Craig Brenner - CEO and co-founder of icognio - talks about their legal technology company delivering secure, on-premises AI solutions built exclusively for law firms.
With decades of experience across technology, leadership, and enterprise systems, Craig has helped build and scale multiple companies serving high-trust, high-stakes environments. He founded icognio to address the security, governance, and adoption gaps he saw emerging as law firms rushed to adopt cloud-based AI tools.
Winning Business Radio is broadcast live Mondays at 4PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Winning Business Radio is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
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With decades of experience across technology, leadership, and enterprise systems, Craig has helped build and scale multiple companies serving high-trust, high-stakes environments. He founded icognio to address the security, governance, and adoption gaps he saw emerging as law firms rushed to adopt cloud-based AI tools.
Winning Business Radio is broadcast live Mondays at 4PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Winning Business Radio is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Winning Business Radio Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/winning-business-radio--3075598/support.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
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make no recommendations or endorsements radio show programs, services, or
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(00:20):
W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are
condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helen n believes that certainly
applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at
W four cy Radio. That's W four cy dot com
and now your host, Kevin.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Helen Thanks everybody for joining in again today. I'm Kevin
Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and radio
on W four cy dot com. We are streaming live
on talkfortv dot com. That's the number four, and of
course we're on Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio.
(01:08):
And after the live show, we're available wherever you get
your podcast content, YouTube by heart Radio, Spotify, Apple, etc.
The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular
viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice
to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to
learn best practices. Those are the how tos, the what tows,
(01:30):
the what not tos. I want you to be challenged
and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others.
Who are those others consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and
owners and entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But you know, virtually
every successful person I've ever had a chance to has
had some form of failure in their lives and careers.
So while we all have to get our knee skinned
(01:51):
once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes
from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history
so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part
of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to
small and medium sized companies all the way up to
the Fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win
and to varying degrees, I've seen some fail, and I've
had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the
(02:14):
highest performing people around and some who probably should have
found other professions. In my own businesses, I've had lots
of success, but some failures too, and I like to
think I've learned a lot. So yeah, you're going to
hear from me, but mostly I want to hear from
I want you to hear from guests. And today my
guest is Craig Brenner, CEO and co founder of Icognio,
a legal technology company built exclusively for law firms. Here's
(02:37):
his bio. Craig Brenner is the CEO and co founder
of Icognio, a legal technology company delivering secure on premise
AI solutions. With decades of experience across technology leadership and
enterprise systems, Craig is helped build and scale multiple companies
serving high trust, high stakes environments. He founded Icognio to
(02:58):
address the security, governance, and adoption gaps he saw emerging
his law firms rushed to adopt cloud based based AI tools.
He's also the owner of Brenner Brothers and has held
senior technology and technology leadership positions in well known technology companies.
He holds a bachelor's in Science and business from Eastern
Nazarene College in Quinsey, mass where he's the captain of
(03:19):
the cross country team and an MBA with the concentration
in e Business from the University of Phoenix, and he
completed Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Technology Leadership Program. He resides in
the Nashville, Tennessee metro area. He has three grown kids,
Colin who's twenty seven, Cameron who's twenty five, and Cassidy
who's twenty two. And he's got three grandkids. And don't
(03:39):
forget he's got two Standard Poodles, Mindy Loo and Big
Wayne Craig. Welcome to Winning Business Radio and TV. Thank
you very much, Kevin, My pleasure. Glad you could be here.
So tell us a little bit about your background. You
grew up in Middletown, New York. Tell folks where that
is and what it was like to grow up there.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Yeah, Middletown, New York is out an hour and a
half north of metropolitan New York City in the Catskills region.
It's in an area a lot of people would know
of a Poughkeepsie, New York on the Hudson Valley region.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
Yeah, beautiful up there.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
It's a country area, So I kind of grew up
in the country even though when people here in New York,
they always think.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Of big buildings, and you don't have that New York
city accent. I don't have that Boston, New Jerseys. My
parents are from Connecticut. So so were you influenced by
parents or mentors when choosing a direction or career, either
you know, directly or indirectly.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, I think my biggest mentor was probably my father.
My father was the incurable entrepreneur. I remember him coming
home and always having a new idea about, you know,
what kind of business he could.
Speaker 6 (04:59):
Do or how he could make money.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
He owned his own milk route when a milk route
was a thing.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Yeah, And he would drag my my one of my
five older brothers out there and two in the morning
to distribute milk around the neighborhoods.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
And so.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
He he really gave me that concept that if you
have a great idea, you can go and you can
build it to have confidence in yourself.
Speaker 6 (05:29):
And my brothers were also.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
All their own business owners as a result of that leadership,
I'd say my dad was my biggest influence. And my mom,
obviously she had six kids, so she showed me how
to manage adversity.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
She gets the award for having all boys too, one girl,
one girl. If you guys play sports growing.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Up, yeah, I was on the cross country team and
the track team. My brothers had pretty much all runners
in my family. And then I branched out a little
bit into cycling and triathlon and ultra marathoning.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Oh very cool. I'd like to hear about that another time.
But I when I got turned forty, I wanted to
get in, you know, better shape. I wasn't in terrible shape,
but I wasn't in shape either, And that's when I
found I like to run. I didn't like it before that,
and I've always been active, but you know, I considered
running that's what you do when you get ready for football,
you know, right.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
It was painful, you know.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
So, Yes, my coach used to say that it's not
fun to run. It's fun to have run.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
That's true. That's true.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
You feel great and it's fun to win too when
you do win. So what made you choose Eastern Nazarene.
I know that campus, really small campus. I know it
well down in Quincy.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Eastern Nazarene College, which was later changed to Eastern College,
was a part of the Nazarene Church, extension of the
Nazrine Church. They have colleges all over the country and
Quincy was just one of their campuses. My two boys
went to Treveca in the Nashville region, which is how
(07:12):
I ended up the Nashville region visited them. So Treveca
is another one of the Nazarene college You have Point
Loma out in California, so they have quite an interesting
college network related to and associated with the Church of
the Nazarene International. But I think in the last few
years the Quincy campus has closed down.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Yeah, it has, unfortunately, but really good education. I know
a bunch of kids that have gone there. My kids
went to a Christian school right in Weymouth and saw
a lot of their front not a lot, but a
number of their friends went there. And I know adults
that have gone there. Had a really good friend got
his as an adult, got his construction certificate, four year degree,
you know, his construction degree and certificate there. So really
(07:55):
good school. And then when and why did you decide
to get an MBA.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
I decided to get an MBA because I realized that
there was more I wanted to learn about business. There
were weaknesses. You know, we all have our strengths and
our weaknesses. I had some weak areas that I wanted
to shore up when relating to business, some on the
financial side, some on the you know, accounting side, some
on the strategy side, some.
Speaker 6 (08:22):
On the leadership side.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
And so I thought that that was a good way
for me to, you know, just go go one level
deeper in terms of how businesses operate, how they run,
what's important and and go ahead and get that. So
that's why I went from from my MBA. I did
it remote remotely through university. And some people might say, oh, well,
(08:48):
you know, you weren't really on a campus, But getting
your MBA remotely has its own set of challenges, and
you have to use technology. Technology is your conduit kind
of to the professor, and so it brings in a
whole different sense of community because you're interacting with students
(09:08):
from all over the country and in some cases.
Speaker 6 (09:10):
All over the world.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
I can imagine, yeah, which you know you sometimes do
on certain local campuses, but you know, they're all distributed,
and the concept of teamwork in an online environment changes
and becomes much more important because that's your lifeline too
to learning. So University Phoenix. They have a nice teamwork program.
(09:33):
They break the classes up into teams, project teams, and
you know, you have some strong team members and you
know you kind of follow them, and then you have
some weak team members and you kind of bring them along.
All these business all these are business concepts, you know. Yeah,
So I did enjoy that program. It was very it
(09:55):
was very good for me.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
What was your takeaway from wp i's Techology Leadership Program.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Well, the WPI Technology Leadership Program was the name is
kind of and I'll say deceiving, but doesn't hit the mark.
The WPI Leadership Training Program is a people management program
which is focused on leading technology leaders. So how to
(10:26):
lead those groups that are in the technology realm as
a CIO or a CTO or even a CEO, and
how to keep motivation, how to keep innovation moving, and
how to incent and how to know how to lead.
So it was an outstanding program. It was right on
(10:47):
the campus there now in Worster. I think it was
a remote campus. I forget the exact town, but beautiful campus.
I was in that class, rather small cohort of about
twenty folks, but all pretty high performing technology leaders in
their own companies, and so they really pushed you. I
(11:10):
mean that's what I that's what I liked about it. Yeah,
there were moments where you were kind.
Speaker 6 (11:14):
Of, wow, this is a this is a push.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
You know, they'd give you some high pressure team assignments
that were competitive, and that was kind of a core
of that curriculum was break up into teams, solve this problem,
come back and tell all these other really smart people
how you're going to solve it and do it better
than them. So you know, that's the pressure cooker that
(11:39):
is innovation. That's how innovation happens.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Love to hear that, all right, take us through. You know,
I don't want to spend a lot of time, but
I want to I want to get a sense. I
always like audiences to get the sense of kind of
how you came up. So just like a quick lesson
from each of these channel sales manager at NTT Data
Sure I was.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
I was selling dial up back in the day. Not
to roll back the film that far. I realized that,
you know, high speed internet access was something that was
needed by businesses, and so NTT acquired a company I
worked for called Verio in downtown Boston.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
I was a channel manager there.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
I later rolled that program out to NFL cities twelve
cities in the United States other channel managers, and it
was very successful. I enjoyed selling, you know, I really
enjoyed the process of some.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
It's the dark side.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
Well, you know, selling, selling is not the dark side. No,
there's a certain feeling you only get when you close business.
Speaker 5 (12:45):
And you know, that's right, that's right, that's really great feeling.
Speaker 6 (12:49):
That's a great feeling.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
So that's how I got interested in really and deep
into technology. And I just have an affinity for it.
I always was skilled out in school. So I went
on to work for a few different startups and then
I went on to found a few different startups, some
which made it and some which did not.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
That's the game. That is the game.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
Yeah, And so it is for sting when you start
something and you have a passion for something and it
doesn't quite go the way you had planned. But I
would say that you know, you've heard this before many
people have. You really do learn more from your failures
than you do from your successes.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
That's a fact, yep, you know.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
And you have to have some scars, you have to
be willing to take risks a lot of people are
not that kind of a personality. My personality is is
that I'm not afraid to take the risks. So some
of them, some of the startups I got funded by
other folks.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Some of the.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Startups I fund funded myself. And these were all technology startups,
and some of them were funded by venture capitalists and
were already kind of in motion. And one of those
was Kiva Systems, which was a robotics company. Uh started
(14:12):
out in Wooburn and later relocated to North Redding. I
was there seven years. We were acquired by Amazon. And
that's another great feeling when you are even just a
part of a team that succeeds and gets acquired.
Speaker 6 (14:29):
By a larger company.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
Yeah, it's a it's a one of a kind feeling
that it's the high five moment. You know, we did it,
We achieved our goal, We returned our investment to our
investors and then some and uh, you know that that
it's addicting.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
I like winning, but I particularly like winning financially. So
that's a good one. All Right, We're going to take
our first break right here, Craig, everybody, We'll be back
with Craig Brenner in just about one minute.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
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Speaker 3 (16:49):
We are back with Craig brann oer CEO and co
founder of Icognio. So then you got into some tech,
some let's see some fractional CIO work, and some consulting work.
Speaker 5 (17:01):
Talk about that.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
Yeah, I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I
had done some government consulting. I was outsourced part time
CIO for the city of Watertown, Massachusetts. I had consulted
for some K through twelve school districts, including Plymouth and
also Shrewsbury. So in the City of Shrewsbury and also
(17:30):
Watertown K through twelve.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
So I enjoyed.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
I enjoyed the the low hanging fruit of being able
to go in to, let's say, something that wasn't necessarily
a company which ran very efficiently and make improvements that were,
you know, not really able to be observed by those individuals.
And then that lead me into led me into consulting
(17:56):
for businesses. One of my consulting opportunity unities with was
with a large sign company, National Sign Company, and on another.
Speaker 6 (18:05):
One was with s VP Worldwide.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Which was Singer Sewing Machines with their Internet of Things
products have product line sewing machines that are that are
networked and people can download designs. And I was a
part of that project and during the during the COVID,
so as you can imagine, a lot of people had
time and they were doing a lot of sewing during COVID,
(18:30):
So that was a very fast moving type opportunity. And
so I did enjoy the consulting and also that you know,
there are some positives and doing technology consulting and there
are some negatives. The positive is, you know, you kind
of come in with a certain agenda to make a
make a sweeping improvement or to innovate something that they
(18:52):
have not noticed and give them advice. The downside is
you're not really a member of the team and it's
very easy for people to create opinions about your performance,
whether it be he's aweso more, he's really doing what
we're paying on that much to do. You know, that
was the downside of consulting, But everything has its goods.
(19:15):
And bads, But I did enjoy the process of it.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
All right.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
So in twenty twenty one, you started Brenner Brothers. I
don't know a whole lot about that. Tell us what
Brenner Brothers is or was sounds like it.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Brenner Brothers is.
Speaker 4 (19:30):
It's still an entity, but it was a industrial food
service for large corporations to the customers in Tennessee where
General Motors and Ultium Batteries Ultium Cells, which is a
large battery manufacturer owned by General Motors, and my brother
(19:50):
and I started that and he is continuing it in
the South Carolina area servicing large data center construction projects.
Speaker 5 (20:00):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, everybody's got to eat. That's pretty dependable, all right.
And then, of course, in January of last year, you
founded Icognio. So first tell us the why behind the
what you know, what did you see, and why did
you decide to Again, there's the risk. I'm sure there
was money that you invested, et cetera. Nothing's free. Take
(20:21):
us through that story.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
The way the company was originally envisioned was not what
it is today.
Speaker 6 (20:29):
That that's a common theme in technology.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
You pivot as the market shows you what's actually going
on and Originally we were shooting for a consumer product
to protect privacy of AI users. But then we you know,
over time, we started to niche down as we saw
the market opportunity growing in certain areas, and that's how
(20:56):
we ended up kind of, you know, in the legal
space because in business and in sports and everything else,
you have to figure out where the puck is going right,
and you have to go there before others go there.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
You don't want to go there too.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
Early because no one will have interest you just wait
too early. But you don't want to also be too
late and come in behind. So that was kind of
a lot of our early discussions. We started development in
fall of twenty twenty four and then throughout all of
twenty twenty five we continued our development and with a
focus on AI security.
Speaker 5 (21:38):
How did you realize there was a need there?
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yes, the AI security space is just a little baby
hasn't even walked yet, and AI is sort of like
the wild West in a lot of ways. Absolutely many
of the listeners might know. And it's the wild West
because it's a petri dish of technology due to the
(22:04):
speed rapid innovation that's taking place and that desire to
you know, have something first and get something out, and
the pressure that companies are under due to large sums
of investment in their companies to innovate, to release and
(22:24):
you know, sort of the term damn the torpedoes comes
to mind. It may not be completely safe, but we
have to do it, you know, And so that was
a that was a lot of our vision was that we.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
We saw whether Puck was going and.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
It was a little bit scary because we thought this
is probably going to go wrong in a lot of
different ways.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
But how is it going to go wrong? I'm not
talking about end of world kind of.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Scenarios, right, not not no, no, uh what I just
lou the reference the name of the the Terminator series.
Speaker 5 (23:04):
Anyway, keep going right.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Not end of world go wrong, but go wrong for companies,
go wrong for businesses. Become an unsolvable challenge for security
officers in companies and they, you know, they have to
do what the CEO says, uh, that's their job to
(23:27):
follow the orders. But they're also under pressure to secure
their data, right, that's their other job. Their one job
is innovate and follow instructions from the leadership of the company,
from the board, but their primary job is to secure
the data and so they you know, these security folks
(23:48):
are in a little bit of a jam in a
lot of ways. They probably would admit it that AI
can be. AI is like fire. It can be your
best friend or can be your worst enemy.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
That's a good reference.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
Yeah, so, and fire.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Is a good thing. You have to control it. And
so that's where we sit. We sit in that control space,
ahead of the competition and deploying in such a fashion
that they do not. And that is our core value
proposition is that we're really not like any of the competitors.
(24:26):
We are a the most secure AI solution for law.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
If somebody read a description, they'd say, wow, they're not
cloud based. But there's a very important reason for that.
And what you've created as an appliance, right, an on
premise appliance. So tell us about that.
Speaker 5 (24:43):
The reason for our.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Founding team, our founding team and myself we have a
lot of history with infrastructure hardware and managing infrastructure hardware.
And you know, the easiest way I can explain it
to anyone who may meet the in tech knowledge or
not being technology, they probably know what a firewall is, right,
(25:05):
So you may have a firewall in your house.
Speaker 6 (25:08):
You probably do.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Some people have firewalls in their house, but companies certainly
have firewalls to protect their data. That firewall does not
live in the cloud. There's a reason for that. It
is a device because that is the best way to
secure the.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
Data behind it.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
So that's basically the approach that we take to our
solution is we take you know, best known practices of
securing devices, and then we build an AI platform on
top of that and we make it one hundred percent
secure and one percent reliable, and it goes inside the
(25:51):
customer's network. It doesn't live in the cloud. And that's
why firewalls don't live in the cloud. That is our
business model.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
And so this is for the for law firms. Uh,
law firms have a I don't know if it's regulatory.
I don't think it's regulatory, but they certainly have an
obligation to keep everything secure, and in particular, you know,
they could be not just at risk of you know,
exposing customer data, but I expose competitive data too, right.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
So yeah, you know, we've done a lot of interviews
with law firms, but you know, our assumption was that
the risk versus reward benefit of using AI in certain
spaces such as law is it's a slippery slope because
you can get a lot of efficiencies from using AI
(26:43):
in the law environment, but then at the same time,
controlling what the end user actually does with AI is
not so simple, so you get into internal regulatory or
policy creation.
Speaker 5 (27:00):
Right.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
The American Bar Association has toyed with AI standards for law,
but they have not done that yet.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
Yeah, it's not it's not easy, but it's it's a
great idea.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
Well, we're counting on it. In fact, we're positive that
it will happen. It's just a matter of time going
by where more and more events occur.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
There are many events that have already occurred, so.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
You know we're going to be able to guarantee compliance
at a much higher level. I don't want to get
too geek, even if you allow. Companies like Anthropic, who
were really focusing on the slanting a certain products set
towards law, have since decreased their bar for security because
(27:53):
they were getting sued a lot. And so even the
AI companies, I don't want to say they don't really
know how it works, because that's not a right statement.
The AI companies don't really know what mistakes it will make.
Speaker 6 (28:08):
Right, So they're.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
Cautious because AI does things that are unpredictable by its nature,
and that has to do with the DNA of how
an AI platform is built and how it operates. It
can be unpredictable. Unpredictable and law do not go together.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
It makes a lot of sense. So I can imagine
that managing partners or boards are very leary.
Speaker 6 (28:43):
Yeah, you have a few different camps.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
You have your old school law firms who are hesitant
to get off the dime with AI because AI has
the potential to decrease billings, and billings is what their
companies are built.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Don Okay, So that's interesting.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
Yeah, you know, so they're they're at the you're talking
at the board level.
Speaker 5 (29:07):
So you're talking at at.
Speaker 6 (29:08):
The board at the board level.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Now, they also have efficiencies which can be gained, which
is maybe X number of hours are saved per month
per uh per paralegal or or per junior attorney or
per attorney. I would I would say that the greatest
savings is at the lower end because AI is better
(29:33):
at repetitive tasks.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Well, the argument I think I would think should be Okay,
Now they have more capacity for billible hours.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
That's correct. That that's another one of the upsides.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
So you see, it's this slippery slope of what are
the benefits and what are the what are the downsides
of fully adopting AI. Now there's a there's another whole
class of law firms that's evolving, which are AI first
law firm Those are the guys that are going to
shake the Apple card up.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
What would you say that legal zoom was maybe a
precursor to something like that.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
Now this would be a little bit different. Legal legal
Zoom is an automation platform.
Speaker 6 (30:16):
I think it's a good product.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
It's a it's an automation platform. What we're talking about
is real law, not not just templates. We're talking about litigation. Litigation.
Uh And basically you have AI firms that are now
evolving and they're getting Interestingly, they're getting VC funding. So
(30:39):
you have law firms getting VC funding. That's something new.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
I've never heard that.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
Yeah, you have AI first law firms getting VC funding
to grow rapidly and the concept there is human in
the middle. Right, So AI does a larger percentage of
the world the law work than they would in a
traditional law firm. Maybe AI does sixty or seventy or
(31:07):
eighty percent of the work by design, the law firm.
Speaker 6 (31:11):
Is built that way.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
That's where you get some serious time savings, right, and
then you have the human in the loop, where the
human is really facilitating the law process. It's very similar
to what's happening with AI and software development. Your lower
end people are now becoming sort of architects in a way.
(31:34):
Here's the same concept that in law that AI first
law firm, the lawyer is more of a facilitator, an
architect of the process. They're not doing the whole process,
they're checking the process. So there's a huge savings there
for the customer AI.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
AI can't go to court, they can't do a mediation,
AI can't do a deposition. I suppose it possible, but
you still need that traffic cop you still need that
legality right right.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Yes, And you would think that law firms are cautious
about that, but you would be completely wrong.
Speaker 5 (32:13):
Because that's what I went there.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
There are I don't want to say hundreds, that's probably
an overstatement. There are more than fifty cases that we're
aware of where law firms have submitted and brought into
court false AI generated content, some of them knowingly, some
(32:36):
of them by a mistake. So it's a very uh
it's like the wild West for law is. If you're
going to use AI, you better have your saddle tight.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
All right, that's a good time to take a break.
We'll take our second commercial right here. We'll be right
back in about a minute with Craig Brenner.
Speaker 6 (32:57):
Thank you.
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Speaker 3 (34:49):
We're back with Craig Brenner, CEO and co founder of
i Cognio. What makes your solution and you touched on
that a little bit, but this is an opportunity to
really the case what makes your solution better than other
legal ais.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
The majority of legle ais are really not legal ais.
They are yet they are a large language model an
l l M. Whether it be anthropic or whether it
be chat, GPT. And then like many products that people
are familiar with that have AI embedded into them, the AI,
(35:29):
you know, is really software around the large language model.
We're completely different. It's basically a wrapper around regular AI.
Our platform is built from the ground up just for law.
It's a it's a major differentiator. Everything that's in our
in our product is built with law in mind. And
(35:52):
that that comes down to safety, That comes down to accuracy,
that comes down to auditability, that comes down to reporting engines,
you know, built for law. So everything in our product
is built from the ground up for law. It's purpose built.
That's the major differentiator. And obviously the second one is
(36:13):
the most important. The security component is it lives inside
the customer's network. Data never their their proprietary data never
leaves their network.
Speaker 6 (36:26):
You know, why would it?
