One of my favorite things about Chad Solomonson is not knowing where he might be calling me from.

In a recent back-and-forth to align our schedules, I caught him en route to the majestic wonders of Moab. Not surprising for a restless explorer who’s always eyeing the next mountain to climb.

Like me, he’s a hiker. Someone who finds the ascent just as exhilarating as arriving at the summit. An avid outdoorsman, he balances the zeros and ones with the open latitudes and longitudes of nature.

At January’s Boye & Company CMS Kickoff 26 in St. Petersburg, we pounded the pavement together in the wee hours, putting some miles under our feet as we broke down some of the deeper themes emerging from the conference, including the unshakable opportunity and specter of AI.

Chad Solomonson exploring the North Carolina mountains before Storyblok's JoyConf events in 2025. Source: LinkedIn

During his presentation at CMS Kickoff, Chad talked about composable patterns and how they’re translating into accelerated success. This is where his company, RDA Digital – a Maryland-based consultancy known for its daring projects with global brands – has been making big waves.

Case in point: In an impressive project with the National Retail Federation (NRF), RDA leveraged the one-two punch of Netlify and Storyblok to create a secure, scalable, high-performing web experience. Powered by a modern headless architecture, things got remarkably faster – but it also reduced the need for custom code, which accelerated dev time by 70%. Talk about quick delivery.

For a deeper dive, you can check out Chad's keynote with NRF at Storyblok's JoyConf 2025.

The composable footprint also provided a framework for implementing a broader AI engagement strategy. Working with Insider One, an AI-powered Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) and Customer Data Platform (CDP), RDA architected the next level of personalization to support NRF’s events – including Retail’s Big Show – to tailor content based on attendee data, behavior, and intent.

The new NRF digital experience with personalized segment notifications. Source: RDA website

This kind of successful use case matters more than ever, especially as headlines are awash with AI trepidation and marinating in a sauce of SaaSpocalypse. Doom and gloom aside, the hard fact is that enterprises have shifted from pie-in-the-sky possibilities to palpable ROI in 2026.

But this is where composable tech stacks are showing real grit. In the MACH Alliance’s latest research, it’s abundantly clear that enterprises with composable foundations – particularly those that are far along in their MACH journey – are seeing real ROI from their AI investments.

Digital agencies and SIs are at the forefront of this change, acting as translators for transformation. As AI reshapes digital ecosystems, data strategies, and customer engagement models, organizations are demanding more from trusted consulting partners, and most shops are scrambling to keep up.

But RDA seems to be harnessing this turbulence as a catalyst – and they're soaring.

I recently spoke with Chad about RDA’s disciplined approach to digital and AI-enabled transformation, and why it has earned them an impressive VOCalis Score of 92 out of 100 and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 86, ranking their consultancy in the coveted “World Class” category.

Based on this independent client feedback, RDA is knocking it out of the park in all the right ways. And in this hyperbolic AI era, success requires more than just tech implementation. It requires the operational clarity, disciplined execution, and measurable business impact they’re delivering.

Chad also waxed about RDA’s culture of innovation. The company is now in its 38th year of building amazing things, and in his mind, it's giving them a strategic edge – and putting them at the top of the mountain.

The validation journey with Digital Clarity Group’s VOCalis

Like other agencies and consultancies in the digital experience space, RDA covers the gamut, building solutions across the stack with leading platform providers like Salesforce and Shopify, all of which are pushing the envelope with agentic AI.

As a Sitecore Platinum Partner, RDA has delivered over 150 projects on the DXP since 2011. Last year, they successfully delivered one of the nation’s largest higher education content migration programs for MSU, transitioning more than 100 sites to SitecoreAI – the cloud-native, AI-first digital experience platform that unifies CMS, DAM, and marketing operations into a single, agentic workspace.

For anyone in the migration business, that's a big haul.

That said, composable is at RDA’s core – and that’s reflected through in its growing headless CMS practice. As one of the first Storyblok Platinum Partners in the U.S., they’re successfully unlocking “joyful” next-gen capabilities that are well-suited for AI innovation. RDA also offers specialized “ServiceBloks” with focused processes designed to accelerate migration and implementation.

Chad's leadership in both ecosystems can't be underscored. He's both a Storyblok MVP and a three-time Sitecore MVP, a testament to his prowess as a practitioner at a time when both platforms are accelerating their AI roadmaps.

RDA is a Sitecore Platinum Partner and a Storyblok Platinum Partner

With a deep portfolio of wins across almost four decades, RDA has religiously collected feedback from customers. The problem, as Chad explained, was the lack of grounded insight, as most of the substance was anecdotal.

To frame their genuine differentiation, they needed real data. Hard data.

One idea that emerged was nurturing RDA’s Net Promoter Score, which could shine a light on these dark allies. NPS is a well-established and widely used metric that measures customer loyalty, satisfaction, and perceived brand value. But it’s also simple, effective, and correlated to revenue growth.

