What's Up with Tech?

How Ignite Tech is Building an Enterprise-Grade AI Future

• Evan Kirstel

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Ever wondered what happens when artificial intelligence becomes more than just a feature but the very essence of your business? Eric Vaughan CEO of IgniteTech, Khorus, and GFI Software, has moved beyond the familiar "AI-first" terminology to something more profound – what he calls "AI DNA." His organization has transformed to the point where 75% of employees integrate AI into their daily work, regardless of their role.

The conversation reveals fascinating insights into IgniteTech's recent acquisition of Khorus, bringing community forum environments and social media management solutions under their umbrella. Rather than replacing humans, Eric emphasizes their focus on augmentation – making people more productive through intelligent AI integration. This philosophy extends to their hiring practices, where every employee carries the title "AI Innovation Specialist" in their respective field, and candidates are evaluated based on their AI tool familiarity and application expertise.

Vaughan delivers a sobering warning for businesses hesitant about AI adoption, describing it as an "existential threat" that could eliminate laggards within a year or two. "If you think you're behind and feel anxious about it, great. If you don't feel that anxiety, you're really in trouble," he cautions. The responsibility falls on CEOs to lead this transformation rather than delegate it. Meanwhile, IgniteTech continues developing groundbreaking solutions like MyPersonas, which creates AI clones with human backup capabilities, and the newly revealed Evoke AI designed to revolutionize website management with the bold promise to "fire your web guy" by allowing anyone to make website changes through simple conversational commands.

Want to see how enterprise-grade AI differs from the flashy startups flooding the market? Curious about why AI agents need to keep humans central to decision-making? Watch our full interview with Eric and discover how established software companies are bringing decades of enterprise experience to the AI revolution. Don't forget to check out Tech Impact TV on Bloomberg and Fox Business for more transformative technology insights.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, Excited to be joined by the leader at Ignite Tech again. Eric, how are you?

Speaker 2:

Evan, I'm great, great. How are you doing?

Speaker 1:

I'm doing well. You've been busy off your transformation into an AI-first company and your acquisition of Chorus, so let's dive in. Before that, maybe introduce yourself what's the big idea at Ignite Tech and Chorus these days and maybe introduce yourself for the folks listening and watching.

Speaker 2:

Certainly. Yeah, you know pleasure to be here with you again. You always provide a forum for lively conversations. I'm Eric Vaughn, CEO of Ignite Tech, Chorus and GFI Software, three companies under the same ownership umbrella. Both Ignite Tech and Chorus are enterprise software companies. Gfi Software is focused on the SMB space. Gfi Software is a company that sells all through partners. We have a network of partners all over the world. Ignite Tech and Chorus is very much direct relationships and Chorus is a new acquisition that we concluded right near the end of May and brought that company, its products, customers and people in. It's been a really interesting last couple of months because that's an exciting company, To say the least and you've called your organization AI First, which describe what that means.

Speaker 1:

What does it mean day to day and how do you work and build products in an AI first company?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I have to say AI first at this point. Now I can keep hearing that and I've been saying it for two years. It sounds inadequate. Now I think I'm live with you trying to come up with the next one. I think it's AI DNA. I think that's what it is, with you trying to come up with the next one. I think it's AI DNA. I think that's what it is.

Speaker 2:

We have now made our company really an AI DNA company. That means in everything we do, with every person we hire, ai is part of that journey. For the last two years, we've transformed our companies to look for a variety of ways to bring AI in and we track, for example, the actual usage of AI tools and AI processes within our company and our entire organization. Entire organization averages 75% of using some form of AI in their tag. We actually track it and that's across the entire team. Now, that's not about tracking for tracking's sake, that's just, you know, are we providing the environment, the tools, the know-how, the impetus, the support to bring everybody together in this AI DNA world? And you know, right now, 75% is a pretty high number. We're pleased with that. And right now, 75% is a pretty high number, we're pleased with that Brilliant and tell us about the acquisition of Chorus.

Speaker 1:

How does it change your position? And go to market.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so Ignite Tech is a nine-digit revenue company. We're private so we don't release that information, but that lets everybody have a frame of reference. That's between $100 million and a billion. Right, we're a nine-digit revenue company.

