For the past three years, the AI story was a race to build a better model. Every few months, a company released one that was faster, smarter and cheaper. In 2026, the story changed. The biggest AI announcements of the year were not new models at all. They were new companies built for one purpose — putting engineers inside other companies to make AI work there.

In May 2026, OpenAI launched a new company for this, backed by more than $4 billion. Its engineers move into a customer’s business, learn how the work really gets done and stay until the AI works in day-to-day use. Days earlier, Anthropic announced a similar company of its own, built for mid-sized businesses that do not have enough technical staff to do this work themselves.

These engineers have a name: forward-deployed engineers. The idea started at Palantir. Instead of selling software and wishing the customer luck, the engineer sits with the customer’s own team and connects the AI to the company’s real information and real way of working. They are not judged on advice or presentations. They are judged on one thing — whether the system still works when real customers, real orders and real problems show up.

The labs have put deployment at the center of the business

This is a real change. Big technology companies were never supposed to work this way. The old model was clean — build a product once and sell it to everyone. When the world’s leading AI companies spend billions to put their own people inside customer businesses, they are admitting something important. The scarce thing is no longer the AI itself. It is people who can make AI work inside a real business.

The size of the spending makes the point. Read together, the moves of this one spring form a clear pattern: Deployment has become the main event in AI in 2026, with billions aimed at the same job. These leaders now believe value is created on the day a system starts working inside a business — and keeps working.

The pilot era showed everyone where AI projects really break

This change did not come from a theory. It came from three hard years of test projects. An AI test looks wonderful in a demonstration — the data is clean, the users are friendly, and the results are impressive. Then the system meets the real business, and it struggles.

Real business information is messy. The same customer appears three times under three slightly different names. Prices are out of date. Every department keeps its own version of the truth. An AI system cannot spot any of this. It trusts what it finds and acts on it, quickly and confidently. That is where most AI projects quietly die — not in the demonstration, but in the first months of real use.

The numbers back this up. Gartner predicts that through 2026, companies will give up on 60% of AI projects that are not built on data that is ready for AI — data that is accurate, current and agreed across the business. In the same research, 63% of companies said they either do not manage their data the way AI needs, or are not sure that they do.

Gartner also warns that more than 40% of AI agent projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, because of rising costs, unclear results and weak controls. The AI itself is not on that list of reasons. The problem is the ground it stands on — the data, the daily process and the basic rules around it. That ground is exactly what a forward-deployed engineer is sent in to fix.

I have led data and AI teams for years, and this matches what I have seen. Businesses did not learn that AI was weak. They learned that their own house was not ready for it. Deployment is the work of getting the house ready.

The future of AI will be decided inside ordinary businesses

So where is this heading? Gartner expects that by the end of 2026, 40% of business software will come with built-in AI agents that handle specific tasks, up from less than 5% in 2025. By 2028, it predicts, at least 15% of everyday work decisions will be made by AI on its own.

If even part of that happens, the key question for a business changes. It will not be which AI you buy — AI will keep getting better and cheaper, whoever sells it. The question will be whether your business is ready. Is your information clean and agreed in one place? Do you have clear examples of what a good result looks like? Are the rules clear for what AI may do alone and what a person must approve?

There is a second shift inside this one. The team that works inside a business every day learns how it truly runs — where time is wasted, where mistakes happen and where money is made. That knowledge decides what gets bought next. This is why the labs moved so fast. The engineer inside the building is becoming the most important seat in AI, and no one wants a rival sitting in it.

For founders and smaller companies, this is good news. The old race rewarded whoever could spend the most on technology. The new one rewards whoever understands a customer’s real work the deepest. Many of the important AI companies of the next decade will not build models. They will make AI work, industry by industry and business by business.

New models will keep making headlines, and they deserve to. But the future of AI will not be settled in a laboratory. It will be settled in offices, warehouses, clinics and shops, by people doing the unglamorous work of making AI succeed in real life. That work is deployment. And deployment is the main event now.

For the past three years, the AI story was a race to build a better model. Every few months, a company released one that was faster, smarter and cheaper. In 2026, the story changed. The biggest AI announcements of the year were not new models at all. They were new companies built for one purpose — putting engineers inside other companies to make AI work there.

In May 2026, OpenAI launched a new company for this, backed by more than $4 billion. Its engineers move into a customer’s business, learn how the work really gets done and stay until the AI works in day-to-day use. Days earlier, Anthropic announced a similar company of its own, built for mid-sized businesses that do not have enough technical staff to do this work themselves.

These engineers have a name: forward-deployed engineers. The idea started at Palantir. Instead of selling software and wishing the customer luck, the engineer sits with the customer’s own team and connects the AI to the company’s real information and real way of working. They are not judged on advice or presentations. They are judged on one thing — whether the system still works when real customers, real orders and real problems show up.

“I don’t like him. He’s rude.” That was the chatter I was hearing about our newest hire, an IT whiz from Ankara in my native Turkey. 

Dismayed as I was to hear this assessment, I wasn’t totally surprised. The person who made it was American; exactly the sort of eternally upbeat, outgoing person the country’s reputation is built upon. Our new hire, on the other hand, was more introverted and subdued — he was polite, but not overly focused on pleasantries. 

What was happening here wasn’t a difference in personality as much as culture. I experienced this myself when I first moved to the U.S. — people were so friendly, it was almost unnerving. It took me a while to realize the friendliness wasn’t fake. Nor was it the same thing as closeness. Americans will ask how you’re doing, mean it for the few seconds it takes to respond and move on. In Turkey, you don’t ask unless you have the time to actually hear the answer. It took time for me to understand this and adapt to it. 

