Why this firm does AI without AI

thanks for having me on.

Absolutely. and thanks again. Thanks for having me on today. And really appreciate the chance to to talk about native and and some of the cool stuff we're doing. But I'll start and be selfish and talk about myself. I think that's we're all pro to do stuff like that. So my my background is is pretty unconventional, right? So I do come from the corporate side. I spent the better part of the last 25 years working on the corporate side of of insurance, actually. most of my career was spent at traveler's insurance. where I was a senior leader there doing product management, strategy, digital transformation, data and analytics, playing a lot of innovation and AI and things like that. And I had a great job and a great life and and I, you know, really, really loved the company and the people I was working with. but I decided that after you know two decades of of that kind of grind and and working on the problems the same way, I was looking for an opportunity to do something different and to really take all the things that I had learned and to deploy those back to help other businesses and and help our you know the industry that that I grew up in, try to ultimately be be a better place. So

No, please ask ask away. Like this this should absolutely be back and forth. Otherwise, it's just my monologue. Well, and so let's do micro and macro. So on the micro level, it's it's just amazing going from a thirty thousand plus person company that's in multiple companies and and offices all over the place to being part of this small scrappy virtual startup. and and I think the first thing on the selfish level, I so my background, I actually went to law school before I I actually got into insurance as well. So I've been a lawyer and and I've had a support staff of at least a of at least an admin since I was 25 years old. Like it's it's such a weird thing to talk about. But like since I was 25, I've had at least an admin, if not a whole team of people that were doing all of the different parts and pieces. I could just be the orchestra. I could I could just be the conductor of the orchestra tr orchestra and like have all of these people who are great at things pick up the different part pieces and run with them. Now in the in the new role, in the new company, it's it's been eye-opening to get back and get my hands dirty and to be doing all of the things from scheduling meetings to building decks to presenting to clients and and actually delivering billable work. putting wearing all of those hats again is has been it's been eye-opening. It's been a lot of fun. It's been reinvigorating and energizing, but it's it's a very different, different place. So that that's the selfish part and the the micro. But if I go to the macro, the other thing that's just so I I spent my entire career working with consultants, but I always got to be the guy on the other side of the table. So like one of the things I joke with people about is like I'm not used to reaching for the check at lunch or dinner. Like I'm used to being the client, so that I'm used to the consultant grabbing the bill and paying. And now I'm I'm the partner that's got to grab the bill and pay and So it's just it's the that mindset shift, but through all of the actions and activities has has been has been completely different. But but I'm loving it because you're it's an ability to learn and engage and just revitalize a lot of the skills and and things that I've learned over the years.

No, absolutely. So, you know, when when we got together and we kind of built the thesis around what's native, why native, why do we want to do this? You know, there was a couple of things that really stuck for us. One of them was that, you know, we we saw traditional consulting tending to bias towards one of two ends of the spectrum. So on one end of the spectrum, you've got these amazing firms that do great strategy work that can be really deep in in the business domain or or in in that side of the equation. And even inside that same firm, you've got the other side that's really good at implementation and execution. And oftentimes, even in a single firm, those two sides don't talk and they don't come together. And what we wanted to be able to do was build what we really talk about as consultancy first, advisory first consulting. And the idea is to get folks like myself and some of the folks on my team that have very hands-on experience inside specific industries. And we really try to focus in on. financial services and regulated industries. So P and C insurance, life and annuity, banking. so we we have people who've actually walked a mile in the shoes of the people that are our clients and our customers, first and foremost. So we want to be able to be that advisor, but we don't want to do it in kind of that ivory tower sort of way, where we're giving just big, big thoughts and abstract ideas of how to be better, but really focusing on tangible, concrete business problems. So the first leg is really like, can we can we bring expertise to a business problem from people who've actually lived that business problem in their life just like I did when when I was on the the customer side?