Speaker 4 (36:28):
Why would why would any company just think about what
I'm saying here, Why would any company allow their proprietary data,
whether it be a customer name, whether it be a
case description, and put that out into the cloud, right
and take a chance that it's going.
Speaker 6 (36:46):
To leak, right? They wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Why would they count on information coming back? So here's
number three, information coming back from AI that is accurate, right,
and hallucinations are probably the most talked about a problem
in law having to do with AI. AI hallucinates. What
(37:11):
is a hallucination?
Speaker 5 (37:12):
For people that are less.
Speaker 4 (37:13):
Technical out there, a hallucination is imagine you're going down
a highway and the way AI works is it puts
words together. That's how it gives you your response. It
looks for the next logical word. When it can't find
the next logical word, it does what it's designed to do.
And this process is called probabilistic guessing. It guesses at
(37:37):
the most probable exit on the highway right the next word.
If it can't find it, it goes anyway right, it'll
take it. And you know on the highway when you
get off the wrong exit, now you've got to make
many turns and take many false turns to get back
on track. That is what a hallucination is for the
(38:00):
common person to understand. It makes things up because it
gets lost in the process. And the larger the models get,
this is the important point. The larger the models get,
the worse that problem gets, because now instead of five
exits off the highway, you have five thousand exits off
the highway to choose from. So while it might seem
(38:23):
that AI can get smarter modeled, as the models grow,
the traffic gets more complicated. So we solve that. I
believe we're the only company who actually has a solution
to that problem of hallucination.
Speaker 6 (38:40):
That's a patent that we have.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Nice, Now, is it a fair question? And if you
can't answer this in five minutes, don't how did you
do that?
Speaker 6 (38:50):
So I have to be careful what I said that
on that one.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
Let's let me describe it from a non technical perspective. Good, right, So, well,
everyone's familiar with how a lie detector works. So you
have someone who's accused of something and you know, they
want want to maybe eliminate them as a as a suspect,
or they want to say, oh, well, this person's lying.
(39:18):
You know, this may not be completely accurate, right, A
lie detector is not always completely accurate, but we have
a better chance of knowing if the person's discepted. Right,
that's exactly what we build. That's exactly exactly what we build.
So could you say one hundred percent? You can't say
(39:39):
one hundred percent with a lie detector. The way a
lie detector works is that it looks for patterns in
the response. Right, That's exactly what we do. That's exactly
what our technology does. There are certain patterns that an
honest response from AI have, and there are certain patterns
(40:01):
that a hallucination had. In other words, something doesn't go
with the question. So when you compare the question or
the prompt in this case for those who use AI,
you compare prompt to the response like a lie detector
compares the question to the body signals, you can see
(40:22):
deception or you can sense it.
Speaker 6 (40:25):
That's exactly what we've built before.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
It provides unanswered response.
Speaker 6 (40:30):
Yes, accuracy response.
Speaker 4 (40:32):
An accuracy response is probably the biggest flaw.
Speaker 6 (40:37):
That AI has.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
Now, who's on your team? I mean this seems like
really forward thinking stuff. And I'm not saying that to
you know, stroke you or anything like that. I'm just
saying that it just does really seem advanced. Who are
the folks on your team? Not by name, but by
background that made this possible?
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Sure, you know, like myself, the team members are folks
that have worked together for and we have many years
of experience. You know, we're kind of like I like
to make the joke that we're the you know, we're
the non startup group. You know, the twenty two year
old kid who works one hundred hours a week and
never sleeps. We have none of those. We sleep because
(41:19):
we know sleep's important. With a twenty two year old kid,
he doesn't know yet got to sleep. But what we
do have is we have that pedigree and we have
it in the areas of hardware development and management, which
is our core. We have it in the area of
scaling with our Chief Scaling Advisor, so we have a CTO,
we have a CSO, a chief scaling advisor. Obviously, we
(41:42):
have a great finance person out of Canada.
Speaker 6 (41:45):
He joined the team. He's magnificent. He really knows his stuff.
Speaker 4 (41:50):
And then we have a chief scientist who is working
on you know, things that I can't talk about or
he'll get upset with me, but he's work working on
some cool stuff. We call him Uncle Fester because he's
good at testing and experimenting. You have to have one
of those on your team if you're going to innovate.
Speaker 6 (42:09):
She's great. And then we.
Speaker 4 (42:10):
Also have our Chief Marketing Officer and if you want
to visit the website you can see some of his
great great vision for our messaging and our marketing.
Speaker 6 (42:20):
And so that's the team. We have an experienced team.
We also have a new member of the team. She's
out of college.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
She is out of college and she was actually a
founder of her own AI legal company. And we went
and found her and she just said, she loves what
we're doing. She gets the problem, she wants to solve
the problem. Had nothing to do with her other company.
She just thought, your guys are solving it properly, and
I want.
Speaker 6 (42:47):
To be a part of that.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
So I guess you know, we've got six people now
on the core founding team.
Speaker 5 (42:53):
Remote pardon me disparate, Yes, we are.
Speaker 6 (42:58):
One hundred percent remote company.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (43:00):
And you know, I say, if some investor wants to
make us have an office, you know, it's if they
have a good reason to have an office, we'll have
an office. But right now we don't see good reason
to have an office. We'd rather save money and be efficient.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Yeah, our team for most well, same, What would you
say is a speed of adoption here of the of
law firms? And by the way, this is commercially.
Speaker 5 (43:23):
Available, correct, Yes, it's available.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yep, that was my understanding. Speed of adoption is it
getting better. Is it a hard uphill slog to get
law firms to adopt this? Is there a hunger and
a need?
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Well, the rate of adoption in general in this market
has fluctuated, and the reason is fluctuated has nothing really
to do with technology. It's fluctuated having to do with
organizational change. Right. So certain organizations are very entrenched in
(43:59):
their current legal processes like you do have other large
legal organizations that are in more repetitive markets, such as
accident litigation, right, right, like Morgan and Morgan. Morgan and
Morgan was a plug for them. They were one of
the early AI adopters with something called x AI that
(44:25):
was in late twenty twenty three or early twenty twenty four.
They released it and started using it, and they lost
a major lawsuit to Walmart due to hallucinations, and then
they kind of backed off. So when I say fits
and starts, it's like they backed off and they said, Okay, wait,
we've got to we've got to make sure we're doing
this you know better.
Speaker 6 (44:46):
And since then.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
They've they've actually launched a new startup which is focused
clearly on features and functions of that space. Right, So
you're going to have a niche down effect over time
where more and more companies can niche down. We're going
to do that with modules, right, Different kinds of law
(45:10):
require different kinds.
Speaker 6 (45:11):
Of feature sets.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
An example is for Morgan and Morgan, who does accident litigation.
A big thing is hospital records right when you would think.
Speaker 6 (45:23):
A hospital records, because hospital.
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Records show costs and hospital records show damage. And so
they've built a whole part of that solution just around
hospital records. Yeah, so other companies are more afraid of AI.
I've talked to some companies that are They literally said
the word afraid.
Speaker 6 (45:45):
You know, so, well, we're afraid of AI.
Speaker 4 (45:47):
We hear all these cases that we hear about sanctions
in the courts, We hear about judges throwing cases out
where you know, we want to do it the old
fashioned way because we don't want to be in that group.
Speaker 6 (45:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
So, and then you have the ones who want to adopt,
but they don't know how to adjust their processes to
maximize AI, if that makes any sense. Their processes are old,
so their processes need to change to maximize AI, or
else they're spending a bunch of money for something and
(46:20):
they're not really getting a lot out of it, and
that is happening often.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
All right, there's also a term and you know, my
guess is, well, before this discussion, my assumption was, uh,
there are people using AI at law firms already. They're
just using it on their own, their own chat, GPT,
their own Gemini, their own whatever.
Speaker 6 (46:39):
And shadow AI.