Jotform has offices across five countries; even within those offices, our teams are incredibly diverse. Our strength comes from our differing backgrounds and perspectives, but they can also lead to moments of friction, like the one with our new hire. As leaders, it’s incumbent on us to build a culture that leverages these differences rather than suffers from them. Here’s how. 

Hire open-minded people

Hiring is one of the areas I refuse to delegate completely — it’s just too important. By the time we’ve narrowed the field to a handful of candidates for a position, it’s clear that any one of them has the qualifications needed to do the job well. But when making a final hiring decision, I want to learn more about how they think. 

One of the key qualities I always look for? Open-mindedness. 

Open-minded people don’t assume their default way of thinking is automatically the right one. When something collides with their perspective, they don’t dismiss it — they want to know more. 

To find this, I like to ask candidates to tell me about a time they were proven wrong. Do they get defensive and shift blame, or do they walk me through what changed their mind? The answer tells me whether they’ll bring that same flexibility to a teammate who does things differently than they expect.

Get your teams together 

There are several reasons that I have my teams work in-office, not the least of which is that remote workers tend to struggle more with isolation and stress than onsite workers, and experience lower overall well-being. 

That’s in part because so much is lost when we interact only through screens. Nonverbal communication, like body language and tone of voice, make up the bulk of how we present ourselves to others, much of which get flattened out online. If you recall the feeling of emptiness and exhaustion that often accompanied a pandemic-era online happy hour or team-building exercise, you know what I’m talking about. 

At my company, we have what we call Jotformers Week, in which employees from nearly two dozen countries gather together for several days of camaraderie. And because no one likes forced fun, we ask what would make the experience meaningful for participants, ensuring everyone has a say in how the time is spent. 

These retreats build a sense of cohesion, filling in the gaps that time and distance tend to create. A tone that seemed cold over Slack gets clarified over dinner. A silence that may have seemed disagreement turns out to be the way someone gathers their thoughts. Our American team quickly found out that our new Turkish IT hire only seems stern; he actually has a quietly wicked sense of humor that regularly has the group in stitches. 

Making time for in-person team building is an expense, to be sure. But having your employees feel genuinely connected, even across oceans? That’s priceless. 

Leave less room for interpretation

In the absence of information, people will make it up, the saying goes. Ambiguity tends to breed misunderstandings, which can quickly erode the culture you’ve worked so hard to create. 

Don’t leave room for misinterpretation. Write down what your company stands for, and make sure everyone sees it. Reinforce it regularly in visible forums like company-wide newsletters and all-hands calls. 

Also, be clear about expectations. At Jotform, I encourage employees to sign off on nights and weekends. When they take PTO, I tell them to delete Slack off their phones and truly take time to refresh and recharge. This way, no one has to spend their family vacation stressing about whether they’re expected to check in — they already have the answer, no interpretation or guessing needed. 

Not only does this practice create a sense of psychological safety, it also closes the gap where cultural misunderstanding tends to take root. The rule is just the rule, the same for everyone reading it. 

Misunderstandings happen, especially when you have a culturally diverse team. Good leaders encourage their employees to approach differences with curiosity, create opportunities for team-building and reduce ambiguity.

“I don’t like him. He’s rude.” That was the chatter I was hearing about our newest hire, an IT whiz from Ankara in my native Turkey. 

Dismayed as I was to hear this assessment, I wasn’t totally surprised. The person who made it was American; exactly the sort of eternally upbeat, outgoing person the country’s reputation is built upon. Our new hire, on the other hand, was more introverted and subdued — he was polite, but not overly focused on pleasantries. 

What was happening here wasn’t a difference in personality as much as culture. I experienced this myself when I first moved to the U.S. — people were so friendly, it was almost unnerving. It took me a while to realize the friendliness wasn’t fake. Nor was it the same thing as closeness. Americans will ask how you’re doing, mean it for the few seconds it takes to respond and move on. In Turkey, you don’t ask unless you have the time to actually hear the answer. It took time for me to understand this and adapt to it. 

“Shots, shots, shots! Come on, you can do a shot,” my former boss said, shouting at me at the makeshift bar. It was our quarterly offsite, and my boss wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had begun pressuring me and mocking me in front of the rest of the team. I felt like I was at a college frat party. I finally relented. I did the tequila shot. And for the remainder of my time working for this boss, I walked around team outings and happy hours and off-sites with a “vodka tonic.” I kept pretending to drink with a glass full of ice, filled with club soda and lime wedges, just so he would leave me alone.

And I am not the only one who feels this way. Apparently, 33% of employees don’t want to drink at work events. And like me, 15% of employees felt obligated to drink, so they grabbed a glass of wine, a beer or maybe even a shot. Being pressured to drink may create negative social energy, because not everyone drinks. Not everyone feels comfortable drinking with their boss. Employees may decide to disengage or skip out on happy hours and team bonding events centered around alcohol altogether.

Alcohol shouldn’t be the only way we form connections at work. Start with these three ways to build better bonds with each other at work, that doesn’t include a shot of tequila or a glass of chardonnay.

1. Well-being hours are the new happy hour

According to research from Wellhub, a corporate wellness platform, “wellness hour” is the new happy hour. In fact, Tuesdays at 6 p.m. is the peak time for wellness across the globe, replacing the happy hour. Employees are more and more focused on nutrition, healthy habits, mental well-being and fitness.

