All News (Page 288)

What if one of the more overlooked pressures on corporate America’s future leadership pipeline is not burnout, return-to-office conflict, or employee disengagement, but inherited wealth?

That is one of the more consequential questions embedded in the Great Wealth Transfer, and one I explore in a new piece. As trillions of dollars move from older Americans to their heirs, fewer people may feel compelled to endure the long climb to senior leadership at large firms.

This is not because the next generation will simply stop working. The evidence suggests that, on average, inherited wealth reduces labor supply only modestly. What it does change is career optionality, giving people more freedom to reject bureaucratic institutions, slow promotion cycles, and systems built around indefinitely deferred reward.

The timing is striking. Younger workers are already revising the meaning of ambition. Just 6% of Gen Z respondents in a Deloitte survey said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal.

Korn Ferry points to a related shift. When wealth creates a greater financial cushion, employees may not leave outright, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors the path to the C-suite has long required.

That could leave corporate America with fewer people willing to make the compromises the climb still demands, with real implications for succession at the top.

Read the full piece here, including what the CEO of Edward Jones thinks about whether the Great Wealth Transfer could reshape the future of C-suite ambition inside corporate America.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

The Great Wealth Transfer is usually framed as a consumer, housing, or wealth management story. But it may also become a story about power inside corporate America. If financial security arrives before the corner office does, why would the most talented people keep climbing the corporate ladder?

For decades, big companies could count on one thing. Enough ambitious people would tolerate the grind because the ladder promised money, status, and security. But as trillions move from older Americans to their heirs, that bargain may begin to change.

The point is not that inheritance will produce a generation of idlers. It is that it may produce a generation less willing to accept the old terms of advancement. Research suggests that, on average, unearned wealth reduces labor supply only modestly while easing capital constraints and making entrepreneurship more viable. But it does give people more latitude to reject low-agency roles, inert bureaucracies, and systems organized around indefinitely deferred reward.

That matters because the Great Wealth Transfer will not be evenly distributed. Market intelligence firm Cerulli projects that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with more than half originating from households that make up roughly 2% of the total. The people most likely to receive meaningful inheritances may overlap disproportionately with the talent pools from which major companies have historically drawn future leaders. That may create an opening for broader leadership paths, but only if companies build them deliberately.

This pressure arrives just as younger workers are revising the meaning of ambition. Deloitte’s 2025 global survey found just 6% of Gen Z respondents named reaching a leadership position as their primary career goal. For many high-achieving younger professionals, the goal is no longer rank for its own sake, but a more exacting mix of agency, growth, coherence, and impact.

That shift is not merely cultural. Traditionally, companies held leverage because employees needed the next promotion to secure their financial future. The wealth transfer begins to alter that equation. Korn Ferry points out that when wealth arrives, employees often enter a kind of “semi-retirement” mindset. They do not quit immediately, but they may stop leaning into the high-stress behaviors required to reach the C-suite.

That presents a specific problem for corporate America. Large firms still rely heavily on internal cultivation for top leadership. Their senior ranks are built through years of exposure to operating complexity, institutional memory, and the disciplines of organizational life. If even a modest share of high-potential talent becomes less willing to spend 15 or 20 years enduring slow promotion cycles, internal politics, and bureaucratic drag, the leadership pipeline narrows, particularly among those whose financial security gives them greater career optionality.

Few executives are better positioned to see that tension than Penny Pennington, CEO of Edward Jones, who sits at the intersection of wealth management and the corner office. When asked whether the prestige and drive of becoming CEO begin to fade when wealth arrives before the career payoff, she challenges the premise that the climb was ever only about money. “I fundamentally believe in the human desire to prosper and to have well-being in a holistic way,” she tells Fortune. Ambition, she argues, does not disappear with financial security. But it does need to be attached to purpose. In her own career, that meant moving away from banking and corporate finance in search of work with deeper meaning, helping people live more prosperous lives.

What may change, she suggests, is the path upward. It may run through a giant company, a small business, a mechanic’s shop, or a startup. In that sense, inherited wealth may change the route people take more than the desire to keep climbing. Some heirs may have true walk-away money. Others may simply inherit enough to reduce stress, fund a home purchase, or create room to choose differently. Either way, they are less captive to traditional institutions.

That changes tolerance for corporate red tape, slow promotions, and compromises that once seemed unavoidable. If financial security is partly solved, friction stops looking like the price of advancement and starts looking like a test of whether an organization deserves your time.

