The firm, and how it runs itself
The River Group works with clients on how far to take agentic AI inside their own operations. This page is what the firm did inside its own.
Start with what does not change. Client work is done by people. The sessions, the facilitation and the judgment a client is paying for are Blaine and the associates who work with him. The agents described below run the firm's own back office, and none of them touches a client engagement.
The River Group is led by Blaine Mathieu, with a small number of associates who assist him with client work. Its own operations are run with a staff of agents: business development, positioning, offerings, media, the website, the monthly briefing and book research, with a chief of staff over the top of them. Blaine runs alongside them rather than above them.
It was a reimagine rather than a retrofit, which is the distinction The Method turns on. The firm did not get an assistant that writes faster. It reorganized how its own work is coordinated: what the firm knows lives in files that compute their own state rather than in any one person's head or any one conversation, work is addressed to a role rather than to a person, and Blaine's own job changed from carrying information between conversations to ruling on the decisions the system puts in front of him.
The Method was the design specification, not a lens applied afterwards. The three tensions are the three settings this firm had to choose, and it chose them deliberately: agents as a workforce-and-workflow question, shared knowledge as the context question, gates and a record of approvals as the autonomy-and-governance question. That is the strongest evidence the firm can offer that The Method is usable on real work, because the work was its own.
What it has not achieved. The full account says plainly where this falls short, and the largest gap is that almost nothing in the system starts without a person. It is written up as a case study, revised as the machinery changes, and it carries its own date.