“For a long time, team bonding meant happy hour,” says Cesar Carvalho, CEO and co-founder of Wellhub.  “I think that’s changing, and it should. Movement and recovery aren’t a break from the workday anymore. They’re what makes the rest of the day actually work.” 

Instead of bonding over a glass of wine, do a spin class together, go for a run or try a yoga class. If you are traveling as a team and in a new city, consider a walking tour together to explore new neighborhoods. You can also make walking meetings part of your team’s traditions and step away from the keyboard. You can bond over physical activity rather than hanging out at an overcrowded bar.

2. Book clubs are making a comeback

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a number of companies have started business book clubs, and my recent book was included: The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses. These were self-organized efforts, where employees reached out to let me know they were reading my book as a team, sending pictures and, in some cases, a summary of what they discussed.

According to Eventbrite, book club events have grown 31% from recent data from the platform. Book clubs are transforming social scenes, helping build friendships and connections in a time when people are seeking more community. Book clubs can help teach us new skills and also transform our connections at work too.

“Leaders continue to struggle with how to keep employees engaged and how to help employees learn and stay curious,” says Tracy Avin, Founder, TroopHR, a premier community for modern HR leaders to grow together. “Reading books together gives people something meaningful to bond over. Instead of asking, ‘What are we drinking?’ we’re asking, ‘What are we thinking about?’ That shift can create deeper conversations, stronger connections and a culture where people keep learning from one another long after the book club gathering is over.”

3. Make an impact together 

Volunteer together. In the past, I have organized volunteer days with Dress for Success, Habitat for Humanity, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and Meals on Wheels America. You can also research and contact a food pantry, community garden or an animal shelter to build deeper connections locally. If you build a relationship with an organization, this doesn’t have to be a one-off. You can show up as a team once every quarter to make an impact and create stronger team connections. 

I find that when I volunteer with my team, we are working toward something bigger than OKRs or annual goals. We spend time together, learn a new skill and watch how we can collectively make an impact. We also discover new things about each other. This can be far more meaningful than being pressured into doing tequila shots together.

We don’t have to drink together to bond at work. Some of us enjoy a glass of chardonnay, while others would prefer to just stick to a club soda. We need reasons to talk, laugh, celebrate and spend time together that don’t depend on what’s in our glasses. The best workplace cultures I have been part of don’t rely on the happy hour. They are built around how we meaningfully connect.

“Shots, shots, shots! Come on, you can do a shot,” my former boss said, shouting at me at the makeshift bar. It was our quarterly offsite, and my boss wouldn’t take no for an answer. He had begun pressuring me and mocking me in front of the rest of the team. I felt like I was at a college frat party. I finally relented. I did the tequila shot. And for the remainder of my time working for this boss, I walked around team outings and happy hours and off-sites with a “vodka tonic.” I kept pretending to drink with a glass full of ice, filled with club soda and lime wedges, just so he would leave me alone.

And I am not the only one who feels this way. Apparently, 33% of employees don’t want to drink at work events. And like me, 15% of employees felt obligated to drink, so they grabbed a glass of wine, a beer or maybe even a shot. Being pressured to drink may create negative social energy, because not everyone drinks. Not everyone feels comfortable drinking with their boss. Employees may decide to disengage or skip out on happy hours and team bonding events centered around alcohol altogether.

Alcohol shouldn’t be the only way we form connections at work. Start with these three ways to build better bonds with each other at work, that doesn’t include a shot of tequila or a glass of chardonnay.

Walt Disney Co. is preparing to swing the axe again. The entertainment giant plans to cut thousands of jobs and has asked some managers to find 20% in annual cost savings, Bloomberg reports.

Not all of it will come from pink slips. Some savings could come from trimming other expenses, and certain divisions will get hit harder than others. The plan is to take part of that money and put it right back into the business. CEO Josh D’Amaro wants to spend it on film and TV programming, technology, theme parks and cruises. Disney declined to comment.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because Disney layoffs have become a regular thing. The company has already cut billions in costs and thousands of jobs in recent years, reaching everything from ABC and ESPN to Pixar and the parks. It had 231,000 employees worldwide at the end of its last fiscal year.

Disney President Dana Walden summed up the mood at a Bloomberg conference last month: “We must survive and thrive and grow.”

Walt Disney Co. is preparing to swing the axe again. The entertainment giant plans to cut thousands of jobs and has asked some managers to find 20% in annual cost savings, Bloomberg reports.

Not all of it will come from pink slips. Some savings could come from trimming other expenses, and certain divisions will get hit harder than others. The plan is to take part of that money and put it right back into the business. CEO Josh D’Amaro wants to spend it on film and TV programming, technology, theme parks and cruises. Disney declined to comment.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because Disney layoffs have become a regular thing. The company has already cut billions in costs and thousands of jobs in recent years, reaching everything from ABC and ESPN to Pixar and the parks. It had 231,000 employees worldwide at the end of its last fiscal year.

Disney President Dana Walden summed up the mood at a Bloomberg conference last month: “We must survive and thrive and grow.”

For Mehul Nariyawala, a household product’s costly mistake was the jumping-off point for a $20 million company. Nariyawala had a $1,000 robot vacuum, which he watched destroy a rug in his home while he was away. The machine had powerful suction but wasn’t intelligent enough to free itself from the rug. It got stuck, kept running for 45 minutes and tore away a patch of the rug.

“That was a realization that, Wow, this thing is really stupid,” Nariyawala tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. Worse, he found that many robot vacuums could not reliably return to their own charging docks. “To me, it’s an oxymoron to call these things robots because if it’s a robot and it can’t even find its own dock, what good is it?” he says.

