August 2025

We’ve just finished reading Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick in our bookclub. I thought the book could have been about 75% shorter but still found some of the reminders necessary and important. Overall, it’s clear that AI’s adoption is urgent, its outputs are biased, and sometimes counterintuitive, cultural fears often hold people back from sharing how they use it, and our competitiveness depends on reframing habits, so AI becomes an open, integrated tool rather than a hidden shortcut.

We know that people are using it every day at Authentise, from power users like Ayoub (who uses Cursor intensely) and Esta (who developed a whole Sales Signal Dashboard with AI). Others are not, and that worries me: If other companies are using it more effectively, we risk losing one of our core competitive advantages (speed). They may be held back by other fears, like the fears of loosing their specific job, so I have to do a bunch of work in next week’s All Hands to reduce those qualms and push increased experimentation.

Confronting the urgency of confronting the opportunity of AI and the challenges of doing so are also very much what our Whisper Steering Committee is about. We’ve only met once but have used that meeting to define our development agenda, which is moving ahead at pace. We should have something to report by September, as expected. I’ve enjoyed the time since then researching and writing weekly updates. If you want a sneak peek to those messages, follow this link (password: Whisper). And if you’ve missed me talking about Whisper and have no idea what’s going on, check this link.

Of course, all this big picture thinking hasn’t meant that we’ve forgotten about core product development. The team has been slaving away like mad. One development that’s pretty topical is AI-based test data extraction. Now you can define what kind of test results you want and upload any random test results (from excel or a document) and it will extract those values for you. Here’s a quick video of Tyler, one of our developers demoing that feature. One improvement that has come in since is that this view is now also available to service providers, meaning you can give a log in to your test labs and all they have to do is upload the documents and you have the results💥You can even set thresholds which would trigger actions (like a Non Conformance Review) when results exceed limits.

I’m excited that AI is making inroads to our traditional products, in addition to uses in Threads and soon, Whisper. We’ve got so many other cool new features to tell you about, but I’ll leave those for next time as they’re not necessarily AI related.