So I I so let's if we could back up just one just a half step. Like what the reason that we believe that we can do this advisory-led motion that combines advisory and implementation all in one package is actually the scaling power of AI. Right. So that that by being AI native, by starting with ways of working and solutions that are geared towards using utilizing AI. So basically at native, we use AI in everything that we're doing. From from scheduling meetings to building PowerPoints to gathering requirements to building our architecture to writing our code to to our deployments, all that we we've got AI nested into every one of our practices. And the idea was with starting over at this time, we had this wonderful opportunity to be able to utilize AI ourselves first, right? I can't sell AI to somebody else if I'm not using AI myself. So the idea was like we built all of our practices on this idea. So our HR has A AI, our payroll as AI, like everything that we're doing has some component of it that has an AI attribute that's been woven in to for us to be able to bring scale and for us to be able to bring speed. And and honestly, for people like myself who, you know, have had a pretty long career and are not young anymore, to have have that hands on experience with AI so that I'm not talking in the abstract. I'm talking about things that I'm doing and using every day. So that was the that was the the connector piece of like we knew we wanted to do this and we knew that AI was going to be our enabler to do it. So we had to like hold ourselves accountable to that. So everything internal was built around AI, which then leads to then how do we bring AI to our customers? And what we found, and and part of our thesis, honestly, was this idea that if you read earnings reports, if you read, you know, the the the investor days and things like that that large companies are putting out, there isn't There aren't any CEOs in particularly in the the regulated industries and financial services that are not talking about AI, the importance of AI to their expense targets, their growth targets, and their next generation of their company. But then when you peel that back a little bit and you see what have they actually done, what have they actually been able to deploy so far? You see a lot of AI that's been, you know, in innovation teams that's been tested. It's You know, they've got a working prototype, but you don't see a lot of it that's made it all the way to implementation and actually meaningful impact on employees' days and and on customer experiences. And so we knew we wanted to bring that and we knew that that was going to be a huge opportunity. So if we could figure out how to combine the AI needs and demands of these companies with a platform that actually enables that AI, that we would have a winning combination.

Sure. Well, so you know, a lot of it and you know the ours, you know, I'll I'll share our secret sauce of, you know, one of the ways that we're using AI is, you know, AI is both a benefit and a constraint on the model that we're using for our consulting. You know, the benefit is that it does create scalability. It does allow us to put more senior people in front of customers without the need to bring a massive team behind it. Right. So it's You know, not not to compare ourselves, but that idea of like forward-deployed engineers and the stuff that Palantir is doing where you see teams of one and two people going in and doing the work that you know a traditional consultancy would have brought dozens of people in to do. You know, we we we want to try to hew to that model as much as possible. and it's this idea of we bring the AI with us when we go into the client. But what that means, because we work in so many highly regulated industries and that we're working with financial services. You know, we were we were joking before, I'm not gonna go into Citibank and get approval to suddenly deploy all of my AI agents all throughout their systems and just crawl all around and and do whatever it is that we do. So we've built our entire model around this idea that no, we're gonna operate outside of the client's environment first. We'll we'll build to the problem that they're trying to solve in inside our environments, which allows us to bring our AI tools, our agents to to build that out. Once we get it to where the customer signs off on it and says that's exactly what we need, we then take that code and take the code, not the AI. We take the code and we deploy the code in the customer's environment. And this is where, you know, you and I were talking a little bit earlier. My background in product management really started to come into play here. Because what we're really doing is not only are we bringing an advisory first view to consulting, but we're also bringing a product management view to consulting. And so what we're doing, and and not in the way that we're, you know, we're selling, we're not a SaaS company, we're not, we're not building products and deploying them, but we're bringing a product mindset to solving these customers' problems. Right. And so when when you when you've been trained in product management and you know, I've I've been a big devotee of that whole space for a long time, you know, I I I love books like Inspired and the Silicon Valley product group and all of that great stuff. Like there's there's so much great work out there that I'm I'm a huge fan of. we're bringing this a lot of that mindset to this of how do we build products that delight the customer that we can then deploy for them. So we we can come in, we we take a product-like approach, we do a prototype, rapid prototyping, incredibly important. We try within 24 to 48 hours of getting the client brief to be able to have a hands-on prototype in a tool like Lovable that they can actually get in and click away at and see. Okay, so if we're going to fix this, this is exactly what it would look like. This is exactly how we would do it. So we build those prototypes, then we take those prototypes, and then inside our environment, we take the prototype and we turn it into a full proof of concept. So we'll take, we'll take four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, depending on the scope of what the customer is looking for, and actually translate their specific requirements into that prototype that we gave them. So they'll actually have their own. standalone application now that is to their requirements that matches their requirements to what they saw in the prototype. And that's a deployable chunk of code now. And we can take that and then in the last phase, we can do the implementation, which is the hard part, which is where you've got to you've got to hook into all of the legacy systems, solve all the data record problems and things like that. But we along the way, we did it so that the business and the business user had full control and access to what we were doing. So that it's not that at the end there was this big surprise that they they see a UI for the first time and they're like, What the hell is this? We built backwards to this is exactly their problem, this is what they need, this is how they want it to work. And then it actually is in their systems and working. So that that's our secret sauce to how we're operating.

Ha ha. Yeah. So our focus for our focus for AI is actually, and this is this is gonna sound really weird. Our focus for AI is we actually don't deliver a lot of the AI. So we we do AI without AI. So that's a you know it's oxymoronic, but so our our chosen platform, we we partner very closely with Service Now. And we believe that ServiceNow has, particularly for regulated industries, the best platform for AI orchestration. And so what that means is that there's There are components inside Service Now that are essential for making AI work effectively, even though they may not be AI themselves. So we we think about it as there's three components. The the first is you've got to be able to access and standardize the data from the customer. So they they've got a data mesh that we were able to bring the data through and be able to put it into this data fabric so that the data is accessible. There is an AI governance and set of tools. that are part of the ServiceNow platform for AI governance. They call it AI control tower. And then for regulated industries, we add on to that the specific modules that are needed to actually comply with with what's going on in those regulated markets and with the regulators. And then on top of that, we've got a case management workflow system where we build out the case so that we can then move the the business task to be completed through a series of actions. Those actions can be completed by human. or they can be completed by agents. And it really doesn't matter for what we're standing up. And why that's so important is that that means that we're building an AI infrastructure for the customer, not just to solve the problem and meet the technology where it is today, but as AI gets better, more robust and more trusted for critical decision making, it can easily be added into this orchestration in the future as well.

And the idea is because ServiceNow is an open platform and we're as a company, we're open to any of the the AI models and tools that the customer will may want to employ. It creates this environment where a couple of things happen that I think are actually magical. the first is is that you can think about it in terms of three three phases. The first is is that a lot of these companies are already repositioning their internal teams to build their own AI models. Right. So, you know, they, they contract with the hyperscalers, they get access to open AI, anthropic, whatever. And then on top of that, they're building their secret sauce. Right. The thing that that's going to differentiate them in the marketplace, they that they need to own, they're building that. So what we can do is we can help partner with them to deploy the models that they've built into their workflows. And then the second one is there's tons of companies out there, I mean we see them every day that are doing this kind of work. And you can buy those models. So as those companies have identified opportunities and companies they want to buy the model from, we can help accelerate their adoption of that model and help them bring that model to the business problem. And then the last is inside the ServiceNow ecosystem and inside what we're doing at Native, there are a whole bunch of accelerators and tools that we can bring for AI inside the workflow as well. So you end up with this really robust structure where the companies can be out building their own tools that are specific to what they need. They can go and shop and buy the best in class tools that are available in the marketplace. And they can take full advantage of the AI tools and agents that are inside the ServiceNow ecosystem already. And so you end up with this best of all worlds type ecosystem in place that allows a lot rapid adoption and change in in AI.

So what go ahead. so so you know what what I would say is like where we're having the most fun, right? So there's there's the obviously we're all capitalists and we all want to make good money, but where we're having the most fun. Where we have the most fun is this idea of there are there are a number of entrants in insurance, in financial services that are doing really interesting and exciting things.

Those don't tend to be the biggest and the oldest of the the ones that are in place. you know, we I I joke, you know, I c I come from one of those big old companies and they're they are doing cool things internally, but getting through procurement, getting through just being practical, right? If if I got one of those large insurance companies or large banks to agree to do something tomorrow. It could be six to twelve months getting through the procurement process and everything. We were joking about the your your ability to do podcasts with people like that. Yeah, it's it could be challenging because you've got to get through legal and procurement and and the CISO's office and all those things. And that we I want to go do work now. And so by by going down to the smaller, nimbler, you know, closer to startups, so whether it's some of the the managing general agencies, the MGAs that have launched and and are really going after a specialized part of the marketplace or smaller nimble carriers that have very progressive CIOs that want to do something splashy and big. Like those are the ones that we're having the most fun with. They're nimble, they're fast, they're willing to take on a new partner. They're they're very realistic in in their expectations of what they can do and how fast they can go.

