AI · Startup · International
Building an AI-native workspace for collaborating with expert personas and digital twins.
55BirchStreet – a change management consultancy – wanted to scale its impact through productising expertise, not increasing headcount.
Thanks to the advent of generative AI, creating a digital product sophisticated enough to manage the complexity of change – while still keeping the user interface simple – was achievable for the first time. But with a lean bootstrapped team, funded through consulting revenue in a tough German economy, every product move had to earn its place.
We started with problem definition, because if you're not solving the right problem upstream, everything downstream is shaky.
Our multi-step, prompt-free, 'Challenge Compass' feature gave users a powerful analysis from just 5 questions.
To bring rigour and consistency, a bespoke panel of experts was created on-demand for each challenge – AI personas inspired by real human experts from the appropriate domain and industry.
The personas started out as a means to an end. But users told us they were the most valuable part. That signal changed the product direction.
We made the personas persistent – and built a workspace for users to collaborate with them.
One user leveraged expert personas to do 3 weeks' work in 3 days. Her boss even asked her how she did it.
Now we're extending the concept to internal personas too, allowing users to make their own best thinking available to every colleague, 24/7.
'We're not using AI to automate tasks or build agents. We're removing the bottleneck on every company's best thinking.'
We're still at the beginning of this journey.
Not everybody wants the best thinking when good enough is easier. The real question Navar keeps surfacing isn't about AI. It's about which types of people actually want to think better – not just faster.
We're starting to find our community. And the work is getting sharper because of it.