Speaker 2:

Chorus was also a nine-digit revenue company and had two key product sectors. One is called community, and that's an environment that I think most listeners will be familiar with. That is the extension of a brand's support. That is a community forum-type environment where people go on you know well-known brands to ask questions about how to fix something or how to use something or to provide input, and that's answered by not just the people at the company but also the broader community. So that was the core of the course of product offering. Then, secondly, they've got something called CARE and SMM social media management. Then, secondly, they've got something called CARE and SMM social media management and that is a set of solutions aimed at what we call brand care and that is monitoring input that takes place on social channels across all a number of different social channels, bringing it all together for analytics, enabling teams to moderate and respond in real time.

Speaker 2:

And what we've done is we've brought that in in these first two months and we're going through a lot of work right now to help identify with the customers in a give and take on how we're going to bring AI to those tools, because both the community forum environment and the brand care environment are ripe for those kinds of things. And it's not to replace people, it's to augment them, and that remains the core proposition that Ignite Tech and now Chorus offer to customers. We're looking to augment, not just automate. We're looking to make humans more productive in all of their roles and all of their jobs and with those products we see tremendous capabilities like moderation, like automatically moderating for posts that are out of line with guidelines for a community, for example, rather than having it flagged and later a human having to discard it automatically discard it when it violates their policies or their community rules. So many opportunities for that. We're going to be delivering those before 2025 is out, but that agenda is not set. We're looking for input from our customers.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant and you're hiring for a role called AI Innovation Specialists. Maybe describe that what they do and why are they so critical to your next phase?

Speaker 2:

Well, that's literally everybody's title. It doesn't matter if you're finance, marketing, sales, software engineering doesn't matter. It's AI innovation, specialist marketing, ai innovation, specialist sales. And that's not just a title, that's an orientation. When we are interviewing somebody in any role, we talk to them about what tools would they be bringing in with them? Uh, what would they be bringing to the table? What's their familiarity? What models are they using? What tools are they using relative to their relevant to their domain? You know there's a number in the marketing realm. There's a number in the software engineering realm, right? So, for example, software engineering is all about, you know, cursor, windsurf and now Cloud Code. All three of these are helping software engineers author, code and spin up new applications and new, even prototypes, within hours, where it used to take weeks. So we've really reached out throughout the world. We have a global recruiting organization called Crossover that focuses on finding those people that have AI as part of their DNA as well. So, yeah, thanks, evan, you've helped me retire the AI first thing I'm dropping.

Speaker 1:

AI DNA now Love it. I'll steal that for myself. You also say that AI adopters who are slow or sort of lagging could lose 40% of their visibility and mind share in the marketplace. I mean, that's a big number. How do you think about that number and the risk if companies don't act now with an AI strategy?

Speaker 2:

Well, I've used the word and I'm it's not hyperbole, uh, it's not at all. Uh, you know, meant to be alarming. It's literally what I believe. I believe it is an existential threat. I think people who are waiting to see what happens are doomed. I think people that are dabbling in this and hoping, you know, maybe it'll go away, are doomed. Maybe not next month, maybe not in 25, but not five years down the road, one year down the road, like they're going to see people coming, you know, behind them for their business and they're not going to be able to compete. So you know we're way past the time of now.

Speaker 2:

And a phrase that I like to use in many different situations and discussions is if you think you're behind, if you've got a little bit of anxiety about being behind right now, great. If you don't, you're really in trouble, you're really kidding yourself. I really believe that, and that's everybody, that's from the CEO down at every organization. The CEO has to understand this and not delegate it. They have to lead it, they have to believe it themselves. It's happening, whether anybody likes it or not. They may not like it, but it's here. Genie's out of the bottle, bottle's gone.

Speaker 1:

I would agree. I'm building my AI avatar now with a company called HeyGen. I need a break, I need to get away, so this will be a great stand-in for me in my little media business.

Speaker 2:

Well, evan, let me talk to you about that.

Speaker 2:

You're building an AI avatar with HeyGen, or you could use our product called MyPersonas, which creates an AI clone of Evan.

Speaker 2:

And not only does it create an AI clone, like what you just talked about, but if you look at our website at ignite techai, you'll find our chief commercial officer is on there and her clone is on there, and you can have live conversations with her AI clone, back and forth, and ask questions that are rooted in the knowledge that you give it about Evan Kirstel. And if your AI cannot answer that question, it then comes to you and sends you an email that says hey, a user on your website, evan, had this question. What's the answer? And you'll answer it. And when you do answer it, it will go back to the person that asked the question. Then it will also update the knowledge in the clone. That's patent pending technology. And, even better, we've now added the ability that you could click on a link and join the session with the person live, like a FaceTime video back and forth you and your AI. So you may want to take a look at my personas.