Speaker 5 (46:42):
Yeah, talk about it. Yeah, very risky, yeah.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
Shadow AI and also operating without an AI company policy governance,
a governance policy to let the to let the employees
know that, hey, when you come to work, it's not
okay to just use AI to speed up your work
or make your work more accurate and use anything you want. Now,
(47:10):
the challenge then becomes, let's say you have a governance policy,
and let's say you know you have good training. They
can still do it on their own, and in general,
human nature dictates that they will. Human nature dictates that
unless you give them a better tool, they will do
(47:32):
the thing that makes them do their job faster because
that gets praised.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Sure, and they will do.
Speaker 4 (47:38):
The thing that helps them do their job better than
the other person in their same position because that gets praise.
And if you do your job better, and you do
your job faster. It also equals performance reviews. So now
you're telling someone, well, you know, don't do the thing
that's going to make you look great, do this other
thing that we bought, even though it's not quite good good. Right,
(48:01):
that's a that's a tough one. That's a that's a
tough one to solve. So you have to give them
a better tool and every The problem with human nature
also is that I know it from managing technology for
many different companies, is everyone has their favorite tool, right,
You have your favorite tools for sure, yep, I have
(48:22):
my favorite tools. Everyone has their favorite tool. So when
they go to work and they get a tool that's
not as good as their favorite, which many of them aren't,
they say, why would I use this, you know, inferior
tool when my tool that I use at home for
AI is so much.
Speaker 5 (48:41):
Better and I'm used to it, I'm comfortable with it, right.
Speaker 6 (48:45):
So so that's it.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
Those are the those are the real Uh what do
you call cultural challenges that any company adopting AI has?
Speaker 5 (48:55):
Yeah, you refer to it as behavior change?
Speaker 4 (48:58):
Yes, I human nature. Human nature is very hard to manage.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
All right, we are on we're almost out of time.
A couple questions. Is there a size law firm that's
a sweet spot? Is somebody too small too big? Tell
the audience that, and then what's the best way or
excuse me, I won't even say that question yet. You
answer that one first.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
Yeah, Well, we're steering away from the lower end of
the market. If you look at the total addressable market,
it's about a nine billion dollar a year market.
Speaker 6 (49:26):
Right for law in general law, and you've got three stratas.
Speaker 4 (49:30):
You've got your larger enterprise corporations, then you've got your
smaller you know, five and ten and fifteen person shops,
or I'll also put in that your legal departments for
larger companies.
Speaker 5 (49:42):
Oh okay, right, you know.
Speaker 6 (49:44):
Fewer seats, fewer seats.
Speaker 4 (49:46):
We're targeting the middle, the middle of the middle to
the middle of the upper if that makes any sense, No,
it does. Yeah, So we're targeting the upper half of
the of the middle strata and the low or half
of the enterprise strata. And the reason why we were
doing that is because we believe that that's the place where
(50:07):
you can succeed best when you get into enterprise of
you know, law offices that have you know, you know,
hundreds of thousands employees, you know which they are offices
all over the world. You're in a whole new it's
a different operation and there and there are competitors who
are going after that market and they've raised a lot
of money.
Speaker 6 (50:28):
We've decided, you know, not to do that.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
All right, here's the last question. Who in the viewing,
viewing and listening audiences should reach out to you and why?
Speaker 4 (50:39):
I think I think anyone who's looking for a great
investment should should reach out to us.
Speaker 6 (50:45):
We're we're right now.
Speaker 4 (50:47):
Just you know, began our fundraising campaign and there's no
other opportunity like this in the market. We're one of
a kind solution with a great management team. We're we're
targeting on mart that's ripe for AI. In fact, any
any law firm that doesn't adopt AI will will go
(51:07):
out of business.
Speaker 6 (51:08):
So you have to adopt it.
Speaker 4 (51:09):
It's not a it's not an if, right, and then
it's a when, Well, when is when is now? So
the timing couldn't be better, and our technology is well
thought out and we've got an experienced management team. So
those are the people that should contact me. The second
people that should contact me is anyone who's looking for
something that does the things that I've described. You know,
(51:32):
any law firm that's looking you know, any law firm
that has say, fifty attorneys, thirty attorneys, twenty five attorneys,
up to one hundred attorneys. That's kind of our sweet spot.
And they're saying, hey, you know, maybe we are afraid
of AI. You know, give us a call. We can
help you with that.
Speaker 3 (51:50):
And your email address one more time. The website is
icognio dot com.
Speaker 6 (51:54):
It's Icognio.
Speaker 4 (51:56):
I see O g n Io, not Incognio.
Speaker 5 (52:00):
But hi I Cognio. Yeah, and my.
Speaker 4 (52:03):
Email address is CRAIGT. Brenner at icognio dot com.
Speaker 5 (52:07):
Perfect.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
Well, thank you so much for the time. We really
appreciate you being here. I enjoyed it, and.
Speaker 6 (52:11):
Yeah, I enjoyed it too as well.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
Thank you very cool, You're very welcome, and thanks everybody
for watching and listening. This is a show about business
and business challenges.
Speaker 5 (52:20):
Right.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
If you've got concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company,
whether your sales team is you or very small or
it's very large, feel free to reach out to me
on Facebook or LinkedIn. One of my easy email addresses
is Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com. We are
Winning Incorporated, part of Sandler Training. We develop salespeople and
sales teams at the high achievers and sales leaders into
(52:42):
true coaches and mentors. We're not a fit for everybody,
but hey, maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you
one for another job well done. Our producer and engineer
join us again next Monday, April sixth. We'll do it
all over again with a great guest. Until then, this
is Kevin Hallinan.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host,
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The podcast is available on top for podcasting and iHeartRadio.
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(53:22):
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(00:20):
W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are
condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helen n believes that certainly
applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at
W four cy Radio. That's W four cy dot com
and now your host, Kevin.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Helen Thanks everybody for joining in again today. I'm Kevin
Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and radio
on W four cy dot com. We are streaming live
on talkfortv dot com. That's the number four, and of
course we're on Facebook and that's at Winning Business Radio.
(01:08):
And after the live show, we're available wherever you get
your podcast content, YouTube by heart Radio, Spotify, Apple, etc.
The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular
viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice
to help people avoid the mistakes of others, right to
learn best practices. Those are the how tos, the what tows,
(01:30):
the what not tos. I want you to be challenged
and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others.
Who are those others consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and
owners and entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But you know, virtually
every successful person I've ever had a chance to has
had some form of failure in their lives and careers.
So while we all have to get our knee skinned
(01:51):
once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes
from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history
so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part
of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to
small and medium sized companies all the way up to
the Fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win
and to varying degrees, I've seen some fail, and I've
had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the
(02:14):
highest performing people around and some who probably should have
found other professions. In my own businesses, I've had lots
of success, but some failures too, and I like to
think I've learned a lot. So yeah, you're going to
hear from me, but mostly I want to hear from
I want you to hear from guests. And today my
guest is Craig Brenner, CEO and co founder of Icognio,
a legal technology company built exclusively for law firms. Here's
(02:37):
his bio. Craig Brenner is the CEO and co founder
of Icognio, a legal technology company delivering secure on premise
AI solutions. With decades of experience across technology leadership and
enterprise systems, Craig is helped build and scale multiple companies
serving high trust, high stakes environments. He founded Icognio to
(02:58):
address the security, governance, and adoption gaps he saw emerging
his law firms rushed to adopt cloud based based AI tools.
He's also the owner of Brenner Brothers and has held
senior technology and technology leadership positions in well known technology companies.
He holds a bachelor's in Science and business from Eastern
Nazarene College in Quinsey, mass where he's the captain of
(03:19):
the cross country team and an MBA with the concentration
in e Business from the University of Phoenix, and he
completed Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Technology Leadership Program. He resides in
the Nashville, Tennessee metro area. He has three grown kids,
Colin who's twenty seven, Cameron who's twenty five, and Cassidy
who's twenty two. And he's got three grandkids. And don't
(03:39):
forget he's got two Standard Poodles, Mindy Loo and Big
Wayne Craig. Welcome to Winning Business Radio and TV. Thank
you very much, Kevin, My pleasure. Glad you could be here.