So I that's good, you know, so we've we we started in April of this year. So we're not even six months into into our life cycle and we're having a blast and having a lot of fun. native came together through a series of roll-ups, not just not just starting as bootstrap. So we we actually started by rolling some companies in to kind of get our foundation going. So when I look forward over the next twelve, eighteen months, I'm excited about the idea of finding other partners to come in and join native as well that bring specialization, that bring something that we don't already have that we can then offer our customers as as extended services around what we're doing. So I'm I'm very excited about the idea of, you know, we've we've got a couple that are in works that by the time this goes up, they may even be closed. but there's a couple of other that we're out prospecting. And so we'd love to continue to grow by kind of bringing other smaller boutiques that that kind of align to how we think and how we're operating, bringing them into this. So that's one piece of it. The other piece that I'm really excited about is October first, we're actually launching our our European expansion. So you know, right on the six month mark, we we founded in the US and that's where we got started. but we've actually got our U UK headquarters and and lead starting on October first. And you know, we're excited to to push into into UK and and the rest of Europe. So that's very exciting for us. so it won't be just North America. It'll be North America and UK, EU. So we're very excited about that expansion to keep going. And then honestly, to just keep taking on more and more customers and clients that that think about these business problems the way that we're approaching them. So we're really excited about that as well.

So I yeah, so I'll share two, one personal and and one bigger picture. The personal one is I'm used to working for a very mature over a hundred year old company where the the cash register rings every day. Right. So it's like there like with there there is market presence. There is, you know, there there is so much sales, so many things going on that you're not living and dying by each sale. That's that those are bound to happen because you've been doing this for so long. Being a being in a consultancy that's six months old, I have to recalibrate around the fact that. Some days you don't sell anything and that's that's okay. You just get back at it the next day and building that new resiliency. And luckily my partners that co-founded with me have that from their past, but from my past, this is all brand new. And like, you know, they start to panic that we haven't sold anything this week. What do we do? And they're like, That's actually more normal than not in months month five of a startup to to go a week without selling something. So that's okay. so that that's the the personal side on on the the bigger picture on on the professional side, I think it's, you know, we're we're in a really turbulent period with AI right now. Right. And and so, you know, you we've got like the the head of I can't remember it's the head of anthropic or the head of open AI that was like petitioning the US government to put restraints on AI development to slow things down. That things are you know they like we're in this incredibly turbulent period where I would say When we launched six months ago, it was all rainbows and sunshine when it came to AI and like let's go. And now it's like, well, data centers are bad and runaway AI and like all of these other like things that you know, concepts that maybe we didn't even think about as as recent as six months ago are now on the headlines. And that's making, you know, buying decisions, procurement decisions, making people take a pause and say, Well, wait a second. I want to do AI, but like I I can't have runaway bots inside my environment that are trying to hack hugging face or whatever. Like you know, that that would be a bad day for me. So so I think you know, it's it's a it's a volatile time that we're in as and I mean you could track it just watching the share prices of the publicly traded parts of the AI ecosystem moving up and down, just day to day, right? Like it so you like but but that is expressed in the stock market and overall sentiment. But we're feeling that like in live meetings with in live pitch meetings with customers where people are now asking all of these questions that, you know, they they all need to be answered and addressed, but they're things that maybe we didn't even contemplate a few months ago.

Hey, it's been great. It's great for us when we're doing a bunch of development and all of a sudden we get all our fable credits back.

Now that you're you are talking to me live, but but all of your views will be my bots swarming your your your YouTube. Yeah exactly. Yeah. So, you know, it's we're nat we're native, spelled with an AI in the middle. So N-A-I-T-I-V, and at native dot com. that's the best place to reach out to reach out through. check out our website. It's got all sorts of things and background on what we're doing, who we're working with, and even demos of some of the the things that we've built. so that's the best place. And you know, we're we're in the middle of conference season and And things like that as well. So, you know, we'll we'll be in Vegas in a couple of weeks at Insure Tech Connect. We'll be in London a few weeks after that at the Service Now big partner event. And so we're you know, we're we're we're making the round. So check there's there's actually an events page on native.com and see where we are in the world as well.

Thanks.