That irritation planted the seed for Matic, the home-robotics company Nariyawala co-founded with CEO Navneet Dalal after the pair left Google Nest in 2017. Nariyawala is Matic’s president. Their goal was not simply to make another robot vacuum. It was to build a machine that could safely and quietly navigate the disorder of an actual home, avoiding pets, toys, cords, spills, furniture and the people moving through it.

Nariyawala says Matic has sold more than 13,000 robots since its November 2024 launch, generating an estimated $15 million to $20 million in revenue. Matic’s robot vacuum costs $1,495. Nariyawala said the company employs about 110 people and is aiming to sell 30,000 robots by year-end.

Outlining the problem

Before they started building Matic, the co-founders did something less glamorous: They wrote a 21-page “problem memo.”

Instead of jumping to a solution, Nariyawala says, they asked what customers disliked about current products, why robot vacuums failed them and what a genuinely useful home robot would need to do.

“We just kept going again and again and again at every level until we deeply understood the problem,” he says.

That process eventually produced Matic’s first product, a privacy-focused robot vacuum designed around computer vision, on-device processing and a more human-like understanding of a home.

Start with the problem

Nariyawala’s path to Matic began in India, where he grew up. He moved to the United States in high school and attended the University of Maryland for undergraduate studies. After graduating in 1999, he joined a startup based in Northern Virginia that burned through $30 million in 11 months.

“It turned out to be a spectacular failure,” he says. “That was my how-not-to-ruin-a-startup 101.”

After a stint in consulting at Accenture and an MBA from Chicago Booth, Nariyawala joined Like.com in 2005, an early Silicon Valley computer-vision startup. There, he met Dalal, a researcher and engineer whose doctoral work became influential in the field of classical computer vision.

Google acquired Like.com in 2010. Nariyawala and Dalal then formed Flutter, a gesture-recognition startup that let people control iTunes and Spotify using a webcam. Users could wave to change a song or make a shushing motion to mute audio. The app reached No. 1 in Apple’s Mac App Store in 73 countries in 2012, according to Nariyawala.

But the founders learned a crucial product lesson: A flashy interface does not necessarily create a business.

“No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Today I’m gonna buy gestures,’” Nariyawala says. “It’s a really cool app but not necessarily a product that can potentially generate revenue.”

Another acquisition

Google acquired Flutter in late 2013. The founders later moved to Nest, where Nariyawala led products in the Nest camera portfolio, including the Nest Cam, Nest Hello doorbell and related devices. Dalal led perception and computer-vision work on the same set of products.

At Nest, Nariyawala learned that a product is more than its hardware or software. It encompasses every point a customer encounters the company, from learning about the product to purchasing, onboarding, receiving support and deciding whether to stay loyal to the brand or not.

“One of the biggest learnings there was that it’s really just about the entire experience of the product,” he says.

Customer support, he argues, is especially important for an expensive consumer device. “When they reach out to you, that’s the first time they’re meeting humans behind Matic,” he says. “How we respond to that is actually really, really critical.”

A privacy-first approach

Matic’s founding idea grew from both professional experience and family life. While working on Nest cameras, Nariyawala noticed that many indoor cameras were pointed outside. He could personally relate. His wife had done the same thing, and after leaving Google, he says she did not want any indoor cameras monitoring their home.

“That’s when I realized that for her, privacy mattered,” he says.

The founders concluded they did not want to trade away privacy merely to automate a household chore. They wanted a robot that would process its understanding of the home locally rather than operate like an always-recording cloud-connected camera.

“As fathers and homeowners, we don’t want to jeopardize privacy just to keep our floors clean,” Nariyawala says. “Why would I invite something that is recording them and putting it out onto the cloud?”

The pair saw a broader opportunity in the gap between the robotics ambitions emerging in self-driving cars and the mediocre performance of household cleaning robots. If companies believed they could develop vehicles capable of safely navigating roads, Nariyawala wondered, why was no one making a household robot that could move through a living room without crashing into objects?

Matic’s unique answer to cluttered homes

Nariyawala says that homes are among the most difficult environments for robots because they are cluttered, dynamic, and highly personal. Furniture shifts. Lighting changes. Children leave toys out. Pets cross a room. A cord may be on the floor one day and gone the next.

Matic’s answer was a vision-based system built around two RGB cameras and local computing. Rather than use the flat, circular shape common in robot vacuums, the company opted for a taller machine that gives its cameras a more useful perspective of the room.

“We wanted to build a vantage point that was much more like a human crawling child,” Nariyawala says.

That concept reflects Dalal’s broader philosophy: Do not bet against nature. Human beings learn to perceive their surroundings before they learn more complex skills, Nariyawala says. Young children learn where they can walk, what they should avoid, how to get from one room to another, and how not to fall down stairs. Matic’s early work focused on giving a robot some of those same foundational abilities.

“The indoor world is entirely built by humans for humans,” he says.

Self-funding the company

Nariyawala and Dalal did not immediately seek venture funding. Having founded companies before and seen what happens after an acquisition, they wanted to build Matic for the long haul. Their ambition extended beyond cleaning floors.

“We’re really building the Apple of home robotics,” Nariyawala says.

That long-term vision informed an unusual early decision. The cofounders self-funded Matic for roughly its first year and a half. They agreed not to raise outside capital until they had a working prototype and had addressed major technical risks.

“Raising funding is never easy, but when you have gone through an exit and you try to do a second startup, it is slightly easier,” Nariyawala says. “But because it’s slightly easier, you don’t actually spend more time thinking through and developing your idea, and that sometimes plays a catastrophic [role].”

