St. Louis-based agency Agile & Co launched Core, a proprietary AI marketing platform built specifically for local service businesses, on September 3, 2026. The platform - which runs on an 80% AI, 20% human strategy model - connects directly to a company's operational data and applies it across advertising, SEO, and website work, removing the need for clients to re-explain their business with each new campaign.
How Core uses operational data
Core pulls in a business's services, pricing, and past campaign performance, then uses that context across Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO, and website design. The system retains this information across every campaign, so strategy builds on what came before rather than resetting monthly. Each new campaign feeds the platform's models directly, with lead and conversion data analyzed to adjust strategy automatically.
"We built Core because we were tired of watching service businesses get sold black-box AI tools that don't know their market," said Chans, Founder and CEO of Agile & Co. "Core learns your business, your customers, and what actually converts, so every dollar you spend gets smarter over time instead of starting from zero."
Human oversight and technical architecture
Despite the heavy AI foundation, human strategists review every campaign and write final copy before anything goes live. The company built Core using MCP architecture, RAG retrieval, and vector databases - not off-the-shelf AI tools. Agile & Co targets contractors, clinics, auto shops, med spas, and similar service businesses that depend on booked jobs as their primary success metric.
Reporting is attribution-based, tracking leads to their source and optimizing toward booked jobs rather than vanity metrics like clicks. The agency also operates without long-term client contracts.
Why this matters for marketing professionals
Core's design addresses a persistent friction point in agency-client relationships: the knowledge drain that happens when campaigns change hands or strategies restart. For marketing managers overseeing local service accounts, the platform's ability to retain business context and compound performance data over time reduces the manual lift of re-briefing teams. The 80/20 AI-to-human split also offers a concrete model for evaluating where automation can handle execution while human judgment remains on final creative and strategic calls. Professionals looking to deepen their understanding of how AI fits into marketing workflows can explore AI for Marketing Managers or broader AI for Marketing resources.
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