The Great Wealth Transfer is unlikely to destroy the C-suite pipeline. But it could reshape it enough that companies will have to earn ambition in the years ahead, not merely reward it later.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Much of the global worry over the closed Strait of Hormuz has focused on crude oil and natural gas, yet the waterway is also a channel for other key Gulf-produced commodities like fertilizer and helium. About a third of the world’s helium and half of its urea, a vital nitrogen-based fertilizer, passes through the strait. 

“Up to 15% of goods passing through the Strait of Hormuz are non-energy materials,” Sugoutam Ghosh, a supply chain management expert from the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS), tells Fortune. “These include critical commodities serving as inputs for multiple industries—and any shortage would have cascading impacts on global agriculture and manufacturing.” 

Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to an interruption in these supplies. Agriculture is the backbone of many ASEAN economies like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where smallholder farms of rice, maize, and oil palm provide employment and food security. Farming contributes about 10% of Southeast Asia’s GDP and a third of its jobs.

“Fertilizer shocks are not just input-market issues. They’re also social and political ones,” warns Imelda Bacudo, an Indonesia-based agri-food systems expert with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “The risk is not only lower yields, but also reduced farmer incomes, higher rural vulnerability, and eventually, higher food prices for consumers.” 

Many crops grown in Southeast Asia depend on fertilizer, even if the region doesn’t produce that much of it. According to a report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a 50% reduction in fertilizer use can reduce palm oil yields by up to 40%. 

When it comes to fertilizer, experts think that countries can manage a supply shock in the short-term, whether by tapping stockpiles or turning to alternate products. But a prolonged closure would spell trouble for farms—and, in turn, for consumers.

An extended disruption “will have a negative flow-through effect on the next season’s crops,” warns Paul Teng, a visiting senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Some farmers may even reduce their plantings, as they did during the early days of the Ukraine conflict.”

Helium, semiconductors and manufacturing

The supply chain upheaval also extends to helium, a key industrial gas used in cooling and leak detection. In particular, it cools magnets used in chip fabrication and MRI systems. 

“A shortage of helium would pose a risk to both the semiconductor and healthcare sectors,” says Ghosh from SUSS, adding that substitutes are “highly challenging” to find.

“Gases such as nitrogen or argon could be used in older fabrication facilities, but they’re unsuitable for high-precision processes in advanced fabs,” he explains.

Older semiconductor fabrication facilities, such as those in Malaysia or Singapore, also lack advanced helium recycling capabilities. They can recycle just half of their helium, whereas high-end plants, like those operated by TSMC or Samsung, can reuse as much as 90%. 

Chipmakers have responded by looking for alternate sources of helium, particularly from other large exporters like the U.S. and Russia, yet SUSS professor Tay Huay Ling says these measures simply “mitigate risk without eliminating it.” Actions like building stockpiles don’t address the underlying overreliance on imported helium. 

Over the longer term, companies and governments could try to reduce their reliance on supply chains that travel through chokepoints. Industries can also invest in processes that reduce the use of these critical components: Firms that rely on helium can invest in recycling machinery, while the agriculture sector can turn to fertilizer alternatives like green ammonia. 

Bacudo, from the FAO, sees a “real opportunity” for multilateral organizations like ASEAN, which can work together to hedge against some of these supply chain disruptions. 

Still, Asian industries that rely on inputs from an unstable Middle East will need to manage a volatile commodity market. Even if the Iran war ends soon, shortages are likely to continue for months. 

“This crisis looks less like a temporary shock, and more like confirmation of a more fragile era for critical inputs,” Tay, from SUSS, says. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Supermicro has spent the past three years riding the AI wave in Silicon Valley but before the recent allegations involving a co-founder smuggling Nvidia chips, it previously ran afoul of export-control regulations.  

The hardware manufacturer’s co-founder, Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw, was charged on Thursday with conspiring to smuggle about $2.5 billion worth of highly coveted Nvidia GPUs in servers to China. Prosecutors claim that Liaw, along with Supermicro’s Taiwan general manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, and a “fixer” named Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, routed servers with banned Nvidia H200 and B200 GPUs through an unnamed Southeast Asian company to Chinese buyers who wanted the chips. Authorities arrested Liaw and Sun this past week. Chang remains a fugitive, according to the Department of Justice. The company has not been accused of wrongdoing, and neither have co-founders Charles Liang, who is the CEO and chairman, nor his wife, Sara Liu, a board member and co-founder.

In a statement Supermicro said Liaw resigned his board seat on Friday, and he remains on administrative leave, along with Chang. Sun was fired. Supermicro’s stock plummeted in trading on Friday, giving short sellers who have collectively bet $2.6 billion against the company a windfall. Shorts collected an estimated $860 million in single-day gains after the stock sank 33%, according to financial data firm S3 Partners. The day pushed their March gains to nearly $1 billion. Supermicro has said it is cooperating with law enforcement and it was not named in the indictment.

However, this isn’t Supermicro’s first brush with this type of export-control violation. 

Court records and the company’s own disclosures show the latest allegations of smuggling to a restricted market show striking similarities to a 20-year-old enforcement action also involving the company, which was founded in 1993 by Liaw, Liang, and Liu. None of the three were named in the 2006 enforcement or charged with wrongdoing.

In 2006, Supermicro pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally exporting computer equipment to Iran, and paid a $150,000 fine to the Department of Justice. Separately, Supermicro settled a parallel action involving 12 charges related to sales of servers, motherboards, and computer chassis brought by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) by paying a $125,400 civil penalty. The company also paid an additional $179,327 to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to settle allegations under the Iranian Transactions Regulation, a violation that OFAC said Supermicro did not voluntarily disclose to the regulator.  

The two cases—separated by two decades and vast differences in scope—allegedly share a similar pattern. Find a neighboring country where it is legal to sell to, hide the real buyer, and ship the restricted tech to the illegal market.

A representative for Supermicro declined to comment on the Iran violations. 

The scheme

The Iran tech sales took place between September 2001 and March 2003, court records show, about a decade after Liaw, Liang, and Liu, who serves as a senior vice president and member of the board, founded Supermicro.

According to the BIS charging document from 2006, Supermicro exported servers, motherboards, and computer chassis from the U.S. through the United Arab Emirates and then onto Iran on six separate occasions without the required licenses from OFAC. A distributor in Dubai served as the pass-through for the equipment. Officials said Supermicro’s “senior director of strategic sales knew of, or had reason to know” about the embargo on sales to Iran. BIS charged the company with three counts of selling goods knowing that export violations would occur and three counts of misrepresenting its shipper export declarations to the U.S. government by claiming it did not need a license to sell the hardware. 

Supermicro settled the cases in September 2006 and cooperated with the government’s investigation, records show. It also implemented an in-house export control program before the BIS and DOJ formally brought charges. The sentencing memo stated that the fines were “sufficient to deter other companies from committing similar crimes.”

DOJ: The China conspiracy

The indictment unsealed this week claims that the accused trio of Liaw, Sun, and Chang allegedly conspired to route servers that included the Nvidia chips in 2024. The defendants allegedly sent the servers through an unnamed Southeast Asian company before they made their way to China. Liaw, Sun, and Chang could not be reached for comment.  

The mechanics alleged in the indictment mirror the Iran violation from 20 years ago. In the alleged China scheme, the Southeast Asian company submitted repeat purchase orders to Supermicro purportedly for its own use. Instead, when the servers arrived after being assembled in the U.S., the Southeast Asian company allegedly sent them on to the real buyers in China. To keep it all hidden, the servers were allegedly repacked in unmarked boxes, the indictment states. 

According to the indictment, the Southeast Asian company grew to become one of Supermicro’s biggest customers, ranking 11th globally in fiscal 2024 with $99.7 million in revenue. Ultimately, the total value of server sales grew to $2.5 billion, authorities claim.

Throughout the swell, Liaw was allegedly directing the activities behind the scenes, the indictment says. 

In January 2025 when the Trump Administration announced new AI export restrictions slated to start on May 13, 2025, Liaw texted an executive at the Southeast Asian company, “We need to speed these up before May 13!” A few days later, the indictment notes, he texted again, “We can ship all your 512 x B200 by Feb. Let us run fast before May 13!” he wrote, referring to the Nvidia GPUs. 

According to the indictment, the executive Liaw texted with wrote him in March and sent a news article about smugglers being accused of routing Nvidia chips to China and wrote, “I’m very concerned Wally.” Liaw wrote back trying to assuage his concerns and then continued making inquiries about the GPU orders, the indictment states. In August 2025, one of the brokers allegedly involved in the Supermicro scheme sent Liaw a link to a DOJ press release about more arrests for AI chip smuggling. Liaw replied with a string of sobbing-face emojis, the indictment states, and then kept working with Chang and Sun, authorities say. 

