Helping Clients Stay on the AI Frontier

Ben started Shaper Collective in November 2025. From inside a Washington public relations firm, he had watched how slowly the market moved, just as large language models were turning persuasion into math. SENSE delivers a weekly brief on what is gaining attention in a client’s issue, agentic social media earns distribution for a client’s message, Amplified Judgment is the firm’s framework for bringing AI into how an organization works, and Thought Leadership is a weekly LinkedIn program written in a CEO’s own voice. Ben also writes The Influence Model, a weekly newsletter on AI and influence in Washington, and leads the Open Community Benefits Agreement at Policy Frameworks.

Ben grew up outside Philadelphia and went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied journalism. He traces the firm to a campaign against campus antisemitism there. In May 2024, the chancellor asked to meet Jewish campus leaders, and Ben was among them. The group brought a nearly 26-page document and 12 requests, and four news outlets quoted him. He has written that the campaign ran on AI and showed him what AI could bring to opinion shaping.

By then he had already had an early look at generative AI, in 2022. He started a consultancy, AdaptIgnite, to help small businesses and private equity firms’ portfolio companies adopt it. He gave a national fleet-telematics company’s sales team one prompting method across eight stages of its sales process, with a prompt library built from its own pipeline. He audited six departments of a billion-dollar clinical-trial technology company and took one department’s idea to a working prototype in ninety days. For a large packaging company’s chief executive, he built a weekly LinkedIn program.

In Washington he joined Rational 360, working on healthcare and consumer goods issues and building AI workflows for its team, until he left to build his own firm.