that started exciting me is being a director, being a sailor, being a team leader, if you will, for quite some time, I’ve always had in the back of my head that concept where I wish I could just clone myself. And I love working with teams, human teams. I love the way, you human personalities excite new creative avenues and, you know, that back and forth is awesome.

But there’s always difficulty and friction that exists when a personality may get involved or an emotion or, uh, someone being tired. You know, they woke up on the wrong side of the bed, or they’re — We’re, we’re an hour past lunch, and then all of a sudden, you know, things change. And hiring and firing and working with so many people, I’m a little bit ruthless when it comes to, uh, at least my directorial background.

It was… i’d give a benefit of the doubt a little bit, but if you made the same mistake twice or three times, God forbid, um, three times you never got there. If you made the same mistake twice, you were off the set. I d- I didn’t wanna work with you ever again. I might be your friend, but no time for that.

And so it was the constant, “Oh, I wish I could just clone myself,” have this hive mind of, of people. And, and I, I wrote a little short story long ago that was, uh, basically, I termed these things amps. They were amplifications of self. And, this was a dream I had and, and basically, they were cyborgs.

They were robots that we’d walk around in, in, in a community and however rich you were or however, you know, successful you may have become, you may have one or two amps. You may have 200. You may be an Elon Musk. You may have, 10,000 Optimus robots behind you. But they were all part of your same network, part of that same mind.

I didn’t even have to explain my concepts to you. You were already there moving that light, or you were already there making that social post. So that dream has now quite literally Just appeared in front of me. And a- amps are just that. They’re extensions of what you do, your work, your capabilities multiplied.

And now this is not science fiction. This is, you can have a hive mind. This has never been more true, uh, u- until today, and it’s only getting bigger, faster, better, um, you know, in, in that post-transformer world when we have this memory. And a lot of agents are wrapping into this as well, the way cowork and the way skills are working.

They’re learning you and your mind better and better. And, uh, you know, being a director of those kinds of parallel creative operations is, is awesome, and it makes me feel like a superhero. And we — Iron Man’s Jarvis, that Jarvis is — it’s almost there, and I’m watching. It’s getting closer and closer and closer.

And the coolest part is we’re getting we’re not just working differently. We’re gonna be thinking differently because Never before have we crossed this kind of road where as an adult you get to reimagine your capability. You know, like a baby learning to see, speak, uh, process the world for first time.

W- we would never get a chance to rebuild a foundational skill from scratch like that. We can do that right now with a second brain or amplifications of self, and I don’t… You can be that 14-year-old with a, a design idea for a new type of software, or you could be a marketer, you could be a writer. There’s no limit to it, and I don’t know. I am the kinda guy that needs to be, uh, continuously, um, stimulated, and there is just no end in sight. So probably a really long-winded answer to that question.

**Carman Pirie:** I thought it was interesting for our listeners to hear you talk about it, and where AI is at and how you’re thinking about it, just to — ‘cause I think it really captures a good frame for the rest of our discussion.

I I’d like to, if we could, um, if you could fill us in a bit on the… In, in the most practical terms, how are you building out that agentic infrastructure? What are you seeing at Westfalia? How are you thinking about it? How are you building that out? How is it coming to life? Can you give us a insight into that?

**Shane Colella:** So the tricky part is getting everyone else on board. There is basically a road that’s being built and it’s this kind of thing where the agentic possibility and what LLMs have unlocked over the past roughly two years is It, this is a new, it’s a new category of technology. And what’s happening is we’re on a road that’s being paved while we’re on it, and there’s a line of cars behind it, and we’re all — more people are joining this line. All the people in my company, there’s, there’s 200 and some odd people in the company, and probably four to six of us have a, a holistic grasp and not holistic in, in the full sense of the word at all.

A slightly broader grasp than most people that understand that that road, we’re all going one mile an hour on it. We’re waiting for it to be built, but everyone’s hopping on that train and saying, “Oh, wait, where’s AI? We’re — I wanna get on this road that everybody is flying down already. We hear about it all the time.”

