We are both a product and a consulting business. There are many who would say that they have never seen both work, which is true for all kinds of businesses, but we are building a product that allows product innovators (who are not necessarily software engineers by profession) to build software, and even though AI will automate the repetitive documentation, coding, testing , deployment etc. parts in that journey, AI is not there yet to replace all the human agency needed in the technology implementation. Today the agency we have removed is of an entry-to-mid-level programmer, but we still need 100% of the human agency of a more experienced engineering architect. Majority of companies or businesses we support do not have that kind of human agency, and hence we provide it as consulting to our customers. This along with our technology solves the real customer problems and that is more important than being classified as a pure product company. Other reason is because AI is clumsy today and it doesn’t work 100% of the time - so we need to understand what are the major pitfalls and have clear and concise educational material for our customers before we can put it in their hands.
There are two reasons for this:
1. We are using automation to the very maximum while ensuring right human agency and since we have done this again and again many times over last decade, and even more so in last two years with help of AI, we can solve similar problems in much lesser time. And last I checked Time is money.
2. More nuanced reason, is the fact that most engineering organizations (specifically the consulting and BPOs) tend to overcomplicate the engineering systems, either due to skill gap or to milk more money out of customers. For a CIO or the leader of a business, this may appear like they know their shit, it is actually creating a solution that is more complex, more expensive to build, and nearly impossible to maintain. Case in point, a business we were working with had nearly agreed to spend half a million dollars for an overly complicated data lake solution with a major cloud provider - but they did not need one. Their scale (current and foreseeable) didn't demand anything beyond a simple postgres SQL server.
A very junior engineer will usually solve simple problem with a complex solution. A slightly less junior engineer can solve a complex problem, but still with a complex solution. More experienced engineers would solve complex problems (growing towards more & more complex) with simpler solutions (growing towards further simplicity), and then there are engineers who find ways to get rid of the problem without the need of the solutions. Our mission is to bring that simplicity to majority (if not all) of our customers.
There are some amazing paid and open-source tools out there that integrate AI into coding process, but they are mostly directed towards software engineers. We do not believe AI, in any near term can take away the human agency from the software development process. It can simplify or assist but we will need smart and experienced engineers to help with the development of trustworthy and stable software systems, even more so in the regulated businesses like Healthcare, Legal, Finance and Manufacturing. Vibe coding is an amazing paradigm that would allow a lot of the non-software-engineers and junior engineers to enhance their depth and skills in the field, or greatly helps with some experimental or fun prototypes, but we cannot depend on it for production workloads without the risk of breaking customer trust, or making some major financial or security damage to the brand. Either our customers can use these tools with their own teams/engineers or they can depend on us for the end-to-end solution. But in either case, human agency is needed and will be needed, until all software becomes commodity like bitcoin that can be mined with compute & AI.
Our ideal customer is a subject-matter expert (usually a product manager, a specialist program manager or an engineer) who has understanding of how the real business works and is able to envision a digital experience to streamline it , or replace an existing digital experience with native AI integration, or just wants to get rid of legacy systems with high operational and infrastructure costs, and replace them with simpler, cost-effective solutions. Currently, a lot of growing startups and middle-market companies are benefitting from our setup and we expect larger businesses including enterprises will find value as we expand our technology beyond preview.