So tell us a little bit about your background. You
grew up in Middletown, New York. Tell folks where that
is and what it was like to grow up there.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Yeah, Middletown, New York is out an hour and a
half north of metropolitan New York City in the Catskills region.
It's in an area a lot of people would know
of a Poughkeepsie, New York on the Hudson Valley region.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
Yeah, beautiful up there.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
It's a country area, So I kind of grew up
in the country even though when people here in New York,
they always think.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Of big buildings, and you don't have that New York
city accent. I don't have that Boston, New Jerseys. My
parents are from Connecticut. So so were you influenced by
parents or mentors when choosing a direction or career, either
you know, directly or indirectly.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, I think my biggest mentor was probably my father.
My father was the incurable entrepreneur. I remember him coming
home and always having a new idea about, you know,
what kind of business he could.
Speaker 6 (04:59):
Do or how he could make money.
Speaker 5 (05:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
He owned his own milk route when a milk route
was a thing.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Yeah, And he would drag my my one of my
five older brothers out there and two in the morning
to distribute milk around the neighborhoods.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
And so.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
He he really gave me that concept that if you
have a great idea, you can go and you can
build it to have confidence in yourself.
Speaker 6 (05:29):
And my brothers were also.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
All their own business owners as a result of that leadership,
I'd say my dad was my biggest influence. And my mom,
obviously she had six kids, so she showed me how
to manage adversity.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
She gets the award for having all boys too, one girl,
one girl. If you guys play sports growing.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Up, yeah, I was on the cross country team and
the track team. My brothers had pretty much all runners
in my family. And then I branched out a little
bit into cycling and triathlon and ultra marathoning.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Oh very cool. I'd like to hear about that another time.
But I when I got turned forty, I wanted to
get in, you know, better shape. I wasn't in terrible shape,
but I wasn't in shape either, And that's when I
found I like to run. I didn't like it before that,
and I've always been active, but you know, I considered
running that's what you do when you get ready for football,
you know, right.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
It was painful, you know.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
So, Yes, my coach used to say that it's not
fun to run. It's fun to have run.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
That's true. That's true.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
You feel great and it's fun to win too when
you do win. So what made you choose Eastern Nazarene.
I know that campus, really small campus. I know it
well down in Quincy.
Speaker 6 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Eastern Nazarene College, which was later changed to Eastern College,
was a part of the Nazarene Church, extension of the
Nazrine Church. They have colleges all over the country and
Quincy was just one of their campuses. My two boys
went to Treveca in the Nashville region, which is how
(07:12):
I ended up the Nashville region visited them. So Treveca
is another one of the Nazarene college You have Point
Loma out in California, so they have quite an interesting
college network related to and associated with the Church of
the Nazarene International. But I think in the last few
years the Quincy campus has closed down.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Yeah, it has, unfortunately, but really good education. I know
a bunch of kids that have gone there. My kids
went to a Christian school right in Weymouth and saw
a lot of their front not a lot, but a
number of their friends went there. And I know adults
that have gone there. Had a really good friend got
his as an adult, got his construction certificate, four year degree,
you know, his construction degree and certificate there. So really
(07:55):
good school. And then when and why did you decide
to get an MBA.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
I decided to get an MBA because I realized that
there was more I wanted to learn about business. There
were weaknesses. You know, we all have our strengths and
our weaknesses. I had some weak areas that I wanted
to shore up when relating to business, some on the
financial side, some on the you know, accounting side, some
on the strategy side, some.
Speaker 6 (08:22):
On the leadership side.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
And so I thought that that was a good way
for me to, you know, just go go one level
deeper in terms of how businesses operate, how they run,
what's important and and go ahead and get that. So
that's why I went from from my MBA. I did
it remote remotely through university. And some people might say, oh, well,
(08:48):
you know, you weren't really on a campus, But getting
your MBA remotely has its own set of challenges, and
you have to use technology. Technology is your conduit kind
of to the professor, and so it brings in a
whole different sense of community because you're interacting with students
(09:08):
from all over the country and in some cases.
Speaker 6 (09:10):
All over the world.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
I can imagine, yeah, which you know you sometimes do
on certain local campuses, but you know, they're all distributed,
and the concept of teamwork in an online environment changes
and becomes much more important because that's your lifeline too
to learning. So University Phoenix. They have a nice teamwork program.
(09:33):
They break the classes up into teams, project teams, and
you know, you have some strong team members and you
know you kind of follow them, and then you have
some weak team members and you kind of bring them along.
All these business all these are business concepts, you know. Yeah,
So I did enjoy that program. It was very it
(09:55):
was very good for me.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
What was your takeaway from wp i's Techology Leadership Program.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
Well, the WPI Technology Leadership Program was the name is
kind of and I'll say deceiving, but doesn't hit the mark.
The WPI Leadership Training Program is a people management program
which is focused on leading technology leaders. So how to
(10:26):
lead those groups that are in the technology realm as
a CIO or a CTO or even a CEO, and
how to keep motivation, how to keep innovation moving, and
how to incent and how to know how to lead.
So it was an outstanding program. It was right on
(10:47):
the campus there now in Worster. I think it was
a remote campus. I forget the exact town, but beautiful campus.
I was in that class, rather small cohort of about
twenty folks, but all pretty high performing technology leaders in
their own companies, and so they really pushed you. I
(11:10):
mean that's what I that's what I liked about it. Yeah,
there were moments where you were kind.
Speaker 6 (11:14):
Of, wow, this is a this is a push.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
You know, they'd give you some high pressure team assignments
that were competitive, and that was kind of a core
of that curriculum was break up into teams, solve this problem,
come back and tell all these other really smart people
how you're going to solve it and do it better
than them. So you know, that's the pressure cooker that
(11:39):
is innovation. That's how innovation happens.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Love to hear that, all right, take us through. You know,
I don't want to spend a lot of time, but
I want to I want to get a sense. I
always like audiences to get the sense of kind of
how you came up. So just like a quick lesson
from each of these channel sales manager at NTT Data
Sure I was.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
I was selling dial up back in the day. Not
to roll back the film that far. I realized that,
you know, high speed internet access was something that was
needed by businesses, and so NTT acquired a company I
worked for called Verio in downtown Boston.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
I was a channel manager there.
Speaker 4 (12:23):
I later rolled that program out to NFL cities twelve
cities in the United States other channel managers, and it
was very successful. I enjoyed selling, you know, I really
enjoyed the process of some.
Speaker 5 (12:36):
It's the dark side.
Speaker 4 (12:38):
Well, you know, selling, selling is not the dark side. No,
there's a certain feeling you only get when you close business.
Speaker 5 (12:45):
And you know, that's right, that's right, that's really great feeling.
Speaker 6 (12:49):
That's a great feeling.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
So that's how I got interested in really and deep
into technology. And I just have an affinity for it.
I always was skilled out in school. So I went
on to work for a few different startups and then
I went on to found a few different startups, some
which made it and some which did not.
Speaker 5 (13:12):
That's the game. That is the game.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
Yeah, And so it is for sting when you start
something and you have a passion for something and it
doesn't quite go the way you had planned. But I
would say that you know, you've heard this before many
people have. You really do learn more from your failures
than you do from your successes.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
That's a fact, yep, you know.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
And you have to have some scars, you have to
be willing to take risks a lot of people are
not that kind of a personality. My personality is is
that I'm not afraid to take the risks. So some
of them, some of the startups I got funded by
other folks.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Some of the.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
Startups I fund funded myself. And these were all technology startups,
and some of them were funded by venture capitalists and
were already kind of in motion. And one of those
was Kiva Systems, which was a robotics company. Uh started
(14:12):
out in Wooburn and later relocated to North Redding. I
was there seven years. We were acquired by Amazon. And
that's another great feeling when you are even just a
part of a team that succeeds and gets acquired.