And it’s like, n-no. Uh, pavement has to be in place and the infrastructure for security, for, for the thought process needs to be in place. So the way that’s being realized is a lot of high-level discussion to really not waste time because of how quickly the tooling is changing. You have an idea to automate something, and it might be cleaning up your email box, or it might be kicking out social media posts, and you’ll figure out a way to do that.

And then two weeks from now, that way is antiquated already, and there’s a much easier way, and now it’s just built into a, uh, an agent that’s canned for you, and it’s, uh, it’s done for you. So there’s this cart before the horse aspect to this, that education and having the bigger, higher level concept is the most important part.

So we are a completely vertigrate — vertical integrated manufacturing facility. We manufacture our parts, our cranes, our conveyors, our vision systems, our software, all of our aftermarket teams, et cetera, all of this customer service, all in-house. So the first part of this that is moving toward agentic capability is our coding team and our software department.

And we have a software solution that is proprietary to us that com-completely governs all of our automation systems, including the parking systems and the, the EV charging systems. And there’s a couple parallel paths that we’re working on, and these are knowledge bases, these are It can be a vector store or a database where we’re taking decades of support tickets and information and putting them in a repository so we can have that capability live, so we can create customer service agents to work with that on the software side.

Um, of course, from a development standpoint, our developers are no longer writing code. I’ve heard a handful of people say this many times over the last couple months. Like, if you’re a developer and you’re still writing code, I feel like you’re just — you’re years behind already. We, we don’t need to be mired in that.

So they are shipping deliverable assets and changes and updates to our software solution, uh, weekly, things that… features that took months before. So that’s one aspect of it. The other aspect is the marketing team for research, for writing, for… I just finished, uh, a V1 of an agentic process that I wrote in or assembled in n8n, where I’m using a couple different API connections connecting to ZoomInfo and then curating some searches, pulling that info out, verifying if those emails and contacts are, are legitimate or if they’re just catch-alls. Then I’m cross-referencing that with my existing customer base via Claude Cowork, and then building email lists into my email automation program and am able to now on the fly do tons of or get rid of tons of legwork that would take hours before that’s now automated and that’s one, one small scenario.

I’ve also built a couple different research agents, so I don’t have to spend the time reading all of my competitors’ newsletters or their press releases or their LinkedIn posts. I have a consolidated dashboard that I see my top-level competitors, what they’re delivering, what they’re doing, what the news is, and I’m in the process of now writing a commentary, an automated, blog offering that basically is able to stay abreast with that kind of information and add my two cents to it, add our company’s retort, if you will, or our solutions based on what our competitors are doing.

All of this stuff is not rocket science. It’s not stuff that was really complicated before. It was just super time-consuming

**Carman Pirie:** I wonder that, I think there’s a really solid kind of a glimpse into — I think folks listening will be able to… Well, frankly, they’ll be able to assess where they’re at, understanding, and then understanding where you’re at, and they’ll know in some ways how far along the path they are and you are and gives them a sense, I think, of the level of sophistication that you’re building out.

And the an awful lot of, um, I think an awful lot of organizations find themselves in a similar place where they’re, I think you said six or seven. There’s a small handful of people, a small cohort that kind of see the future already, and they don’t — It’s not fully formed necessarily, and they’re trying to convince a bunch of other people and try to bring them along.

Um, and it’s interesting to me because one of the things that, that, that’s happening, and I think you were knocking on the door of that a little bit where you were talking about, you know, the technology changing, and I, I was left wondering how much are we trying to convince people to leverage existing technology that’s already there versus how much are we focusing on building out agentic infrastructure as an example that’s LLM agnostic, that has the security protocols that we require?

You know, so ‘cause so much of this technology is in some ways the benefits are easier or at least faster to realize as an individual in some ways than to try to make it a corporate way of being and doing things.

**Shane Colella:** I totally agree, and that’s, that’s where a lot of the roadblocks happen. The bigger the company, the bigger the IT department. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, we can’t have access to this agent running around our network.” I mean, the, the comment to that is you can do this personally. You know what your job is. You know, pick the task you repeat most, write some instructions for it, and just mark down instructions or text quite literally, and start playing with the tool.