The team focused on proving key capabilities: depth perception using two cameras, voice and gesture recognition, quieter cleaning and a wheel-base design. Its first prototype arrived in 2018. By spring 2019, it had developed an early demonstration in which a person could speak to the robot, point to a mess and tell it to clean a specific spot.

Only then did the founders begin raising money. “Venture capital funding, or institutional funding, is like rocket fuel,” Nariyawala says. “The best time to go get rocket fuel is when your rocket is ready and docked.”

In 2019, Matic attracted early investment from entrepreneurs including Jack Dorsey, Stripe cofounders Patrick and John Collison and Nest cofounder Matt Rogers.

A longer journey than expected

Matic has raised $115 million in outside investment to date, with additional personal investment from the founders.

The journey took longer than planned. The founders originally thought they might ship around 2020 or 2021. Matic instead began shipping in November 2024.

In August, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) banned foreign-made advanced robots, including robot vacuums. The ruling prohibited new foreign-made models from getting future import and sales approval.

Nariyawala says that the ban does not affect Matic and instead makes it “easier” for the company to build robots in the U.S. From day one, the company has been focused on security and privacy, he says. Their existing robot is already grandfathered in for sale in the U.S., and their next set of robots is heading in the right direction to move through the FCC ban. The company is determined to source its components in the U.S.

“We cannot guarantee the security and privacy of the robot unless we assemble it in the United States,” Nariyawala says. “So for us, designing and assembling it here and putting all the software here was not an optional thing. That was something we always wanted to do, and we did that from 2017 onwards.”

Nariyawala says he reached out to the FCC after the ban was announced and showed them a path to how Matic will source as many components in the U.S. as possible moving forward.

“The FCC and government have been very much accommodating and understanding what we’re doing,” Nariyawala says. “Their entire point is that yes, you guys are heading in the right direction. So as long as it’s heading in the right direction, we’re supportive of it. We just have to show that we’re pushing in that direction.”

An intelligent machine

Matic now positions its vacuum as an intelligent, autonomous machine rather than a device that follows a fixed or random cleaning routine. Nariyawala contrasts that vision with early robot vacuums, which he compares to a blindfolded person bouncing from wall to wall.

“Hardware is hard,” Nariyawala says. “If hardware is 10 times harder than software, then building a robot is 100 times harder than software.”

Many current robot vacuums use a form of LiDAR sensing, he says, which can help a machine detect walls and certain obstacles but does not provide enough context to distinguish among a person, a cabinet, a pet, or a pile of clothes.

“It has no contextual awareness,” he says.

Matic’s system is meant to create a three-dimensional, evolving understanding of a home. Nariyawala describes this as an “absolute map,” rather than a map that only orients the robot relative to its charging dock. The distinction matters, he says, because a robot should be able to understand its environment even if the dock is moved.

A game-changing update

Matic recently introduced “Cues,” an update enabling users to communicate with the robot through voice commands and gestures. Through the update, the robot can understand more than 70 spoken languages, and users can point to an area they want cleaned to have the robot take care of a mess.

The robot has an accompanying app that remains necessary for onboarding and detailed settings, such as setting no-go zones, but the company wants routine interaction to feel more natural.

“If this is truly an intelligent robot, then we should be able to communicate with it in the same exact way that we communicate with each other,” Nariyawala says.

The approach is designed for households that include children, older adults, people who do not want to use another app and family members who may not speak English — personalized experiences for different users.

Growth strategies

Matic has focused less on traditional marketing than on getting customers to talk about the product. Nariyawala says roughly two-thirds of orders have come through word-of-mouth referrals, and the company did little marketing before this year.

“The only evergreen marketing channel is a great product,” he says. “When you build something really unexpected, delightful that customers love, they can’t help talking about it.”

For Nariyawala, Matic’s floor-cleaning robot is only the first stage. The company’s roadmap imagines a “trusted organizer” that can handle simpler tasks, followed by a more capable household robot that can take on complex planning and execution.

But he returns repeatedly to the same principle that shaped the company’s original 21-page memo: The technology is not the product. The customer’s problem is.

“Customers don’t want hardware or robots,” he says. “They want a solution to their problems.”

Spend 30 minutes with an excellent veteran broker and something interesting usually happens. They’ll explain why a specific neighborhood that looks identical to the one next to it consistently outperforms it at resale. They’ll describe the exact moment in a negotiation when a seller’s resolve breaks and how they learned to recognize it 15 years ago. They’ll tell you which renovation projects reliably return value in their market and which ones buyers quietly discount even when they look expensive. They’ll mention the pattern they’ve watched repeat with first-time buyers for two decades that no amount of pre-purchase education seems to prevent.

Then you look at their Instagram and it says JUST SOLD in large letters over a photograph of a front door.

That gap, between what someone actually knows and what they make public, is one of the more expensive disconnects in professional marketing. And it’s not unique to real estate. Lawyers who’ve spent 20 years navigating a specific type of litigation have pattern recognition their clients would genuinely value if it ever made it out of client conversations. Executives who’ve managed through three recessions understand something about organizational behavior that no business school curriculum captures. Financial advisors who’ve watched clients make the same behavioral mistakes across multiple market cycles carry insight that the average investor would pay serious attention to if it were ever made accessible.

The problem is rarely that these people lack something worth saying. It’s that what they know has become so familiar to them that they’ve stopped recognizing it as knowledge.

