Why we started Exponent AI

As business leaders, we were always trying to do more with less.

Our most recent experience involved building the digital go-to-market strategy for a fast-growing B2B software startup. There was never enough time or resources to continuously give enough attention to things like growing our audience, engaging our prospects, creating marketing collateral, building new partnerships…to name just a few. These critical tasks require daily work and specific focus.

We were endlessly searching for new productivity.

It was clear: we had to enlist help if we wanted to get more done.

But…hiring a few more people is never as easy as it sounds.

First of all, hiring is expensive. Leaving the explicit cost of recruiting aside, which could cost thousands in recruiting fees, job platform fees, and other software expenses, it came with huge opportunity costs for us.

We spent weeks interviewing candidates. Once we picked someone (and they accepted our offer), we had to wait 2-4 weeks for them to start, and then spend another 90 days training and ramping them. Existing employees also had to sacrifice time and productivity while they interviewed, covered for, and trained the new hires.

And after all of that, it was not always effective. 33% of new hires didn’t work out and left in the first 90 days!

So why do we [and everybody else] still do it?

Because “Sally just quit and we need somebody to replace her”. Because “Our Q3 sales targets are really ambitious”. Because “We need another few heads to help with all of the new customers we have”. Because “We need to launch the product we’re working on and we’re behind”.

Hiring is the default option when companies want to get more productive. And we need productivity to achieve our sales targets, to provide our offerings & service our customers, and to keep track of costs, cash, and everything else. We hire because ‘not hiring’ means ‘not producing’ and ‘not producing’ means lower profits.

So, we were stuck in a pattern of either expensively hiring somebody to “give us bandwidth” or not getting tasks done well.

Yes…we tried outsourcing.

It also sucked.

We spent months cycling through options from our contracting agencies from all over the globe…India, Colombia, Ukraine. Finding a good contractor to add to the team felt like it had the same odds as winning the lottery. The quality of output from contractors rarely met our standards. The resources were cheap, but you really got what you paid for.

In order for contractors to add real value, we had to sink hours of time into training and managing these offshore workers. Even then, we faced communication barriers, high turnover, and a fundamental lack of buy-in to what we were trying to accomplish as a team. They were, after all, contractors.

It became abundantly clear that even when budgets allow you to do more with more, it's hard to grow a productive team.

So how about turbocharging the existing team with the latest AI tools?

We were super excited about using AI to unlock productivity at first…but, our enthusiasm was quickly tempered.

AI products like ChatGPT are cool, but not entirely practical for businesses. We found ourselves having to constantly re-prompt it to get usable content and dependable answers. It was great for rewriting your press releases as a Shakespearean sonnet, but it couldn’t write a usable cold outreach email.

Still, the technology was intriguing, and it got us thinking about what could be possible with the right combination of AI, software, and business automation tools.

That’s what led us to start Exponent AI.

The idea behind Exponent AI is simple - the world needs a better alternative for business productivity. By creating AI teammates, we think we can power productivity for businesses and entrepreneurs everywhere.

We believe AI teammates are the future.

AI teammates combine the flexibility and scalability of AI with the ease of interaction and autonomy of human workers. They are instantly deployable, trainable like regular employees, vastly more productive, and easy to manage.

We envision a business leader adding high-quality productivity to their organization with just a laptop and their credit card, in a matter of minutes.

Need to send out cold outreach emails and start booking meetings with prospects?
Hire an AI teammate.

Need a kick-ass blog that is updated weekly and just happens on autopilot?
Hire an AI teammate.

Need to have somebody to take over bookkeeping while you go on vacation?
Hire an AI teammate.

For the first time, this can be more than theory. AI teammates will provide a fast, scalable, and effective way for businesses to create more productive organizations.


We’re excited to get started on this journey with you. It’s time to get more done on your terms - that’s why we started Exponent AI. Join us.