See what it can build for you. It doesn’t have to be in your business network. Just do it on the side. Stop waiting for permission. And the moment you can bring that to your manager or owner or whomever and say, “Hey, look, you know,I spend 30 minutes a week doing this. Now I spend six seconds doing this a week.”

And start doing the math. There’s no… protect a little bit of time in your calendar to evaluate what automation could do in your role weekly, non-negotiable, and, and treat it like any other skill investment, whether it’s just any other investment, and that’s what this is. And if you can clarify that vision, it’s really not a hard sell.

Now, I’m preaching to the choir because my company is an automation company, so I’m a little further the reception on my higher-ups’ end is, is considerably different. But,

**Jeff White:** Bit predisposed.

**Shane Colella:** Yeah, I mean, time is time, money is money at the end of the day, though. And if you find yourself repeating something this is the time.

I feel like the dreamers, the, the people… this moment really belongs to the creatives because we always had issues, whether it was funding, whether it was the technical limitations of writing an application or working on software or, “Oh, you need your copywriter ‘cause you weren’t the best writer,” or now it’s the vision, the dreamer, those with the sharpest focus.

A, a disciplined creative can quite literally do so much. So the biggest thing is just, don’t ask for permission. Don’t wait. Just do it. And, carpe diem.

**Jeff White:** I, I do wonder, you know, and I think there’s, there’s this balance between, depending on who you talk to when you’re thinking about the possibilities here, there’s this balance between fear and excitement. Obviously the three of us are all extremely excited about this. We see the way that this is going, but there’s still a lot of people who are concerned that, you know, th- this is not going to make them more productive, it’s meant to replace them.

And I don’t necessarily think that’s true. We had a recent guest on the show, a guy named Friddy Hoegner, and he’s a recruiter and works in this, and his biggest concern about these tools is that they’re going to replace the entry-level people who will basically mean in five to 10 years we will no longer have anybody to kind of grow into roles because we’ll be replacing all the easy things to do, um, with agentic tools or AI.

How, how are you thinking about that? Are, are you at all concerned that maybe we’re going to have a massive hole in the workforce if we’re not careful?

**Shane Colella:** You know, I think this falls into that category where this is — there’s no prior model to this. And, the incompleteness of that model is a lot of the fear. We’re, we’re trying to push things into the way we’ve thought all along, and this crossroads is, w-with technology, humanity, and the pace of the advancement altogether, our brains really shouldn’t and really are having difficulty putting it into the existing model, the existing infrastructure, the entry-level position, if you will the corporate structure.

I think we’re gonna see a dramatic shift in AI-first companies that the entry-level position in a, in an antiquated ladder, if you will, that junior whatever, they don’t need to exist. A while ago the, the difference between a horizontal organization and a vertical organization. I forget when that concept came out, but I don’t know.

I was working for myself at the time, so I really didn’t care much about it. But it’s just turning it on its head and then it’s lateral, you’re enabling other employees. So just defining entry level versus senior level, I think is part of the problem. I, I think those individuals that we’re talking about specifically that sort of went to school with that older school model in place, they might be left in sort of a limbo.

But then this to me lights a fire under their ass to just the ones that can teach themselves or, or take that dream that’s been in their backseat for a while and not just, punch a time clock and enter this junior level and start learning from the senior people or want to follow that path.

Y-you can do that from your bed with a laptop if you want, and just start having discussions with a model and have discussions with all the senior people that would’ve taught those junior people across the world that have ever lived at once and recognize their deficiencies, the advantages, and it — and I maybe I’m an extreme optimist on this side e-environmental concerns notwithstanding, but I think it’s a perception difficulty to answer that question.

So I don’t think I don’t think we’re gonna have… I think there’ll be a little bit of a rocky road, back to that Wild West metaphor. Yeah, you might just get shot dead in the street. Yeah, that sucks. But you also could open a gold mine and, your family is set up for generations. And I think a lot more of the opportunity is the gold mine than getting shot in the street.

Probably a too visceral metaphor, but that’s the way I think about it.