To impact their NPS, RDA sought help from a validated industry source. Chad traced back to a pivotal moment when he discovered VOCalis, a program offered by Digital Clarity Group (DCG) – a former analyst firm that harnesses market research to deliver data-driven growth. It specifically targets agencies and system integrators supporting digital and marketing technology initiatives.

VOCalis goes beyond traditional feedback programs, leveraging Voice of Customer insights to uncover what makes an agency unique. It does this through a blend of client outreach, real-time feedback monitoring, and targeted analysis – and benchmarks performance across delivery quality, client experience, and business outcomes.

VOCalis centers around the central question of how customers rate the likelihood of recommending an agency to a colleague, and goes deep into the factors behind it. Through the process, it helps surface an agency’s differentiated value and positions it to attract new clients and drive revenue.

“When I learned that DCG had a very large benchmarking capability to see how we're measuring up against the core fundamentals of consulting, I was intrigued,” Chad said. “They also had a very specific Sitecore practice view, so I could see how we performed against our competition. It gave us a real indication of where we stand in the ecosystem, and that was tremendous.”

Key results

As Chad told me, RDA has been an active participant in the VOCalis journey for several years, allowing his team to learn, track their progress, and optimize for improvement.

To get more granular, VOCalis is conducted in cycles by DCG. It evaluates performance across eight different KPIs, including planning, delivery quality, client service, cost control, technology decision-making, and business outcomes.

These categories go beyond service quality, reflecting execution reliability, governance maturity, and the ability to convert digital strategy into measurable results. Independent validation across each dimension is the real key, providing confidence that transformation initiatives are disciplined, accountable, and capable of delivering tangible business value.

In the most recent VOCalis cycle, surveys were distributed to 62 contacts across 28 of RDA’s clients. As mentioned, they earned a VOCalis score of 92/100 – a notable increase from 90 in 2025. This is well above the industry average of 76. It's worth noting that RDA has consistently elevated this metric year over year.

RDA’s aforementioned NPS of 86 was also significantly higher than the industry average of 8. According to DCG, this was also the third-highest NPS ever recorded for an agency cycle with more than 10 clients.

As Chad said, this input reflects RDA’s success with recent client engagements, specifically around AI transformation initiatives. The combination of intelligent tech and human judgment – buoyed by strong governance, clear business strategy, and grounded architecture – is proving to be the secret sauce for delivering measurable impact.

“It was a great validation of what we’re doing and where we're investing,” he said. “Getting direct feedback from clients across a larger scale and having these predictable kinds of metrics really helped us see where the gaps are.”

Strategy as the foundational ‘basecamp’

RDA’s impressive NPS is less a marketing metric and more a byproduct of its strategy-first posture – particularly when it comes to the burgeoning field of AI. In a market groaning under the weight of tools, platforms, and promises, RDA has chosen to compete on its advisory depth.

As Chad explained, rather than jumping into implementation, his team is adamant about gaining a holistic view of the client’s environment. Not just technical, but financial and organizational. This is crystallized by the company’s Vision to Victory framework – an AI-centric, strategy-first model that aligns leadership around measurable business outcomes, defines a future-state digital vision, and moves organizations from strategy to execution in weeks, not months.

Here's a great video from RDA’s President & CEO, Matt Forsyth, explaining how RDA's Vision to Victory model helps organizations move from strategy to execution by aligning stakeholders, clarifying priorities, and building the right structure for success:

“To me, it always comes back to strategy,” Chad emphasized. “A lot of customers haven't really laid out a plan that understands their current investments and the options they have in front of them. But we always advocate for seeing the whole picture. We have the technical acumen and the ability to unpack complex architectures. Maybe you have an on-prem thing here, a SaaS thing there. Based on what we gather, we put together a roadmap that is grounded in reality, reflects their budget and resourcing, and helps them make informed decisions.”

According to Chad, RDA’s track record for success is also backed up by its view of AI as a “growth accelerator.” Rather than shooting for the moon, developing practical skills and strong technical leadership allows them to turn short-term gains into long-term value. This balanced approach builds resilient teams, strengthens institutional knowledge, and ensures AI-driven innovation translates into sustainable business results.

By approaching strategy as a foundational tenet, Chad sees the summit with greater clarity – as a force multiplier that puts the apex into view, and makes the ascent more predictable.

“We're aggressive on strategy because the advisors, strategists, and people who are ultimately driving big, important decisions have to be trusted,” he said. “That’s where we bring the most value to our clients.”

Build or buy in the age of AI?

Unlike many “agencies of record” born in brand or media, RDA was cut from the SI cloth with a culture that’s wired for building things that don’t exist – yet.

“That’s our history,” Chad said emphatically. “We’re not like most traditional agencies. We came out of that system integrator world, and most of the time we were asking, ‘What do you want to build?’ I think that mentality is ingrained in us as a consultancy.”

Now, AI is reigniting that builder mentality and changing both the dynamics – and the economics – surrounding packaged software. I’ve been hearing across the ecosystem from both agencies and enterprise teams as they try to balance the “build or buy” equation, and RDA has been experimenting on its home turf to vet the potential for customers.

