One word defines our 2025 journey: TRANSITION.
This was a turbulent year around the world, politics and economics created a constant game of “hurry up and wait,” across all sectors. With ambitious projects pausing, restarting, and reshaping, we took that moment inside Metajive as something else: a chance to refocus, to realign, and to choose what kind of company we want to be for the next decade.
2025 was not about standing still. It was about moving through uncertainty with intention—maturing our operations, deepening our craft, leaning fully into AI, and building the kinds of partnerships that let us make a bigger dent for our partners.
We went after the biggest, most ambitious projects in our history— some with the most established organizations in the world. We shared that ambition with a few incredible startups still in stealth. That level of commitment takes courage; instead of retreating, we treated 2025 as the year to take every swing.
We chose to:
- Double down on the work where we create the most value.
- Say yes to deeper, longer-term relationships instead of one-off wins.
- Protect the balance between up-time and down-time for a team that always shows up at 100%.
- Appreciate the amazing partners we have been working with for years.
Transition, for us, wasn’t just “getting through” a hard year—it was deciding what we want Metajive to be on the other side of it.
The clearest symbol of that transition is our new site.
We didn’t just redesign a homepage; we rebuilt how we present ourselves to the world. The new metajive.com is a reflection of who we are today and who we’re becoming: a digital product and applied AI partner that moves fast, thinks long-term, and treats experience as a craft.
Our entire team dove in—strategy, design, development, operations—to make sure the site wasn’t just “pretty,” but honest:
- Clear language that matches how we actually work.
- New case studies that spotlight our evolution in AI, digital product, and commerce.
- A sharper system for content, emails, and a full suite of branded assets so our outward presence finally matches our internal ambition.
This wasn’t a marketing exercise. It was a mirror.
A lot of 2025 was about the “unsexy” parts of building a world-class studio: operations, HR, accounting, and lots of process.
We invested heavily in:
- Bringing our operations into a more unified, integrated system.
- Strengthening HR and accounting so the business is built for longevity, not just momentum.
- Refining our estimating and engagement process—getting more of the team involved earlier so we can better scope, anticipate, and partner with partners from day one.
Underneath all of that: a team with an average tenure of four years. In an industry known for churn, that matters. It means shared history, trust, and a culture where people grow together.
This team supported each other through a demanding year—learning, experimenting, and finding a new relationship to creation in an AI-powered world. That’s transition at a human level.
This wasn’t a marketing exercise. It was a mirror.
We continued to put in reps for our full-service development capabilities, especially on the back-end and digital product side. We’ve been intentional about bringing in people who think beyond pages and templates and instead build systems: platforms, products, and experiences that can evolve.
In 2025, we:
- Grew our dev team with talent anchored in digital product thinking.
- Deepened our Shopify partnership and capabilities, treating commerce as an experience, not just a catalog.
- Continued to sharpen the way design and development work together so we can keep that rare balance of speed and quality that defines our sweet spot.
We also traveled—a lot. Face-to-face time with partners across the globe wasn’t just relationship-building; it helped us stay close to the realities of their business, markets, and understand our partners' world.
If 2024 was about leaning into AI, 2025 was about living there.
We formalized Applied AI as a service and rolled out AEO (AI Experience Optimization) retainers, helping partners not only show up in AI agents—but show up accurately and meaningfully.
For our partners (and for ourselves), that means:
- Making sure AI users can actually find you.
- Ensuring what’s said about you is correct, up to date, and aligned with your brand.
- Designing experiences where AI becomes a helpful layer, not a black box.
Internally, we treated AI as infrastructure:
- AI is now woven into essentially every department.
- We use it to accelerate, to explore options, and to keep our teams focused on the high-value problems only humans can solve.
And then there’s Ember—our first major AI case study, built with The Future Laboratory team, transforming how trend research is discovered and explored. Ember isn’t just a product; it’s a proof point of what happens when strategy, design, engineering, and AI truly work as one.
We also pushed on AI-powered branding for Blink, exploring what it means to build and stretch a brand in a generative world—creating tools, systems, and visual languages that are ready for an AI-native future.
And alongside all of that, we helped launch Google Flow as a standout product in our portfolio—with the world's best and most ambitious partners. Opportunities like this help us stay in front with AI and make it real, usable, and scalable.
Our relationships deepened in 2025.
- Continuing our work with Bank of America, John Boos, and School of Rock, proving the value of long-term collaboration.
- Beginning a significant new relationship with Edward Jones, partnering to help shape how they show up digitally.
- Welcoming partners like Alterra—whose leadership and vision for the ski industry we’re genuinely inspired by—helping them craft a digital presence that matches their ambition.
- Partnering with Getronics and others who know a great digital presence is a strategic advantage, not a checkbox.
Our Together Group family gave us new reach and new ways to plug into global opportunities. In parallel, we kept building momentum with independent partners like Hyperquake and Prophet—who are committed to the same goal: better work that creates a bigger impact.
These aren’t just logos on a page. They’re relationships where we’re trusted to help shape products, platforms, and brands over time.
Our values—Velocity, Creation, Growth, Kaizen (continuous improvement)—were not theoretical this year. They were stress-tested.
We held ourselves to a pace/quality balance that most teams can’t sustain, especially when we’re in our sweet spot. We re-examined what it means to “create” in an era where AI is always present, choosing to treat it as a collaborator, not competition. And we showed up for each other as people, not just producers—supporting growth beyond job titles.
A big part of that was our Growth World Tour series in 2025, where we brought in voices from outside our walls to help us level up as humans and practitioners. We dug into accessibility with Lars Holm Sørensen, financial planning with Emmett Kearney, the future of luxury with The Future Laboratory, experience and service design with a design lead from Airbnb, DISC and communication styles workshops with Kelly McNeill, and leadership development with Gideon Schneider. Each session was a reminder that if we want to build better products and systems, we have to keep expanding the people behind them.
Looking ahead to 2026, one thing is crystal clear: AI will continue to change the world—and the way brands, products, and experiences are made.
We’re excited (and yes, a little nervous in all the right ways) about:
- Growing our new partnerships and deepening the existing ones that have trusted us.
- Delivering the best work we’ve ever done, across applied AI, digital products, Shopify, and beyond.
- Giving the team at Metajive more opportunities to work outside themselves—to stretch, experiment, and pursue digital excellence at a new level.
- Focusing on larger, longer-term relationships where we can genuinely make a bigger dent in the universe for our partners.
2025 was a year of transition. Not a clean before-and-after, not a perfect arc—just the real, sometimes messy, always meaningful work of becoming the company we’re meant to be.
We’re still moving. Still learning. Still building. Still Ambitious as ever.
Which is why the question on
our minds hasn’t changed:
