Building a Transformation Firm in the Age of AI — Chapter 1

What I didn't expect when I started NewCo Advisory

A year ago I started NewCo Advisory with a simple idea: using my experience to help companies figure out how to transform their most important experiences and capabilities, driving growth and accelerating needed change.

Not rebrand. Not reorganize. Not put a new strategy in a deck and call it a vision.

Actually transform — the way they serve customers, the way they grow, and the way they compete in a world that's changing faster than most organizations know how to process.

What I didn't expect was that the world would shift so fast under all of us at exactly the same moment. 

We're not just in a new technology cycle. We're in a fundamental rethinking of how businesses create value, earn loyalty, and stay relevant. AI is the accelerant, but the fire was already burning. 

That's the moment NewCo has been born into. And honestly, I kind of like it. In this new series, I want to be open and honest about what it is like to try and grow a company at an unprecedented time. 

Share what I am learning and seeing and see how that resonates with others. 

A practical example

The way we work has changed completely since we started. Part of this is how we use AI and part of this is how AI pushes us to change. 

Here's a small example of what that looks like day-to-day now. I get off a client call. We pull the transcript immediately. Then we ask a simple question: what did they actually tell us? Not what we expected walking in. Not the problem we came prepared to solve. What did the customer — in this case, our client — actually say?

We build our materials off that (and historical materials where we have them). Then we get to work on whatever it is we need to work on - proposal for services, business case, strategic roadmap, etc.

As we run through our work, we use AI to pressure-test it against the real conversations. Did we respond to the problem they described, or did we default to the version of the problem we assumed they had?

That loop adds little real time, but powerful new results. Two years ago, this loop only existed by comparing written notes or by the accuracy of recollected memory. And by using AI systems that have context of our business and the history with our clients, we get a Human / AI loop that keeps us sharp and aligns our deliverables much better with our clients. 

Importantly, it's changed how we think about work. Every conversation is an input (not a memory). Every client interaction is now an actionable signal. Ultimately, they are procedural and technological changes that were not available to us and will likely continue to get better. 

How an example like this actually happened

There was no master plan for any of this. No offsite where we mapped it all out.

It just evolved by keeping up with the tools, trying new ideas, and interestingly following the lead of the most AI plugged in staff. A cool idea or move just becomes the new way we are doing something. We don’t look back and say should we do that…we just make the adjustment. 

Every couple of weeks it feels like something shifted. A new way of capturing what clients were telling us. A faster path from insight to recommendation. A better way to stress-test a growth strategy before we put it in front of a leadership team. Each thing was small on its own. But they compound, and one day I looked up and realized we didn't work the same way anymore.

That's the honest story of how the work we are doing is changing. Being a smaller and more nimble shop means we have less layers and hurdles to go through when using AI and keeping up with new capabilities, but the lesson in here is if you want your teams working in an AI-native way, you have to find a way to drop the barriers of usage and the freedom to try new things to almost zero. 

Its a model we are starting to live by and one that we are bringing to our clients. 

Why I'm writing this

This is Chapter 1 of building NewCo in public.

No content calendar. No polished framework to sell.

Just what we are seeing as it happens — in client rooms, in the work, and in a business landscape that is genuinely, irreversibly changing.

We will share what's working and what isn't. The client conversations that shift our thinking. The places where the conventional wisdom about transformation turns out to be exactly wrong. And the moments where companies find the version of themselves that's ready for what comes next.

Because the most interesting thing about this moment isn't the technology. It's watching how leaders and organizations are rising to meet (or waiting for someone else to get there first and force them to play catch up).

#DigitalTransformation #CustomerExperience #BusinessGrowth #BuildingInPublic #NewCoAdvisory

Originally here at medium.com