Seeing the Product Beyond the AI
Company
Function AI
Theme
Product Vision • AI Strategy • Systems Thinking • Business Growth
The Situation
In 2016, one of my longtime friends founded Function AI, a startup focused on deploying AI-powered conversational agents for large enterprise organizations.
Long before generative AI became mainstream, the company was building omnichannel AI solutions that worked across chat, email, and phone to support both customers and employees.
As the company grew, my friend came to me with a challenge.
The AI itself was working.
The business around it wasn't scaling.
The Real Problem
Every enterprise customer wanted reports.
How many conversations had the AI handled?
How many issues had been resolved?
Where were customers dropping off?
Which conversations required escalation?
Every new reporting request became another development task.
Instead of building the product, developers were spending more and more time producing reports for individual clients.
The company wasn't struggling with AI.
It was struggling with the absence of a product around the AI.
The Insight
I had previously worked on an enterprise CRM, and the solution appeared almost immediately.
I told my friend:
"You don't have a reporting problem.
You have a product problem."
Rather than generating custom reports for every customer, I proposed creating a customer-facing management platform where clients could monitor, customize, and continuously improve their AI deployments themselves.
Instead of treating reporting as a service, we could transform it into a product.
The Vision
I sketched out a platform built around three connected capabilities.
Customer Intelligence
A centralized view of customer interactions and user profiles that would help organizations better understand who was interacting with their AI systems and identify opportunities for marketing, sales, and employee engagement.
Operational Intelligence
A complete lifecycle view of every inquiry, tracking conversations from open to resolved, identifying escalations, measuring success rates, and helping organizations understand where human intervention created the greatest value.
Rather than asking whether the AI was working, organizations could finally measure its business impact.
AI Configuration
A workspace where clients could safely customize AI behavior without requiring engineering support.
Organizations could adjust responses for seasonal demand, emphasize specific topics, introduce new conversational skills, and continuously optimize their AI experiences as business needs evolved.
Over time, the platform could become the delivery mechanism for entirely new AI capabilities, creating opportunities for product expansion and recurring revenue.
The Prototype
After explaining the concept, my friend was quiet for a moment.
Then he looked at me and said:
"Can you build something that shows this?"
I created a low-fidelity prototype illustrating the platform, its workflows, dashboards, reporting capabilities, and future product vision.
The prototype wasn't intended to be production software.
It was designed to help investors, advisors, and leadership understand the opportunity.
The Outcome
When the concept was presented to the founding board and advisors, the reaction surprised me.
Several immediately recognized the strategic opportunity.
One comment stuck with me:
"Nobody is doing this. We have to get on this."
To me, the platform felt like a natural extension of the technology.
To them, it represented a completely new direction for the company.
The conversation shifted from managing customer requests to building a scalable product that could grow with the business.
What I Learned
This experience reinforced something I've encountered throughout my career.
Organizations often focus on improving the technology they already have.
I naturally find myself asking a different question:
"What's the product that's missing?"
Sometimes the greatest opportunity isn't building better features.
It's recognizing the platform, workflow, or system that doesn't exist yet—but should.
That perspective has influenced how I've approached design systems, accessibility governance, enterprise software, AI strategy, and organizational transformation ever since.