The indictment notes that as the orders continued, the accused allegedly worked harder to keep it all secret. Supermicro’s compliance team started an audit in late 2024, the indictment states, which was around the time Supermicro was dealing with a cluster of issues in the U.S. Its auditor EY had resigned in October, the DOJ had opened an investigation into the company based on accounting allegations raised by a former employee, and it was at risk of being delisted by Nasdaq. It later hired BDO and its own internal investigation into its accounting found no evidence of wrongdoing. BDO has not been accused of wrongdoing in the smuggling case. BDO declined to comment.

During the 2024 audit during that heightened period, Chang allegedly arranged for a “friendly” auditor employed by Supermicro to conduct the inspection, the indictment states. When a second, more rigorous audit was set for August 2025, Sun and Chang allegedly staged hundreds of what authorities called “dummy” servers, which it defined as non-working physical replicas in Supermicro boxes. 

The dummy servers were allegedly set up at the Southeast Asian company’s warehouses so auditors could confirm their arrival. Sun said the staging operation would need about 100 people, forklift operators, arranged meals, and a “20-person shuttle bus for easy travel between the hotel and the warehouse, allowing for short breaks,” the indictment states. During the actual audit, however, the indictment states that Supermicro’s compliance worker was off site “enjoying entertainment” on the Southeast Asian company’s dime, the indictment claims. 

Sun texted Liaw to say the audit had run smoothly and included 2,107 units in three warehouses. Liaw wrote back, “That’s spectacular!” the indictment states, and continued placing new orders days later. In December 2025, BIS sent one of its own inspectors to do a post-shipment verification check. The indictment claims Sun allegedly set up the dummy servers again, using a hair dryer to peel off labels and serial-number stickers, which was captured on surveillance cameras. Authorities say Sun allegedly introduced himself as “Michael” and said he worked at the Southeast Asian company’s law firm while fielding questions from the federal BIS officer. 

In the Iran case, Supermicro’s then-CFO Howard Hideshima signed off on its settlements with law enforcement. He served as the CFO from 2006 through 2018, before Nasdaq suspended the company from trading and formally delisted it in March 2019. In 2020, Hideshima and Supermicro were charged by the Securities & Exchange Commission for accounting-related issues. Hideshima was fined $50,000 by the regulator and left the company. 

Liaw also left the company following the 2018 accounting scandal. The company brought him back as an adviser in “business development” in May 2021, and he returned to a full-time senior executive post in August 2022. In December 2023, he rejoined the board before his resignation this week. 

On Friday, Supermicro said it appointed DeAnna Luna as its acting chief compliance officer. Luna joined Supermicro in 2024 as vice president of global trade and sanctions compliance.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady on how a wartime mindset is the new default.
• The big story: Is Cursor dead?
• The markets: Down big as Trump and Tehran exchange threats.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. To some extent, every CEO is a wartime CEO when their country is at war. But the concept, and the characteristics that go with it, extend far beyond geopolitics. As Fortune’s Geoff Colvin points out in this piece, Shell put military-style scenario planning at the heart of its corporate decision-making in the 1970s. I’ve talked about the concept of wartime and peacetime leadership with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who wrote about it 15 years ago, and leadership consultant Stephen Miles of TMG. When UiPath CEO Daniel Dines told me last week that “we treat this time as wartime,” he was talking not about Iran but his push to pivot the robotic process automation company he founded towards agentic AI.

What’s changed?

‘War’ is the norm – “Peacetime left us in March of 2020,” Miles told me yesterday. “The new world is now ambiguous, uncertain, and discontinuous … The world is hours, minutes and seconds, not quarters and years, and I don’t see that changing.” In his view, that calls for leadership that’s “total immersion, which provides much higher context and the ability to weak-signal detect so you get the whiffs of smoke before there is a forest fire.”

Anxiety, alignment and agency – For Horowitz, a peacetime CEO has a large advantage in a growing market; in war, they’re facing an “imminent existential threat.” The first is about expanding the market and reinforcing strengths, the latter is about speed and survival. As Dines put it: “In peacetime, you can tolerate different behaviors and try to adjust …We need to implement decisions faster and propagate them to the company much faster.” Anxiety is a motivator to go for it: “If you wait to see where the world is going, it’s not going to work.” Dines defines agency as “people with both expertise and the will to make things happen.”