Expertise becomes invisible through repetition

There’s something that happens when you’ve seen the same pattern play out hundreds of times. It stops feeling like insight and starts feeling like obvious. The broker who’s watched buyers consistently underestimate carrying costs on older properties no longer experiences that as a revelation. It’s just a thing they know. It stopped surprising them around year six. So it doesn’t occur to them that a first-time buyer encountering this reality for the first time might find it genuinely useful to hear before they’re already in contract.

This is the core problem. Expertise normalizes. The more you know about something, the worse you tend to be at judging what’s interesting about what you know. Familiarity is the enemy of recognizing value.

Which means the job of turning expertise into public-facing content is rarely about inventing new ideas. It’s about extraction. Pulling out what’s already there, what’s been sitting in client conversations and private observations for years, and making it visible to people who haven’t spent a decade accumulating the same experience.

Content calendars start in the wrong place

Most professional marketing starts with a version of the same question. What should we post this week? A social media manager gets brought in, templates get built, a content calendar gets assembled and the result is a reliable stream of announcements, generic industry commentary, and the kind of motivational content that gets produced when nobody can think of anything specific to say.

A social media manager cannot manufacture 10 years of pattern recognition. They can execute. They can produce. They can distribute. But the raw material has to come from somewhere, and if it isn’t being extracted from the actual expertise of the professional, it gets replaced with something generic that could have come from anyone.

The better starting question is not what we should post. It’s what we actually know that the market hasn’t heard clearly yet. Those are genuinely different questions, and they produce genuinely different answers.

The questions that tend to unlock useful material are specific, and most professionals haven’t been asked them in the context of their public content.

What do clients ask you repeatedly? Repeated questions are a signal. They mean the market is confused about something and hasn’t found a satisfying answer yet. Every repeated question is a piece of content waiting to exist. The broker who gets asked every spring whether it’s better to buy now or wait through summer has answered that question a hundred times privately. They’ve never written it down publicly once.

What does your industry believe that you think is wrong? Contrarian expertise is some of the most valuable material a professional can produce, and most of them are sitting on it quietly. The financial advisor who thinks conventional wisdom about a specific type of account is actively harmful to the clients who follow it. The broker who’s watched a popular renovation strategy underdeliver in their specific market for fifteen years while the rest of the industry keeps recommending it.

What can you predict because you’ve seen it 100 times? Pattern recognition accumulated through repetition is something generalists and newcomers genuinely cannot replicate. The experienced professional who knows which type of seller is going to change their mind about price after the first two weeks on market, or which buyer behavior signals that an offer isn’t going to survive inspection, is carrying proprietary knowledge. Most of them have never thought of it that way.

What seems obvious to you but consistently surprises clients? This is often the richest material. The things that feel too basic to mention are often the things the audience most needs to hear. The curse of expertise is assuming shared context that doesn’t exist.

What happened recently that reminded you of something you learned 10 years ago? This one turns experience into timely commentary without requiring a formal opinion column. It’s just: Here’s what I watched happen this week and here’s the pattern underneath it that I’ve seen before.

Those answers become articles. They become media commentary when a journalist needs a credible source. They become speaking topics. They become the newsletter that clients actually read because it contains something they couldn’t have gotten from a generic industry publication.

Knowledge that stays private helps one person at a time

Here’s the distinction that matters. Expertise kept inside client conversations helps the specific people sitting across from you at that moment. It builds a reputation slowly, through word of mouth, one relationship at a time.

Expertise that gets externalized travels without you. An article that captures a genuine insight reaches people who have never met you and may never hire you but who now associate your name with a perspective they found useful. A piece of commentary that captures something real about market behavior becomes a credential that a press mention or a referral can point to. The insight that got shared in a client meeting last Tuesday becomes, when written down, something that works on your behalf indefinitely.

Great thought leadership is usually extraction, not creation. The material is already there. Most experts just haven’t been asked the right questions to get it out.

Spend 30 minutes with an excellent veteran broker and something interesting usually happens. They’ll explain why a specific neighborhood that looks identical to the one next to it consistently outperforms it at resale. They’ll describe the exact moment in a negotiation when a seller’s resolve breaks and how they learned to recognize it 15 years ago. They’ll tell you which renovation projects reliably return value in their market and which ones buyers quietly discount even when they look expensive. They’ll mention the pattern they’ve watched repeat with first-time buyers for two decades that no amount of pre-purchase education seems to prevent.

Then you look at their Instagram and it says JUST SOLD in large letters over a photograph of a front door.

That gap, between what someone actually knows and what they make public, is one of the more expensive disconnects in professional marketing. And it’s not unique to real estate. Lawyers who’ve spent 20 years navigating a specific type of litigation have pattern recognition their clients would genuinely value if it ever made it out of client conversations. Executives who’ve managed through three recessions understand something about organizational behavior that no business school curriculum captures. Financial advisors who’ve watched clients make the same behavioral mistakes across multiple market cycles carry insight that the average investor would pay serious attention to if it were ever made accessible.

There are some founders who think that only good ideas can come from them. Haniff Brown is not one of those founders.

In 2024, the Williams College math major and former private equity investor was promoting his company Fit:match’s AI body-scanning technology as a way to help shoppers find clothes that fit. Then a major English soccer team asked if he’d bring the tech to their youth academy for an entirely different use. He almost said no, but went anyway, and after listening to the coaches, he found an entirely different use for the tech — and much bigger business in the process.

Today, Fit:match partners with FIFA, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball to deliver athletes a full set of anthropometric and body-composition measurements in seconds. Brown spoke with Entrepreneur to share his insights and advice for building, growing and seizing unexpected opportunities.

