From side hustle to AI frontier: Team Empathy is just getting warmed up

Ben Male has built, sold, and reinvented. Now, he's more excited about what's coming than anything he's done before.​

It started, as many good things do, with a cousin and a half-baked idea. Back in 2015, Ben Male was pitched into the world of digital marketing almost by accident. His cousin was freelancing in search engine optimisation, Ben had a business idea, and the two started tinkering. Others joined. Ben found his feet in digital, and a direction he didn't know he was looking for.​

Together, the pair co-founded Inbound, a HubSpot partner agency doing inbound and digital marketing. They bootstrapped it, figured things out on the fly, and ran it for four years before selling in 2019. It was the kind of formative chapter that looks obvious in hindsight but felt anything but at the time.​

Then 2020 arrived. Ben briefly tried his hand at an Airbnb business, a venture that COVID made short work of. He regrouped, returned to digital, and started asking a different question: not just what kind of work he wanted to do, but what kind of life he wanted to build around it.​

The answer was Team Empathy, founded in 2020 with what Ben calls a "chillpreneurship" ethos at its core. High-impact, high-value work. Delivered without being glued to a screen for twelve hours a day. Walk the dog. Walk the baby. Do good work and actually live your life. That philosophy hasn't changed. The work, however, has evolved considerably.​

Team Empathy began as an SEO agency, helping local and sustainable businesses rank better on Google. It was solid, purposeful work. But then AI arrived and Ben's decade of search experience suddenly felt like the foundation for something far more interesting.​

"I was starting to get a bit bored of SEO," he admits. "But AI has made it way more exciting because we're basically creating a new layer of the internet."​

That new layer is what Ben calls Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). Where SEO was about ranking on Google, AEO is about being found and recommended by AI agents. The shift is significant. These agents don't just search, they query, contextualise, and recommend. They know their user's demographics, preferences, and needs, and they're looking for businesses that can answer questions clearly and credibly. If your brand isn't visible to AI, it increasingly isn't visible at all.​

Team Empathy is now an agency partner of AirOps, a New York-based platform that helps businesses build the infrastructure to show up in this new environment. The goal isn't to do the work for clients indefinitely, it's to install the system, transfer the knowledge, and hand over the keys. Ben's team brings in their own workflows, calibrates everything to the client's brand voice, trains the internal team, and within six to twelve months, the business owns it entirely.​

The ideal client right now is a seven or eight-figure e-commerce company ready to stop guessing and start owning their narrative in an AI-driven world. It's a tighter focus than before and a deliberate one.​

"We're providing AI transformation," Ben says. "And you need a system like this. The future of the internet lies here."​

For someone who built, sold, and started again more than once, Ben Male has earned the right to say that with confidence. Team Empathy isn't chasing the next thing, it's leading it.​

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Team Empathy features in this Beany Business Spotlight. Celebrating the businesses that know where they've come from and exactly where they're going. ​

Beany works with ambitious, forward-thinking businesses like Team Empathy, handling the numbers so founders can focus on what they do best.​

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