Speaker 6 (14:29):
By a larger company.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
Yeah, it's a it's a one of a kind feeling
that it's the high five moment. You know, we did it,
We achieved our goal, We returned our investment to our
investors and then some and uh, you know that that
it's addicting.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
I like winning, but I particularly like winning financially. So
that's a good one. All Right, We're going to take
our first break right here, Craig, everybody, We'll be back
with Craig Brenner in just about one minute.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on
W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com.
Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up
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They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management
with a family feel for your closely held family business.
Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning, integrating your
business planning with personal They will help put your money
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(15:38):
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Advisory service is offered through.
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And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin helenan
presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in
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is Kevin Helene.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
We are back with Craig brann oer CEO and co
founder of Icognio. So then you got into some tech,
some let's see some fractional CIO work, and some consulting work.
Speaker 5 (17:01):
Talk about that.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
Yeah, I wanted to try my hand at consulting. I
had done some government consulting. I was outsourced part time
CIO for the city of Watertown, Massachusetts. I had consulted
for some K through twelve school districts, including Plymouth and
also Shrewsbury. So in the City of Shrewsbury and also
(17:30):
Watertown K through twelve.
Speaker 6 (17:32):
So I enjoyed.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
I enjoyed the the low hanging fruit of being able
to go in to, let's say, something that wasn't necessarily
a company which ran very efficiently and make improvements that were,
you know, not really able to be observed by those individuals.
And then that lead me into led me into consulting
(17:56):
for businesses. One of my consulting opportunity unities with was
with a large sign company, National Sign Company, and on another.
Speaker 6 (18:05):
One was with s VP Worldwide.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
Which was Singer Sewing Machines with their Internet of Things
products have product line sewing machines that are that are
networked and people can download designs. And I was a
part of that project and during the during the COVID,
so as you can imagine, a lot of people had
time and they were doing a lot of sewing during COVID,
(18:30):
So that was a very fast moving type opportunity. And
so I did enjoy the consulting and also that you know,
there are some positives and doing technology consulting and there
are some negatives. The positive is, you know, you kind
of come in with a certain agenda to make a
make a sweeping improvement or to innovate something that they
(18:52):
have not noticed and give them advice. The downside is
you're not really a member of the team and it's
very easy for people to create opinions about your performance,
whether it be he's aweso more, he's really doing what
we're paying on that much to do. You know, that
was the downside of consulting, But everything has its goods.
(19:15):
And bads, But I did enjoy the process of it.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
All right.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
So in twenty twenty one, you started Brenner Brothers. I
don't know a whole lot about that. Tell us what
Brenner Brothers is or was sounds like it.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Brenner Brothers is.
Speaker 4 (19:30):
It's still an entity, but it was a industrial food
service for large corporations to the customers in Tennessee where
General Motors and Ultium Batteries Ultium Cells, which is a
large battery manufacturer owned by General Motors, and my brother
(19:50):
and I started that and he is continuing it in
the South Carolina area servicing large data center construction projects.
Speaker 5 (20:00):
Cool.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yeah, everybody's got to eat. That's pretty dependable, all right.
And then, of course, in January of last year, you
founded Icognio. So first tell us the why behind the
what you know, what did you see, and why did
you decide to Again, there's the risk. I'm sure there
was money that you invested, et cetera. Nothing's free. Take
(20:21):
us through that story.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
The way the company was originally envisioned was not what
it is today.
Speaker 6 (20:29):
That that's a common theme in technology.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
You pivot as the market shows you what's actually going
on and Originally we were shooting for a consumer product
to protect privacy of AI users. But then we you know,
over time, we started to niche down as we saw
the market opportunity growing in certain areas, and that's how
(20:56):
we ended up kind of, you know, in the legal
space because in business and in sports and everything else,
you have to figure out where the puck is going right,
and you have to go there before others go there.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
You don't want to go there too.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
Early because no one will have interest you just wait
too early. But you don't want to also be too
late and come in behind. So that was kind of
a lot of our early discussions. We started development in
fall of twenty twenty four and then throughout all of
twenty twenty five we continued our development and with a
focus on AI security.
Speaker 5 (21:38):
How did you realize there was a need there?
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yes, the AI security space is just a little baby
hasn't even walked yet, and AI is sort of like
the wild West in a lot of ways. Absolutely many
of the listeners might know. And it's the wild West
because it's a petri dish of technology due to the
(22:04):
speed rapid innovation that's taking place and that desire to
you know, have something first and get something out, and
the pressure that companies are under due to large sums
of investment in their companies to innovate, to release and
(22:24):
you know, sort of the term damn the torpedoes comes
to mind. It may not be completely safe, but we
have to do it, you know, And so that was
a that was a lot of our vision was that we.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
We saw whether Puck was going and.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
It was a little bit scary because we thought this
is probably going to go wrong in a lot of
different ways.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
But how is it going to go wrong? I'm not
talking about end of world kind of.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Scenarios, right, not not no, no, uh what I just
lou the reference the name of the the Terminator series.
Speaker 5 (23:04):
Anyway, keep going right.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
Not end of world go wrong, but go wrong for companies,
go wrong for businesses. Become an unsolvable challenge for security
officers in companies and they, you know, they have to
do what the CEO says, uh, that's their job to
(23:27):
follow the orders. But they're also under pressure to secure
their data, right, that's their other job. Their one job
is innovate and follow instructions from the leadership of the company,
from the board, but their primary job is to secure
the data and so they you know, these security folks
(23:48):
are in a little bit of a jam in a
lot of ways. They probably would admit it that AI
can be. AI is like fire. It can be your
best friend or can be your worst enemy.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
That's a good reference.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
Yeah, so, and fire.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Is a good thing. You have to control it. And
so that's where we sit. We sit in that control space,
ahead of the competition and deploying in such a fashion
that they do not. And that is our core value
proposition is that we're really not like any of the competitors.
(24:26):
We are a the most secure AI solution for law.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
If somebody read a description, they'd say, wow, they're not
cloud based. But there's a very important reason for that.
And what you've created as an appliance, right, an on
premise appliance. So tell us about that.
Speaker 5 (24:43):
The reason for our.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
Founding team, our founding team and myself we have a
lot of history with infrastructure hardware and managing infrastructure hardware.
And you know, the easiest way I can explain it
to anyone who may meet the in tech knowledge or
not being technology, they probably know what a firewall is, right,
(25:05):
So you may have a firewall in your house.
Speaker 6 (25:08):
You probably do.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Some people have firewalls in their house, but companies certainly
have firewalls to protect their data. That firewall does not
live in the cloud. There's a reason for that. It
is a device because that is the best way to
secure the.
Speaker 6 (25:26):
Data behind it.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
So that's basically the approach that we take to our
solution is we take you know, best known practices of
securing devices, and then we build an AI platform on
top of that and we make it one hundred percent
secure and one percent reliable, and it goes inside the
(25:51):
customer's network. It doesn't live in the cloud. And that's
why firewalls don't live in the cloud. That is our
business model.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
And so this is for the for law firms. Uh,
law firms have a I don't know if it's regulatory.
I don't think it's regulatory, but they certainly have an
obligation to keep everything secure, and in particular, you know,
they could be not just at risk of you know,
exposing customer data, but I expose competitive data too, right.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
So yeah, you know, we've done a lot of interviews
with law firms, but you know, our assumption was that
the risk versus reward benefit of using AI in certain
spaces such as law is it's a slippery slope because
you can get a lot of efficiencies from using AI
(26:43):
in the law environment, but then at the same time,
controlling what the end user actually does with AI is
not so simple, so you get into internal regulatory or
policy creation.
