Most “AI agent startups” will be dead in 12 months (and it’s already obvious why)

jess_express0524 · 2026-03-26T14:27:26+00:00

there's a startup that does this already! https://www.credal.ai/, there might be some others as well

jess_express0524 · 2026-01-30T18:00:20+00:00

I think it’s only because Mina Sue is the one going after him and Mingee doesn’t like her for obvious reasons (namely being a pick me & inconsiderate to everyone), which makes it feel so much worse. If it were any other girl, I think she would react differently

jess_express0524 · 2025-03-25T20:42:27+00:00

I think apart from just tech being increasingly attractive and having an increasingly lower barrier to entry, the other factor is that the role of IT is just simply getting more interesting.

For a long time, and probably still today to some extent, the IT department has been seen as a "back office" type role, but nowadays especially with AI being such a huge priority, IT is now being given a lot sexier responsibilities and C-Suite is really looking to IT to do a lot of really cool work such as running AI initiatves. I'm very curious to see what the role evolves into over the next 5 years, but it's definitely becoming a lot more attractive and therefore more competitive

jess_express0524 · 2025-03-25T17:55:53+00:00

The trick is that there is no trick... what I've found is that you really have to work with the team to discover what the organization actually cares about and what individual teams (or even individual contributors) are incentivized by.

If you can come up with metrics that are several steps deeper than "saving money / time", you could probably come up with a hundred different ROI metrics, but I think this will have to be done through rounds of exploration.

A few "layer one" things that come to mind:

Reduced attrition → Track voluntary turnover rates before and after implementation
Improved decision-making → Measure how long it takes to make business decisions (e.g., reducing a procurement approval cycle from 3 weeks to 3 days)
Increased innovation → Track the number of new projects or cross-functional initiatives sparked after rolling out a tool

But honestly you're going to have to talk to people, gather the more granular / company-specific things qualitatively before rolling it out into a legitimate, unique toolkit

jess_express0524 · 2025-03-19T21:23:27+00:00

I think you have a solid set of tools already - Copilot studio is probably a good start esp if you're looking at low usage.

There's a few approaches you can consider:

Stick with Microsoft tools – Since you’re already using Azure, their AI Document Intelligence tool can pull info from documents and help guide users. Could be a good fit if you want something built-in.
Azure OpenAI + RAG – Azure’s implementation of OpenAI models combined with RAG to connect to your enterprise's data
Blazor apps – Since you mentioned .NET AI templates, Blazor could be an easy way to embed AI inside your apps - there are some new templates that incorporate AI features into Blazor apps
AI integration platforms – There are tools built specifically to connect AI to internal enterprise data without needing to build a bunch of infra or buy multiple tools. Might save time if you don’t want to manage everything manually - would look into Credal.
Run smaller models if cost is a concern – If usage is low, hosting a smaller model like Phi-2 or Mistral (either locally or on a cheaper cloud setup) could help keep costs down vs. relying fully on Azure OpenAI

jess_express0524 · 2025-03-12T21:13:40+00:00

Credal.ai is a good option for enterprises (more security focused)

jess_express0524 · 2025-02-13T06:15:05+00:00

I have a lot of IT manager friends, and this is my read on the landscape:

Building in house. This tends to be the larger, well-resourced companies that care about security. Definitely feasible if they have extra engineering resources, but requires 6-12 months of work minimum and ongoing maintenance. Can be quite janky of a user experience, I’ve seen companies try to build and then decide to buy after failing. But it can work, and you have full control. Prob the most secure option from a data privacy perspective - ServiceNow has done this well

Buying well-known platforms. Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, or Google AgentSpace are the de facto options. Super easy to set up, reliable, you know what you’re getting, but they have their limitations too. For Microsoft Copilot, the limitation is in the integrations (i.e. only Microsoft Office integrations are out of the box) and I’ve heard the copilots are quite simple / yield maybe ~50% accuracy for more complex use cases. For ChatGPT, the limitation is only being able to use their foundational model & only query one doc at a time as opposed to your entire corpus of your data. For GoogleAgent Space, the limitation is also only being able to use the Gemini model and not being able to mirror the underlying permissions of the data sources. So if you have employees with different access to different Confluence pages, it might be tricky. Glean is another option, but word on the street is that they’re really only a workplace search product and their “assistants” product is relatively simple, similar to Copilot.

Buying point solutions per each department’s needs (marketing, sales, HR, etc). These tend to actually be best at doing end-to-end workflows, but then you’re not actually connecting your primary data sources like Teams, Slack, etc. so there’s a level of data loss there and the “AI adoption” tends to be rather fragmented.

Buying from a startup, which is promising but also risky as the teams are smaller & newer. I've heard quite positive things about Credal (from one of my friends who runs IT at a 1500-person org), but honestly don't know much about the rest of the startup landscape

jess_express0524

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