Jamie Sergeant is Global CEO of Crowd (www.thisiscrowd.com), a creative and digital transformation agency with a strong presence from Europe to China and global headquarters in the UAE. Over 20 years, he has built a genuinely international operation with 25 nationalities and 17 languages on staff, serving global brands and governments while championing British creative talent internationally.
Crowd were early adopters to AI with their first AI product going live in January 2023.
Leading, not defending
Jamie and Deborah Cleary, NoCodeLab Co-founder and Director of Growth, had known and worked with each other for many years. That deep understanding of capability and respective skills meant Deborah knew exactly who Jamie should meet.
When Jamie met Sara Simeone of Manchester-based NoCodeLab in 2025, he recognised an opportunity immediately.
"I knew when I first met Sara that there's got to be some way of working with her," Jamie recalls. "She's an incredible mind and works at an incredible pace."
His mission was clear: transform Crowd into one of the world's culturally and practically AI-first agencies. Not AI-adjacent. Not AI-curious. AI-native.
"I was looking for a way to both enlighten and encourage my team," Jamie explains. The future wasn't about protecting existing services from AI erosion. It was about enabling his global team to create entirely new capabilities and value streams.
Sara Simeone, NoCodeLab Founder and Chief Builder, could see the alignment immediately. "It was clear from day one that Crowd understood the future wasn't about defending existing services, but enabling the team to create new capabilities and value streams. For us, the measure of success was capability transfer, not consultancy dependency, empowering every person to become a product builder. That cognitive shift is the real strategic victory."
Everyone builds
NoCodeLab designed a two-tier programme. First, they worked with Crowd's entire global team on overall AI capability building. Not just senior strategists. Not just the technically proficient. Everyone.
"We ran incredible workshops for the team," Jamie says. "What we did was run a series of workshops where all of my team had to create dashboards and learn to vibe code. And we had some fantastic ideas come out."
The goal was capability transfer, not consultancy dependency. Every person had to create something functional. The workshops created psychological safety for experimentation. People who had never written code suddenly built functional tools.
Then NoCodeLab worked with the senior leadership team to co-build something with genuine commercial potential: a product that would define Crowd's position in the AI-native era.
From research to product
Sara had been conducting foundational research on online visibility in LLM engines, understanding how brands appeared (or didn't) in AI-generated responses. This research revealed a critical gap in the market.
The Crowd leadership team, working with Sara's research as the foundation, built SightGeo: a platform that tracks how brands rank on LLMs and their share of voice in AI-generated responses.
The logic was straightforward. As consumers increasingly asked ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for recommendations instead of using traditional search, the fundamentals changed. If a brand wanted to appear in AI-generated responses, they needed to know where they stood.
"It's now called SightGeo and it enables us to look at how our clients are ranking on LLMs and their share of voice on LLMs," Jamie explains.
No existing tool answered these questions comprehensively. SightGeo filled that gap. Built collaboratively through hands-on workshops based on Sara's research, it was tested with clients and iterated based on feedback.
SightGeo evolved into a comprehensive platform with four modules: a Global Intelligence Dashboard tracking visibility and cultural fit, a Cultural Adaptation Engine tuning tone for different markets, a Content & Prompt Workbench refining how AI cites brands, and enterprise-grade security enabling it to scale with confidence.
The China advantage
Crowd's presence from Europe to China gave them a crucial strategic differentiator: direct access to markets with fundamentally different LLM ecosystems. They localised SightGeo for Chinese AI platforms.
"We've taken that even further forward. It's now in Chinese. We have a strong presence in China, so we've also looked at that from the Chinese LLMs," Jamie notes. "It's really given us this platform to start thinking about our business in a slightly different way, and that is productising some of the services that we feel will get eroded by the advancements of AI."
While Western agencies were still working out how to track ChatGPT presence, Crowd was offering cross-market AI visibility analysis that no traditional SEO platform could match.
Cultural transformation
SightGeo went from research insight to client-facing platform within months. But the real transformation was cultural. Crowd became one of the world's culturally and practically AI-first agencies in operational reality, not marketing copy.
The team that built SightGeo understood marketing intimately. They simply needed tools to express that understanding in working software, and Sara's research to show them where the opportunity lay. Vibe coding provided the bridge. The two-tier programme ensured the entire company understood AI capabilities whilst leadership drove product innovation.
What remains
SightGeo now represents a revenue stream that didn't exist 12 months ago, augmenting the agency's core business. Clients who engage Crowd for traditional services stay for the proprietary platform that provides capabilities unavailable elsewhere.
NoCodeLab brought the research, ran the workshops, taught the methods, and co-built the first version with the leadership team. When the engagement ended, Crowd continued building. The capability remained embedded across the entire organisation, not on retainer.
The strategic victory
Crowd didn't merely adapt to the AI transition. They led it. They identified the opportunity (guided by Sara's foundational research on LLM visibility) and built the tools that would define the next era whilst competitors debated whether AI represented threat or opportunity.
The team spanning 25 nationalities, 17 languages, and a presence from Europe to China is now equipped to move faster than agencies twice their size. They can ideate in the morning, build in the afternoon, ship to clients by evening. That velocity constitutes a competitive moat.
When you're a creative and digital transformation agency championing creative talent internationally, you're expected to sit at the forefront of technological innovation. Jamie ensured that it wasn't marketing copy. It became operational reality.
That focus on enabling people (from company-wide capability building to hands-on product co-creation with leadership, grounded in cutting-edge research) made Crowd one of the world's culturally and practically AI-first agencies. Not in theory. In practice.
Your turn?
Crowd's transformation shows what's possible when you look at your people, your products, and your processes through an AI-native lens. The question isn't whether AI will reshape your industry. It's whether you'll lead that transformation or watch it happen.
THE STUDIO programme is designed for organisations ready to build capability, not just buy consultancy. To explore how The Studio could transform your organisation, visit nocodelab.ai/the-studio.