Let’s start with the elevator pitch. What is Fit:match?
Fit:match is a body intelligence platform. Think of us almost like the ChatGPT or the Claude or the Gemini of the human body. We provide remote access to body intelligence and body analytics at scale. So if you want precision or data analytics on the human body, we are the company providing that for hospitals, for athletes, and coaches, and really across the board.

Talk to us about the pivot from your tech focusing on people buying clothing.
I think it was in 2024 when we got a call from a really large sports team in England. We were doing some work in a retailer and they said to us, “Hey, we really like your technology. I know that you’re using it for shopping, but can you swing by our youth academy out in the countryside in England?” At first, we were like, no, the technology is built for this purpose. But sometimes as an entrepreneur, you just have to take a risk and you have to go with your gut. And I felt, why not? So when I was there, I started to talk to the coaches, I started to talk to the scouts and then the sports scientists. And that really was the aha moment for us. What they told us at that academy is, “Hey, if you can get this body scanning process down to 10 to 15 seconds, you would unlock a huge advantage for us.” Because most assessments in sports take a long time and involve pulling an athlete out of training. I came back from that trip and I was just like, “We’re going all-in on this.”

You’re a die-hard Manchester United fan — how does it feel to build a business around something you love?
What makes me the happiest is the fact that whether it is the MLB or Major League Soccer, we’re doing it at the youth level. If you can democratize it the right way, you can get access to more youth, you can help develop ecosystems and pathways that don’t exist today, and you can also provide data to parents so they can make better decisions for their sons and daughters.

^{Photo credit: Fit:match}

For entrepreneurs, how important is it to put your product in people’s hands to experience it?
You have entrepreneurs, and then you have founders that are trying to build something that doesn’t exist. I’m on the latter piece. A big part of this journey for me has not only been, “Hey, the technology works!” but it’s also now proving to enterprises, businesses, markets and consumers that this is something they can do. A big part of how I’ve tackled adoption is to put the technology out there as much as possible. Because the more that’s hidden, the more obstacles you have to face in that selling journey. So every client call that I have now, whether I’m talking to Cleveland Clinic or a sports team in Peru, I start with a demo of the technology. Not a video, not a picture. We have someone on our team get on the call, take out their iPhone, click four pictures, and go through the technology, because I want to educate the person on the other side that this is easy. This is an experience that I always tell people my eight-year-old son can do and my 70-year-old mom can do. And what I found is the ROI and the payback on putting it out there has been huge.

What’s your advice to founders out there seeking funding?
I’ve been fairly open about this. I do not like fundraising. I like building products, I like scaling teams, I like having fun on that side of the business. So I view fundraising almost as if you’re going in a car from Los Angeles to New York, and somewhere along the line you’re gonna break down and not have any fuel left. And you need a gas station along the journey. Fundraising is those gas stations. It’s not the means, it’s not the ends — it’s just some fuel that you need to get to the next stage and execute your journey. If I build the right product, if I build the right market, if I have customers who are paying, I’ll find the right investor. I find a lot of entrepreneurs try to focus on fundraising first, then those things second. What I found is that fundraising becomes easier once you solve for those things. So my advice is to focus on the stuff that investors really want to see.

There are some founders who think that only good ideas can come from them. Haniff Brown is not one of those founders.

In 2024, the Williams College math major and former private equity investor was promoting his company Fit:match’s AI body-scanning technology as a way to help shoppers find clothes that fit. Then a major English soccer team asked if he’d bring the tech to their youth academy for an entirely different use. He almost said no, but went anyway, and after listening to the coaches, he found an entirely different use for the tech — and much bigger business in the process.

Today, Fit:match partners with FIFA, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball to deliver athletes a full set of anthropometric and body-composition measurements in seconds. Brown spoke with Entrepreneur to share his insights and advice for building, growing and seizing unexpected opportunities.

PowerPoint may soon be facing match point. People have been predicting the death of presentation software for decades, but AI strategist Peter Gostev reignited the debate last week with a LinkedIn post declaring “Google Slides & PowerPoint are dead,” according to LinkedIn News.

Why? The argument is that AI can now build interactive, web-based presentations from a simple prompt. Anthropic’s Claude Design turns a rough outline into an on-brand deck that exports as standalone HTML, as well as PowerPoint. Microsoft is fighting back by building AI editing directly into PowerPoint, and says new-user retention for the feature jumped 36%.

But some business owners are hungry for a new way to communicate. AI coach Braydon Carter says entrepreneurs at a recent mastermind asked him to teach them how he builds his presentations as websites using AI coding tools.

Not everyone is a fan. Skeptics point out that HTML decks are hard to edit without AI, and some corporate email filters block HTML attachments. E-Tabs founder Benjamin Rietti doesn’t think PowerPoint is going anywhere. What’s dying, he says, is “the old way of producing those decks”: the late nights, endless copying and pasting, and last-minute number checks.

PowerPoint may soon be facing match point. People have been predicting the death of presentation software for decades, but AI strategist Peter Gostev reignited the debate last week with a LinkedIn post declaring “Google Slides & PowerPoint are dead,” according to LinkedIn News.

Why? The argument is that AI can now build interactive, web-based presentations from a simple prompt. Anthropic’s Claude Design turns a rough outline into an on-brand deck that exports as standalone HTML, as well as PowerPoint. Microsoft is fighting back by building AI editing directly into PowerPoint, and says new-user retention for the feature jumped 36%.