People become disposable – In war, people die. The corporate equivalent is that they are fired. More risks are taken. Dissent isn’t tolerated and consensus isn’t a priority. There’s also more pressure at the top. My colleague Claire Zillman writes that, broadly speaking, the AI revolution is creating more CEO churn, according to Spencer Stuart. Feigen Advisors found that despite the headlines about skyrocketing turnover, leadership at a narrower band of companies—the top of half of the S&P 500—has held relatively steady, though it also found CEO turnover outside the U.S. is increasing. Does this mean America is winning the war? It depends, of course, on how you define the battlefield.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

For decades, building a billion-dollar company required a village. Raise massive capital, hire hundreds of people, build a sprawling department for every operational headache — from VAT compliance in Marseille to sourcing logistics in Shenzhen. Headcount was power. Scale required sacrifice of autonomy.

That equation is breaking down. The “Execution Wall” that once separated the solo entrepreneur from the multinational corporation is crumbling — not because the giants are fading, but because the tools of scale have finally been democratized. We are entering the age of the One-Person Unicorn.

From Busywork to Strategic Command

The solo founder was historically a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Ten hats, and eight of them — labeled “Procurement,” “Customs,” and “Compliance”— never fit. To scale, entrepreneurs often had to surrender their autonomy to investors just to fund the headcount needed to handle the boring-but-vital heavy lifting.

Unlike earlier automation, agentic AI doesn’t just follow a script — it reasons, adapts, and executes. This shifts how we interact with technology: away from clicking through dashboards and menus, toward a language-based interface where complex end-to-end workflows are triggered by intent rather than manual data entry. Enterprise AI agents can now navigate the full labyrinth of global trade — from RFQs to cross-border payments — freeing founders to reclaim their time for strategy.

The Shift From B2B to A2A

The real power of the One-Person Unicorn isn’t just internal efficiency; It’s how they interact with the world.

Global trade has historically been a sluggish game of human-to-human coordination: email chains, manual vetting, and midnight phone calls across time zones.

The future looks radically different.

Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interaction — where a buyer’s AI and a seller’s AI communicate directly through APIs — can compress weeks of supplier negotiations and logistics coordination into minutes of high-fidelity data exchange.

When the “cost of execution” collapses toward zero, a lone entrepreneur gains the operational reach of a Fortune 500 company. That’s not a metaphor. It’s an emerging structural reality. That’s not a metaphor. It’s an emerging structural reality.

What This Means for the Workforce

This transition inevitably raises employment questions. But what’s unfolding is less a story of displacement than of professional elevation.

By absorbing the shadow work of administration, AI raises the floor for individual capability. We see this in the way tools like Accio Work provide an immediate operational backbone for the solo entrepreneur, bypassing the need for a traditional back-office — providing an immediate operational backbone that bypasses the traditional back-office entirely.

The boundary between “employee” and “owner” is beginning to blur. A generation of specialists now has the infrastructure to launch global ventures without a single hire.

The Leadership Bar Just Got Higher 

Democratized power comes with a significant catch: as the barrier to entry falls, the bar for leadership rises.

In this new economy, grinding through administrative tasks is no longer a badge of honor — it’s a failure of leverage. The competitive advantages of the next decade won’t be technical proficiency or a massive payroll. They’ll be judgment, taste, and strategic vision. The AI can execute the workflow, but the human must supply the direction and quality control. The bottleneck is no longer a lack of resources, but a potential lack of imagination. It’s a potential lack of imagination.

The Invisible Office Is Already Open

The gap between a small business and a global powerhouse is narrowing faster than most leaders realize. The One-Person Unicorn is no longer a theoretical outlier — it’s a model emerging on the horizon for a world where capability, not headcount, defines a firm’s reach.

The question is no longer whether this future is coming. It’s whether you’ll be ready to lead it.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Michael Polyani, the British-Hungarian philosopher, economist, and scientist, is perhaps best known today for coining the term “tacit knowledge.” His great observation was that a large part of what constitutes expertise in any given field is never written down. In some cases, it exists only as a kind of professional intuition that even the expert can’t fully articulate. “We know more than we can tell,” was Polyani’s famous catch phrase.

