A report landed on my desk this month that, without quite saying so, divided every software company on earth into two groups. ICONIQ called it the Great Sorting. A few years into the AI era, one class of companies is pulling away, reaching scale faster than anything we have seen, while the rest drift toward the other outcome. The line that stayed with me was blunt: not all companies may make it to the other side.
As we’ve built Auditoria, that sentence does not scare me. It clarifies. Because I have learned which choices put a company on the right side of a sort like that, and almost none of them are the ones that feel good in the moment. So if you are starting an enterprise AI company today, here is a short readout I wish someone had handed me. Not a framework. Just what I know now, most of it learned along the way.
Build the governance before you build the magic. Build your autonomy controls before you build the automation that shows well in a demo. It made our early demos slower, and I spent more evenings than I would like defending why our agent paused to ask a human when a flashier one just charged ahead. The companies that skipped that work are retrofitting trust now, under pressure, in front of auditors. In enterprise finance, the demo that dazzles is rarely the one that closes. The one that closes is the one a controller can sign her name to.
Read the full article on Substack