But some business owners are hungry for a new way to communicate. AI coach Braydon Carter says entrepreneurs at a recent mastermind asked him to teach them how he builds his presentations as websites using AI coding tools.

Not everyone is a fan. Skeptics point out that HTML decks are hard to edit without AI, and some corporate email filters block HTML attachments. E-Tabs founder Benjamin Rietti doesn’t think PowerPoint is going anywhere. What’s dying, he says, is “the old way of producing those decks”: the late nights, endless copying and pasting, and last-minute number checks.

The week a key hire quit mid-project, I took three routine calls back onto my desk “just until we stabilize.” Pricing exceptions. Vendor swaps. The weekly staffing puzzle. The crunch lasted about ten days. The habit lasted months.

I remember the quiet after more than the scramble. People stopped bringing recommendations. They brought questions. I had taught them, without meaning to, that judgment lived upstairs again.

Here’s my situation, so you know where I’m coming from. I run B:Side Capital, a mission-driven Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution (CDFI). I also teach management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Across those chairs I keep seeing the same pattern in restaurants, contractors, clinics and software shops: When pressure arrives, the owner becomes the decision system, and nobody writes the date when that arrangement ends.

Most owners treat a temporary grab of authority as common sense. It often is. Speed matters when consequences are coupled and information is thin. The failure is leaving the grab unnamed. Temporary control becomes institutional culture unless you define the evidence for returning decisions to their normal owners. Gallup finds that employees whose manager involved them in setting goals were nearly four times more likely to be engaged than others, yet only 30% of employees experience that basic expectation. Involvement dies first when every hard call routes back to one desk.

I used to treat the pull-up as proof I was carrying the load. Wrong lesson. Carrying the load can be necessary. Teaching the company that only you may decide is optional and expensive.

Name who owns each recurring call

Start with a blank page and the decisions that repeat every week. Pricing exceptions. Hiring offers inside a band. Vendor changes under a dollar threshold. Schedule swaps. Customer make-goods. Write who may decide, what they may trade and when the call must move up. Goals without owners are theater. Strategy becomes real the moment someone knows, without asking, whether the call is theirs.

At BodeTree, I finally did this after another stretch where every exception landed in my inbox. The map was ugly in its simplicity. Ambition had concentrated judgment in one person, and I had been calling that leadership.

The principle fits in one line: Decision rights are part of strategy, not an org-chart afterthought.

Try the same map this week. Pick five recurring calls. Put a name next to each. If your name appears four times, you have a concentration, whether you plan to grow or not. A restaurant owner might find the same person owns menu specials, vendor credits and the Saturday floor. A SaaS founder might find discounting, enterprise renewals and production access share one login. Name the owners while the room is still listening.

Write the escalation triggers with the authority

Delegation is incomplete until the person receiving authority knows when and how to return a decision upward. Local actors need room to act, and they also hit threshold changes the original mandate did not anticipate. An escalation path defines the triggers, the response time and what context must travel with the issue. Skip it, and you get silent overreach or habitual upward deferral. Both train the wrong muscle.

I fought writing triggers because they felt bureaucratic. They are a boundary, not a binder. Act here. Come back when one of these conditions changes: risk crosses the band, purpose conflicts, spend exceeds the limit or two teams need the same scarce resource.

The principle: Hand someone the return path with the authority.

Say the split plainly when you delegate. “You own this up to X. Escalate when Y. Bring the context, not just the question.” A franchisee can do that for a regional manager. A clinic owner can do it for billing leads. A fabricator can do it for shift supervisors. Keep one annoyance unresolved on purpose: the issue that always climbs because nobody knows whether it belongs downstairs. That gap is the curriculum.

Put an exit condition on every temporary pull-up

Crisis can justify concentrating authority. Comfort cannot. The moment you pull a decision upward, state what would let it move back down: a date, a restored capability, a risk threshold or an information flow that no longer needs your desk. Review observed capability against decisions people actually got to practice. Otherwise the exit test measures deprivation of opportunity as if it were incapacity.

I used to wait until things “felt normal” before returning calls. Feelings are a weak criterion. Normal never arrives cleanly. The temporary grip stays because returning authority requires a second act of courage: trusting judgment you recently starved.

The principle: A pull-up without an exit condition is a theory of leadership in disguise.

Test it this week. List every decision you reclaimed in the last quarter “just until we stabilize.” Write one sentence for each: what would justify giving it back, and who must explain if it stays with you. A retailer can stage a seasonal buy back to a buyer. A professional-services owner can return staffing puzzles to a lead. Ambition stays. The calendar gets a veto on permanent centralization.

Here’s where I’d start this week: Map five recurring calls to named owners, write escalation triggers beside each one and put a dated exit condition on every temporary pull-up still sitting on your desk. Say the return path out loud to whoever shares the risk with you.

The quiet after that quit still sits in my mind. People waiting for my nod was the real scoreboard. Write the exit condition when you take the call back, and judgment has somewhere to live again.

The week a key hire quit mid-project, I took three routine calls back onto my desk “just until we stabilize.” Pricing exceptions. Vendor swaps. The weekly staffing puzzle. The crunch lasted about ten days. The habit lasted months.

I remember the quiet after more than the scramble. People stopped bringing recommendations. They brought questions. I had taught them, without meaning to, that judgment lived upstairs again.

Here’s my situation, so you know where I’m coming from. I run B:Side Capital, a mission-driven Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution (CDFI). I also teach management and entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Across those chairs I keep seeing the same pattern in restaurants, contractors, clinics and software shops: When pressure arrives, the owner becomes the decision system, and nobody writes the date when that arrangement ends.