Most Agencies Talk About AI. Ben Newman Builds With It.
Ben Newman founded Shaper Collective after national public affairs campaigns on K Street. Since 2022, he has advised private equity firms and large enterprises on generative AI adoption, then built Shaper Collective to run that same discipline for causes and candidates.
Public Affairs and Agent-Building Rarely Live in One Person.
Washington teaches you how power actually moves. Building agents for a living teaches you how attention actually moves now. Shaper Collective exists because those two educations rarely happen inside the same career.
National public affairs campaigns. How coalitions form, how a message survives contact with a newsroom, how a room full of stakeholders actually decides.
Generative AI strategy and adoption work for private equity firms and large enterprises since 2022. Much of the work ran on Anthropic’s Claude. Early to AI stylometry: producing content with AI that still sounds like the person who’s supposed to have written it.
The Influence Model Tracks How AI Is Rewriting Washington.
Ben writes The Influence Model, a weekly newsletter on how AI is reshaping the tactics of influence in Washington. The newsletter is where the operating thesis behind Shaper Collective gets tested in public, before it shows up in a campaign.
Zero Guardrail Violations Across Every Live Campaign.
In Lakewood, Colorado, three community voices produced 109 pieces of content and 170 social posts around a special election, generating more than 52,000 views and more than 836 engagements without ad spend.
In Virginia, one community voice generated 132,000 views and more than 4,400 comments in six days.