Untamed Launches Unleashed AI After 27 Staff Match the Output of 49
UNTMD
Key Facts:- Australian growth marketing agency Untamed has launched **Unleashed AI**, a separate business dedicated to building and operating AI agents inside Australian companies, having first proven the model internally — reducing its own headcount requirement from 49 to 27 staff.
- Australian businesses are adopting AI rapidly but seeing limited returns, with only 34.7 per cent reporting productivity gains from automated workflows — the lowest figure across six markets surveyed by KPMG, and below the 42.3 per cent global average.
- Untamed's founder Maria Kathopoulis attributes the gap to poor implementation rather than technology limitations, noting that businesses frequently stall at the pilot stage without staff experienced in deploying AI agents effectively.
- The agency's first client build, Buildmetric, saw two AI agents recover at least 72 hours of staff time per week, reduce reporting errors by 98 per cent, and free employees to focus on acting on data rather than producing it; Buildmetric is now a launch partner in Unleashed AI.
- Unleashed AI opened for client work in early August 2026, targeting professional services firms and mid-sized businesses with sufficient repeatable processes to automate but insufficient internal capacity to manage implementation independently.
MELBOURNE, Australia, 3 August 2026: Untamed, an Australian growth marketing agency, has launched a separate AI business, Unleashed AI, to build and run AI agents inside Australian companies. The agency built the agents in its own operation first. Untamed now delivers with 27 staff the volume of work it previously needed 49 people to produce.
Australian businesses are buying AI faster than they are getting anything back from it. Twelve per cent of Australian businesses used AI in 2024–25, rising to 35 per cent among large businesses, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Yet only 34.7 per cent of Australian firms report productivity gains from automating workflows. That is the lowest of six markets surveyed by KPMG, and well under the 42.3 per cent global average.
The gap sits in implementation, not in the technology. Buying a licence takes an afternoon. Working out which steps of a job an agent should own, where a person still signs off, and how the output gets checked takes months, and most businesses attempt it without anyone who has done it before. Agent projects stall at the pilot stage, staff go back to the old process, and the licence keeps billing.
Untamed started building agents to strip repetitive work out of its own delivery: reporting, campaign checks, research, and the administrative steps that sat between a brief and the work itself. Client demand for Untamed's marketing services rose once that capacity was freed, and clients began asking the agency to build the same thing in their businesses.
"Your next hire is often an automation brief in disguise," said Maria Kathopoulis, founder of Untamed. "We were part-way through a hiring plan when we stopped and asked what those people would actually spend their week doing. It was work nobody should be doing by hand. We built agents for it instead, and the roles we never advertised are the reason 27 people now cover what took 49."
The first client build was Buildmetric, a long-standing Untamed marketing client. Untamed put two agents into the business, one handling reporting and one handling day-to-day operational workflow. Since they went live in May, the pair have returned at least 72 hours of staff time each week, close to two full-time roles, and cut errors and gaps in Buildmetric's reporting by 98 per cent. Buildmetric is now a launch partner in Unleashed AI, alongside Brett Kneebone and Luke Rose.
"Our team used to spend the front half of every week pulling reports together and then correcting them," said Luke Rose, Founder of Buildmetric and Unleashed AI. "That work has gone, and what I did not expect was where the time went. People started acting on the numbers instead of producing them, and they are doing work now that we could never justify pulling them off reporting to do. That is the part I want other operators to see, and it is why I wanted a hand in taking this to market."
Unleashed AI opens for client work in the first week of August, targeting professional services and mid-sized operators: the businesses with enough repeatable processes to automate and too little internal capacity to work out how.
About us:
About Unleashed AI
Unleashed AI builds and implements AI agents and automated workflows for Australian businesses. Launched in 2026, it is a separate business founded by UNTMD in partnership with Buildmetric, Brett Kneebone and Luke Rose.
About Untamed
Untamed (UNTMD) is an Australian growth marketing agency working across SaaS, eCommerce, services and marketplaces. Founded by Maria Kathopoulis, it provides fractional CMO, demand generation and conversion optimisation services and employs 27 staff.
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