Speaker 1:

I better. I didn't know that existed, so I have some.

Speaker 2:

Oh that hurt that hurt you didn't know it existed. We're trying so hard to tell the world.

Speaker 1:

And you are indeed so on that note, I mean, how do you make sure your AI whether it's your AI avatar or AI chatbot you know, when it comes to brand safety, social listening, customer service, what have you? You know? How do you make sure it's accurate and ethical and compliant and not biased, and all those things that the businesses require?

Speaker 2:

So there's this term in the AI industry that some will be familiar with, called grounding, and grounding is the opposite of hallucinating. Everybody knows hallucinating, but fewer people will know grounding. Grounding is, if you will, a command to the LLM, command to the AI. Don't make things up. If you don't know, say I don't know. Now people will know. The current state of play here in mid-2025 is AI doesn't like to say I don't know. It seems to hedge towards I know, even if it doesn't. But our technology, we have focused so hard, so directly on this grounding, that our grounding exceeds that of all general LLMs. It's in the mid-90s. Anybody who understands grounding research knows that Gemini is in the mid-80s, for example. Grounding meaning when you ask a question and it answers it's accurate. Now, one of the things that we hypothesize but we don't yet know is we believe that because we tell the AI that it has a human behind it, that if it's not sure it can go ask, that it is more likely to do that than not, and we think that's why our grounding works so well, because we say, hey, no problem, evan's AI clone. If you don't know this answer, you just ask Evan. Evan will answer and you'll get smarter. This is what really works. So that's the answer. This is how we make it.

Speaker 2:

You know the fundamental aspect of both our product, my personas. You see on my screen this other product called Eloquence, which is very much the same, but it's working in an email sense. So Eloquence is a persona, it has a name and it has a real person's name and it creates bespoke emails, no templates. That is always perfect grammar, always empathetic, always context sensitive to what came in in the email, based and grounded in knowledge. And it does the same thing. If it doesn't know, it adds on CC, a human. Now let me tell you a funny story about that though.

Speaker 2:

We had a series after the Quorus acquisition. We spun up some Quorus Eloquence personas and one of them had a conversation back and forth with a customer. Customer said great, let's set a meeting, and Eloquent set the meeting up and the persona's name was Lena. And when we set up the meeting, the customer said hey, I want Lena on that call. Why isn't she on the invite? And internally somebody came to me and said what do we say? How do we answer that question? So we asked AI, here's the situation. What should we say? How do we answer that question. So we asked AI here's the situation. What should we do? And his recommendation was add the person to the call and then explain it to the customer when you get on the call. It's AI. That was so good. You didn't know it was AI and you didn't care. And I think that's where we need to go with AI solutions, right?

Speaker 1:

I think that's where we need to go with AI solutions. Right? Sounds good to me. So let's talk about tools. You know we're all as individuals Many of us, even in companies, are using or experimenting with ChatGPT and Cloud and a whole host of tools. You know why should companies work with Ignite Tech or one of its companies or applications versus you know one of these big tech applications and just run with that?

Speaker 2:

Well, one of the things I think that sets us apart from the industry, because, believe me, we're sympathetic. The whole industry is hearing AI, ai, ai, ai all day, every day. The whole world is hearing it from every company. Every single company has an AI strategy, which they should, I agree. The difference is there's a lot of spin-ups right now of new tech companies. They're certainly inventing things and doing things that are interesting and helpful, but what you find really, really quickly is they're not enterprise quality, and what I mean by that is they don't understand what a global Fortune 50 brand requires in their software. They require a mature software or support organization. They require a pre and post-sales organization. They require a user interface that has fundamentals. For example, I worked on a new AI tool I won't name it just a week ago and noticed that it was missing a reset password function at the login.

Speaker 1:

And I forgot my password.

Speaker 2:

Okay, that's what I mean. It's immature software Like look at our cool, shiny new toy. Oh yeah, all that other stuff that you can't do. Yeah, we'll get to that later. That's not going to reassure a Fortune 50 company. So we are an enterprise software company. We've got 30 years of history in our enterprise software DNA with AI tech inside of that, so we wrap it around with enterprise know-how and that's why we differentiate ourselves between a lot of other AI tools that are popping up right now. I mean even some of the popular ones. Evan, when ChatGPT first came out, the basic UI was missing some critical functionality simple things like folders to maybe go put chats in folders, if you remember that wasn't there at first, but we waited.