**Jeff White:** It’s really covering the full spectrum though!

**Carman Pirie:** Yeah, it is. But I think there’s somewhere in the middle of that a segment of the people out there will f- uh, figure out a way to get rich quick, and all will be well, and their families will be successful for here on out for eternity. There’ll be a limited amount of that probably, but then as there always is.

But I like Shane’s optimism. And then, I mean, on the other hand of it, uh, Jeff, you’re asking, you know, just, what happens to these no-this notion of entry-level positions and things. And I was sitting here listening to you two chat about that and thinking, well, it seems to me like the skills that they’re going to need to learn in that entry-level role in order to be successful in the mid, senior roles or what have you, may actually be quite a bit different skills than what we imagine entry l-level skills being today.

**Shane Colella:** Completely.

**Carman Pirie:** And chances are they’re gonna be learned in different ways. Like, we think of the almost an apprenticeship st-style model now where you learn by being around other people that are doing it. But, quite candidly, that model’s been challenged for a while, particularly since the pandemic and remote work, where, it’s not as common in many sectors now to work shoulder to shoulder even as an entry-level employee, right?

**Shane Colella:** Yep. Yep

**Carman Pirie:** Of course, that’s been partially traced back to why there aren’t as many entry-level employees. People are saying that the pandemic kind of nipped that a bit because of this, this exact dynamic. But, uh, yeah, it’s just… I don’t know I’m willing to bet that it’s just the on- that the only thing for certain is change, and that it’s t- it’s going to be a — we’re going to train those entry-level people differently.

They’re going to learn different skills, and agentic will impact their learning every bit as much as it will impact their future work. Because I think the successful universities, the people that are thinking about it properly and equipping people for tomorrow, are being aggressive in terms of how they incorporate AI into education.

So realizing that peop- that this is, this is the future. I mean, you don’t have to talk to Ethan Mollick at, Wharton for very long before you realize why they’re doing what they’re doing, right?

**Shane Colella:** Yeah. And, you mentioned education. I think that is — that’s the most exciting part. Traditionally, whether it was an apprenticeship, the one-on-one learning was, was excellent and you were able to really hone in. We always wanted smaller classrooms and things like that. But you might be paired with this, pardon my French, asshole that you were learning from, and it was his way or the highway, and you just had to fit into that.

Now, every single person that has access to a computer, even on their phone now, these models will get lighter and smaller all the time, has a personal apprentice for anything they want, and it teaches them. It meets them at their level. Never before have we had this kind of custom tutor or accessibility that isn’t just, “Hey, it’s one directional.”

Now it’s both ways. You can talk this out. “Hey, I…” You know, you can’t tell that asshole senior guy, “Hey, I don’t like the way you’re talking to me. I don’t really understand that. Can you rephrase it? I don’t understand that either. Can you rephrase it? Can you rephrase it? Can you put it in a metaphor that has to do with Pokémon, ‘cause I really love Pokémon?”

And now you can do that and get legitimate results to understand things on levels that, that really cater to the way everybody’s brain works, and everyone is such an individual. You grew up with that. Every classroom you were in, I don’t care if it was 30 people or 300, there were plenty of people in the classroom who were just like, “I just don’t get it.”

But they weren’t dumb. They just didn’t learn that way. So yeah, I, I think that’s where the entry level happens now, and it’s gonna start happening at, at five years old.

**Carman Pirie:** I think this is the kind of thing that’s moving fast enough, and frankly, you’re an interesting enough guest. I think it’d be interesting to reconnect with you on this. But before we let you go this time around, I would love to know If you had to just close your eyes, open them again, and tell me that you’re a year — it’s a year later.

We’re not talking about what’s happening five years from now or 10 years from now. One year from now, how different do you think things are at work for you?

**Shane Colella:** As I mentioned earlier, having no historical analog to answer that question, you know, is, is one side of it. But We’re old enough to understand that a lot of dreams take a little while. People move slower than we think. But those of us that have the ability to shift their job, I’m the department head.

I answer to the president of an automation company. I really have free reign to transform the infrastructure around me, my job description, my day-to-day. I just had some team members get shuffled around, and I am now solely focused on replacing three people with one person and a bunch of agents.