Today, tacit knowledge presents a challenge to companies that want to automate workflows with AI agents. Much—perhaps even most—of the knowledge these agents need is not written down.

Interloom, a Munich-based startup that is aiming to transform traditional business process automation for the AI age, thinks it can crack the problem of tacit knowledge. And it has just raised a new $16.5 million venture capital round to help it achieve that mission.

The funding is being led by DN Capital, with participation from Bek Ventures and existing investor Air Street Capital. The company previously announced a $3 million seed round in March 2024.

Interloom did not disclose its valuation after the new funding.

Fabian Jakobi, Interloom’s founder and CEO, argues that the current wave of excitement about AI agents overlooks the tacit knowledge bottleneck. About 70% of operational decisions have never been formally documented, he said. When a complex support ticket lands on a veteran staffer’s desk, they know the workaround, the right internal team to escalate to, and the resolution—not because it’s in a manual, but because they’ve seen it before.

“The most important person at the bank is the person who knows whether the documentation is right or not,” Jakobi told Fortune. “They’re often the lowest paid. But they determine quality.”

Interloom’s approach is to ingest millions of operational records—support emails, service tickets, call transcripts, work orders—and use them to build what it calls a “context graph,” a continuously updated map of how problems actually get resolved within a given organization. Jakobi likens the concept to Google Maps: just as Google learns optimal routes from real-time traffic data, Interloom maps the paths that operational experts take to solve problems, and uses those maps to guide AI agents and new employees alike.

Jakobi is a serial entrepreneur. He previously founded Boxplot, which in 2021 he sold to Hyperscience, a New York-based AI software company that specializes in extracting data from unstructured documents.

Interloom’s software is already live with several large European enterprises. At Commerzbank, Interloom analyzed millions of customer support emails and checked them against existing internal documentation—finding that much of it was either conflicting or incomplete. The company says it reduced the gap between documented and actual operational knowledge from roughly 50% to 5%. At Volkswagen, it is processing customer support tickets. And at Zurich Insurance, Interloom won a company-wide AI competition—beating out what Jakobi says were 2,000 other AI-native startups—for an underwriting use case.

An underwriting decision at an insurance firm, Jakobi said, reflects that company’s particular risk appetite, its accumulated experience with certain brokers and products, and institutional knowledge that no general-purpose model possesses.

“The Zurich underwriter knows how their broker chat underwriting works much better than Accenture does,” Jakobi said, taking aim at the large consulting firms that have traditionally dominated enterprise process work.

The broader argument is that AI agents, no matter how capable, are useless in large enterprises without organization-specific context. Jakobi frames this as the “corporate memory” problem. 

“In software, the compiler tells you if the code works,” Jakobi said. “We don’t have that luxury [in other domains.] The evaluation has to come from a human expert.”

Interloom’s new backers agree with that thesis. Guy Ward Thomas, a partner at DN Capital, said that “an agent is only as good as the expert decisions it can rely on.” And Thomas said that DN Capital has seen with other AI agent startups that when these agents don’t have the right context about the enterprise in which they are being deployed, they rarely work well. “Our experience with vertical AI agents and voice platforms showed us how important context is,” he said.

Mehmet Atici of Bek Ventures previously backed UiPath, which had been the leader in the previous wave of RPA, or robotic process automation. But RPA relied on agents that were, for the most part, hard-coded to follow the same exact workflow in the same exact way every time. “We’ve seen automation’s transformative potential firsthand and we believe AI is now unlocking a new wave of rapid adoption in the enterprise,” Atici said.

Interloom’s timing may be propitious. The so-called “Great Retirement” is seeing roughly 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring daily in the U.S. Walking out the door with them is decades of institutional knowledge—just as companies are trying to deploy AI at scale.

Jakobi sees the competitive landscape in characteristically blunt terms. His biggest rival, he says, is inertia—the assumption within large enterprises that operations will continue to function as they have for the past decade.

Interloom’s next product push is what it is calling internally a “Chief of Staff”—a layer designed to give managers real-time visibility into how their AI agents are performing, complete with version control for agent-driven processes.

But Interloom is hardly the only company trying to create an AI agent management and orchestration layer. Almost every company marketing AI agents, from OpenAI to ServiceNow to Microsoft, has been working on similar kinds of products.

Jakobi, however, said that he thinks Interlooms “context graph” gives it a distinct advantage over these larger players, which he says rarely have insight across an entire complex process. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here