Speaker 2:

When Claude came out from Anthropic, you couldn't delete a chat. Why Exactly? Why won't you let me delete a chat? You could archive it, but not delete it. What I'm talking about? An individual account. That doesn't make sense. But they're rushing to get the tech out, which is cool, and we're all using them, but you find these deficiencies that enterprise software companies can't depend on. You know that kind of deficiency.

Speaker 1:

So that's where I think we differentiate ourselves Definitely when it comes to data protection data privacy putting corporate information in chat GPT is questionable, to say the least. So what's next for Ignite Tech and Chorus? What should we be watching over the next six months to a year? Can you give us a peek into your roadmap or other opportunities that are on the horizon?

Speaker 2:

Well, first of all, thanks for saying six to 12, six to 12 months, because oftentimes you get this five year question. I always laugh like five years, are you serious, not a?

Speaker 1:

chance.

Speaker 2:

I predict what's happening in five years. In the next six to 12 months, there are there are new software. So we're doing two different things. We're doing two different things. We are providing meaningful AI capabilities to existing software products that we own, like Chorus Communities, like Chorus Care. We've announced that, we've talked about that and we're currently on a listening tour with customers around the world, where we're holding meetings and showing them some prototypes to get their feedback of where we're going. So that's absolutely coming. Simultaneously, our AI software development org is creating brand new software from the ground up, and I'll give you a preview of one that's not even yet announced. We've got a product coming out that the tagline is going to be fire your web guy.

Speaker 2:

In 25 years of creating websites, very little has changed. Everybody's got some CMS, wordpress or whatever, and there's some web guy or gal somewhere. You want a new page up? You give it to the web guy. You need a change on your page? You give it to the web guy. Hey, web guy, is it up yet? Is it up yet?

Speaker 2:

It's like a barrier between the most fundamental view on a company and your customers, right? So what if you could just go on to a chat and say add a page, make it look like this page. Add a form on that page. Add this image on this page. I don't like that text. Change this text. What if every person could do that and didn't need to talk to their web guy? So that's not yet announced. The product is called Evoke AI E-V-O-Q. I'm giving you a scoop right here, live on your podcast. I don't know when it's coming out, but the press release is not out yet. We're very excited about that and we're going to continue to innovate in things that make humans more it's not the word efficient, they are augmented and they really are getting direct benefit out of that, and we think that's going to shake up the world of web. In fact, we think that's going to have a profound effect.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant, I love the very practical going to have a profound effect. Brilliant, I love the very practical, useful nature. That sounds like a killer use case. The opposite of that is just all the AI hype that's out there right now. Is there one trend you think is completely overblown, that everyone's talking about? What's been overhyped in the world of AI? Maybe it's AGI or super intelligence or one of these other things?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I won't wade into the AGI discussion. I think that's got too much depth to answer it that way. But I think agent and agentic I don't want to say it's been overhyped, because I certainly believe in the capability of the concept of agents doing work for you we are absolutely using that and doing that. I think that the way we're talking about it is scaring customers. First of all, I don't think they know what the word agentic means and I think when they hear agent they worry that there's this disembodied piece of software that's running around doing things that you don't know what's happening right, and so the way to fix that is to maybe stop talking about it like that, because we love to do this in the tech industry. We love tech terms and talk about software that is working on your behalf but reporting back to you and keeping you at the center of all major decisions, like whether or not to book that flight with your credit card, for example.

Speaker 2:

You know humans will need that. We need to make humans continue to feel like they are controlling it, but they are augmented by these agents. So I don't think it's over with at all. I do think the concept of an agent-based AI makes sense right when it's not just you one-on-one. I mean, the fundamental concept of agent is it's not just you one-on-one with the AI. At the moment, it's like go do this for me and it goes away and it does. It's a great idea and there's lots of good uses of that, but we're going to have to bring humans back to the center of that, even in their own minds.

Speaker 1:

I think that's important, indeed, and thanks so much for sharing the update and the scoop and a peek into the future. Really exciting stuff, eric.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, evan. Thanks for all you're doing to help get this word out too. It's very much appreciated.

Speaker 1:

Thank you and thanks everyone for listening and watching, and be sure to check out our new TV show, tech Impact TV, now on Bloomberg and Fox Business. Thanks everyone. Thanks Eric.