“Because of AI, we’re experiencing a bit of this ‘builder renaissance,’” Chad explained. “Companies don’t want to spend exorbitant fees for software. Now, they’re seeing ways to build things for their specific needs that will drive value and have more custom or unique capabilities. About two years ago, we started doing it ourselves, looking at our tooling and costs, building and deploying whole new systems that we built from scratch, just like we did 25 years ago.”

“We’re not like most traditional agencies. We came out of that system integrator world, and most of the time we were asking, ‘What do you want to build?’ I think that mentality is ingrained in us as a consultancy.”

That hands-on experimentation is now translating into real client work. As Chad said, RDA’s team is currently balancing a half-dozen of these custom initiatives for clients. This is where “digital and AI-enabled innovation” stops being a slogan and becomes an operating model to build, prove, then scale.

RDA's “builder renaissance” – augmented by AI – is also having an impact on delivery, compressing timetables from six months to six weeks or less. As you might guess, velocity is a core factor when calculating NPS. But as Chad pointed out, this kind of acceleration requires a solvent strategy to meet expectations and sustain high satisfaction scores.

“If we get the strategy locked down correctly, we can do projects much faster, and deliver more value, which is fantastic for clients,” he said. “For us, it’s important that we continue to stay ahead of where they’re going and bring value that enhances their roadmap as they see fit.”

While the urge to build is becoming stronger, RDA still relies on proven systems of authority that meet fierce technical and governance requirements. As a trusted guide for building vendor stacks, Chad and his team face the moving targets of shifting roadmaps, feature sets, and wholesale product repositioning.

RDA’s response is to meet these tectonic shifts with pragmatic, roadmap-first guidance. It’s not just about picking tools, it’s about helping clients understand the right choices and tradeoffs based on their goals. This all comes back to a heightened level of customer intimacy that Chad and team have nurtured over the decades.

It's also rooted in the hardened principles of maintaining good business relationships – something we often forget about in the age of screens and automation.

Investing in AI-focused leadership

Behind RDA’s success is a longstanding and deliberate investment in the right people. That charter is expanding in the AI domain, where leadership is promoting an AI-first approach to the company’s future investment in innovation. That means more human talent with AI knowledge – and the capacity to learn and adapt quickly in a shifting ecosystem of LLMs.

“We just promoted one of our top architects as Director of AI Innovation, because he’s been a passionate advocate,” Chad said. “Now he’s going to lead a lot of what’s happening and have his fingers on the pulse of so much change. He’ll see how it applies to our platform and partner relationships, our internal teams, and where they need to target the dollars and resources to make sure that we’re staying ahead.”

“Customers want to know more about the greater impact on business outcomes that could come from different solutions like AI. That’s why we’ve made massive investments in roles like digital strategists.”

It’s certainly something I’m seeing across organizations as they adopt AI en masse. According to CIO Dive, the number of Chief AI Officers (CAIOs) increased 70% year-over-year from 2023 to 2024. And in 2025, a survey by Foundry indicated that 16% of enterprises now had a CAIO, and another 44% were seeking or were interested in adding a CAIO to their org charts.

For RDA, this is how culture shows up operationally – via new roles and smart budget decisions that prioritize learning and innovation. This investment in humans also reinforces its NPS and VOCalis benchmarks.

“That’s really been the catalyst for building our strategy,” Chad stated. “Customers want to know more about the greater impact on business outcomes that could come from different solutions like AI. That’s why we’ve made massive investments in roles like digital strategists.”

Why it matters

I talk frequently to agencies and SIs, often at large vendor events. They’re on the front line with customers, feeling the pressure of performance and the crushing reality of AI threatening their traditional revenue models. At the same time, they’re innovating in new and exciting ways across a diverse stack of tools and technologies.

Meanwhile, vendors are looking to agency partners as a key channel for growth in an increasingly competitive product landscape, where AI is commoditizing features and challenging licensing paradigms.

It's a tough spot to be in. But in this morass of complexity, RDA is seeing the forest through the trees.

By embracing AI early as a strategic concern and injecting it across its company culture, they’ve built an accelerated and scalable approach. Adopting a composable mindset has also given them clear line-of-sight when assembling the right solutions for specific customer use cases.

And by engaging in the VOCalis process, they’ve identified critical gaps, optimized performance, and validated the impact of their AI initiatives with customers. Quite frankly, the results speak for themselves, and if you’re researching SI partners, a high NPS benchmark can tip the scales and reinforce your decision-making. It's like a calling card for success.

Despite the growing prevalence of vibe coding and AI DIY tooling, prototypes don’t equal production. You need proven knowledge and expertise to truly unlock the potential. If AI transformation is on your near-term roadmap, I would argue that qualified partners are more critical than ever to delivering real ROI – and finding the right one can make all the difference.

It’s hard to argue with 38 years of seeing around corners and preparing for what’s next. That’s why RDA could be the “agency of change” for your AI future.

Learn more at www.rdadigital.com

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Agency of Change: RDA’s ‘World-Class’ NPS Reflects a Deep Focus on Digital and AI Transformation