And I think in one year, I think we’re gonna see a lot of consolidation. Now, I don’t think those people — I, I think it’s going to actually open up more opportunity, more jobs, um, because the expertise that the agents can get quite a lot done, but the expertise in marketing or research and development or the engineer or the award-winning writer, you can have all that stuff, the agent kick out eighty, ninety percent of it, and then you come in and put the finishing touches on, the curator, the, uh, the bigger brain, or not bigger brain, the, the personal brain and personal touch, the personality behind it, uh, I think is, is where that will come into play.

So I wanna be careful to not say that I’m consolidating a team and now I’m not gonna hire two other people. Well, I think as a company, we’re gonna hire considerably more people in other positions, and I want people thinking more strategically that can govern agentic teams. And if it’s a design team where it was traditionally an art director and two or three designers, you could have two art directors and sixteen agent designers or one other designer that’s managing a bunch of agents, and then the productivity just increases dramatically.

So I think it’s gonna change a lot. I am super excited and I spend way too much time outside of work working on what’s gonna happen in a year and learning. Because, honestly, the people with the clearest vision of what they wanna do is I think those are gonna be the winners here.

**Carman Pirie:** Well, Shane, see, I boxed you in now because we now have you on record about what you see is going to happen in the year, so we know what to talk about and say whether you got right or wrong when we bring you back on the show.

**Shane Colella:** I can’t wait. I can’t wait. And we’re gonna … It, that’s … What I’m super excited for that, you know, things like Baby Dragon Hatchling and the post-Transformers, ‘cause we’re all excited about the Transformer. This is th- that Saturn that’s sitting right next to me, well, a galaxy might replace that Saturn in one year, and we might be sitting next to humanoids.

We just got our first humanoid, on order to come into our R&D facility to start programmatically getting that up to speed. It’s awesome. I love being the sci-fi meets the Wild West and the Gold Rush all at the same time, and I’m sitting surrounded by giants, planets, galaxies, cyborgs. It’s badass.

**Jeff White:** There’s a lot of metaphors here.

**Shane Colella:** Well, it’s you can’t put it into, into legitimate terms. I, I need those bigger concepts for me. That’s just the way I, I think about it.

**Carman Pirie:** Shane, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.

**Shane Colella:** Thank you so much.

**Jeff White:** Yeah, thanks a lot.

[Read Full Transcript](#podcast-transcript)

[« Episode 399: Keeping Your Brand Voice Authentic When AI Makes Everyone Sound the Same](https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/keeping-your-brand-voice-authentic-when-ai-makes-everyone-sound-the-same/)

[Episode 401: Why Your Distributor Cares More About Your Brand Than Your End Customer Does »](https://kulapartners.com/thekularing/why-your-distributor-cares-more-about-your-brand-than-your-end-customer-does/)

#### Featuring

### Shane Colella

Director of Marketing at Westfalia Technologies- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/scolella/)

Shane Colella spent years in a touring rock band, then twenty more pointing cameras at people and asking them to tell the truth. Now he points AI agents at problems and asks them to do the work. Every one of those jobs comes down to timing and knowing what to hand off without losing the soul of the thing.

Shane is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and Director of Marketing at Westfalia Technologies, where he leads an AI-first team with agents handling lead research, attribution, content drafts and more — systems he wires himself. Music never left: he still writes and plays every day, and that production instinct, building something whole out of moving parts, is the same muscle he uses building agentic workflows.

We’re living in the wild west of AI, and he finds it electrifying. He hasn’t felt this kind of charge since the first time he walked on stage. If you want to talk agentic AI, marketing, music, or filmmaking, his door is open.

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The Kula Ring is a podcast for manufacturing marketers looking to enhance their impact and grow their organizations.

Hosted by Jeff White and Carman Pirie, it features discussions with industry leaders who share their experience, insights and strategies on topics like account-based marketing (ABM), sales and marketing alignment, and digital transformation. The Kula Ring offers practical advice and tips from the trenches for success in today’s B2B industrial landscape.

### About Kula

Kula Partners is an agency that specializes in maximizing revenue potential for B2B manufacturers.

Our clients sell within complex, technical environments and we help them take a more targeted, account-focused approach to drive revenue growth within niche markets.