Speaker 5 (27:00):
Right.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
The American Bar Association has toyed with AI standards for law,
but they have not done that yet.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
Yeah, it's not it's not easy, but it's it's a
great idea.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
Well, we're counting on it. In fact, we're positive that
it will happen. It's just a matter of time going
by where more and more events occur.
Speaker 6 (27:25):
There are many events that have already occurred, so.
Speaker 4 (27:30):
You know we're going to be able to guarantee compliance
at a much higher level. I don't want to get
too geek, even if you allow. Companies like Anthropic, who
were really focusing on the slanting a certain products set
towards law, have since decreased their bar for security because
(27:53):
they were getting sued a lot. And so even the
AI companies, I don't want to say they don't really
know how it works, because that's not a right statement.
The AI companies don't really know what mistakes it will make.
Speaker 6 (28:08):
Right, So they're.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
Cautious because AI does things that are unpredictable by its nature,
and that has to do with the DNA of how
an AI platform is built and how it operates. It
can be unpredictable. Unpredictable and law do not go together.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
It makes a lot of sense. So I can imagine
that managing partners or boards are very leary.
Speaker 6 (28:43):
Yeah, you have a few different camps.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
You have your old school law firms who are hesitant
to get off the dime with AI because AI has
the potential to decrease billings, and billings is what their
companies are built.
Speaker 5 (29:00):
Don Okay, So that's interesting.
Speaker 4 (29:02):
Yeah, you know, so they're they're at the you're talking
at the board level.
Speaker 5 (29:07):
So you're talking at at.
Speaker 6 (29:08):
The board at the board level.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Now, they also have efficiencies which can be gained, which
is maybe X number of hours are saved per month
per uh per paralegal or or per junior attorney or
per attorney. I would I would say that the greatest
savings is at the lower end because AI is better
(29:33):
at repetitive tasks.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Well, the argument I think I would think should be Okay,
Now they have more capacity for billible hours.
Speaker 6 (29:42):
That's correct. That that's another one of the upsides.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
So you see, it's this slippery slope of what are
the benefits and what are the what are the downsides
of fully adopting AI. Now there's a there's another whole
class of law firms that's evolving, which are AI first
law firm Those are the guys that are going to
shake the Apple card up.
Speaker 3 (30:05):
What would you say that legal zoom was maybe a
precursor to something like that.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
Now this would be a little bit different. Legal legal
Zoom is an automation platform.
Speaker 6 (30:16):
I think it's a good product.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
It's a it's an automation platform. What we're talking about
is real law, not not just templates. We're talking about litigation. Litigation.
Uh And basically you have AI firms that are now
evolving and they're getting Interestingly, they're getting VC funding. So
(30:39):
you have law firms getting VC funding. That's something new.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
I've never heard that.
Speaker 4 (30:45):
Yeah, you have AI first law firms getting VC funding
to grow rapidly and the concept there is human in
the middle. Right, So AI does a larger percentage of
the world the law work than they would in a
traditional law firm. Maybe AI does sixty or seventy or
(31:07):
eighty percent of the work by design, the law firm.
Speaker 6 (31:11):
Is built that way.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
That's where you get some serious time savings, right, and
then you have the human in the loop, where the
human is really facilitating the law process. It's very similar
to what's happening with AI and software development. Your lower
end people are now becoming sort of architects in a way.
(31:34):
Here's the same concept that in law that AI first
law firm, the lawyer is more of a facilitator, an
architect of the process. They're not doing the whole process,
they're checking the process. So there's a huge savings there
for the customer AI.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
AI can't go to court, they can't do a mediation,
AI can't do a deposition. I suppose it possible, but
you still need that traffic cop you still need that
legality right right.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Yes, And you would think that law firms are cautious
about that, but you would be completely wrong.
Speaker 5 (32:13):
Because that's what I went there.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
There are I don't want to say hundreds, that's probably
an overstatement. There are more than fifty cases that we're
aware of where law firms have submitted and brought into
court false AI generated content, some of them knowingly, some
(32:36):
of them by a mistake. So it's a very uh
it's like the wild West for law is. If you're
going to use AI, you better have your saddle tight.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
All right, that's a good time to take a break.
We'll take our second commercial right here. We'll be right
back in about a minute with Craig Brenner.
Speaker 6 (32:57):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on
W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com.
Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up
right here on Winning Business Radio.
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Best in Wealth Management is family owned for two generations.
They take pride in thoughtful financial planning and wealth management
with a family feel for your closely held family business.
Best in Wealth Management focuses on deep planning. Integrating your
business planning with personal tay will help put your money
to work and your mind at ease. Go to Bestinwealthmanagement
(33:38):
dot com for more information.
Speaker 5 (33:41):
Advisory service is offered through.
Speaker 3 (33:42):
Commonwealth Financial Network, a registered investment advisor. Join the best
family and let our family advise your family. That's Bestinwealthmanagement
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app to find the closest repair shop. Or maybe you're
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While it has great local coupons for all sorts of
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(34:17):
If you're looking for something, YP Local Search can help
you find it. So go to yp dot com or
download the app to search local, to find local and
save local.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helen
in presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal
in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once
again is Kevin Helene.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
We're back with Craig Brenner, CEO and co founder of
i Cognio. What makes your solution and you touched on
that a little bit, but this is an opportunity to
really the case what makes your solution better than other
legal ais.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
The majority of legle ais are really not legal ais.
They are yet they are a large language model an
l l M. Whether it be anthropic or whether it
be chat, GPT. And then like many products that people
are familiar with that have AI embedded into them, the AI,
(35:29):
you know, is really software around the large language model.
We're completely different. It's basically a wrapper around regular AI.
Our platform is built from the ground up just for law.
It's a it's a major differentiator. Everything that's in our
in our product is built with law in mind. And
(35:52):
that that comes down to safety, That comes down to accuracy,
that comes down to auditability, that comes down to reporting engines,
you know, built for law. So everything in our product
is built from the ground up for law. It's purpose built.
That's the major differentiator. And obviously the second one is
(36:13):
the most important. The security component is it lives inside
the customer's network. Data never their their proprietary data never
leaves their network.
Speaker 6 (36:26):
You know, why would it?
Speaker 4 (36:28):
Why would why would any company just think about what
I'm saying here, Why would any company allow their proprietary data,
whether it be a customer name, whether it be a
case description, and put that out into the cloud, right
and take a chance that it's going.
Speaker 6 (36:46):
To leak, right? They wouldn't.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
Why would they count on information coming back? So here's
number three, information coming back from AI that is accurate, right,
and hallucinations are probably the most talked about a problem
in law having to do with AI. AI hallucinates. What
(37:11):
is a hallucination?
Speaker 5 (37:12):
For people that are less.
Speaker 4 (37:13):
Technical out there, a hallucination is imagine you're going down
a highway and the way AI works is it puts
words together. That's how it gives you your response. It
looks for the next logical word. When it can't find
the next logical word, it does what it's designed to do.
And this process is called probabilistic guessing. It guesses at
(37:37):
the most probable exit on the highway right the next word.
If it can't find it, it goes anyway right, it'll
take it. And you know on the highway when you
get off the wrong exit, now you've got to make
many turns and take many false turns to get back
on track. That is what a hallucination is for the
(38:00):
common person to understand. It makes things up because it
gets lost in the process. And the larger the models get,
this is the important point. The larger the models get,
the worse that problem gets, because now instead of five
exits off the highway, you have five thousand exits off
the highway to choose from. So while it might seem
(38:23):
that AI can get smarter modeled, as the models grow,
the traffic gets more complicated. So we solve that. I
believe we're the only company who actually has a solution
to that problem of hallucination.
Speaker 6 (38:40):
That's a patent that we have.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Nice, Now, is it a fair question? And if you
can't answer this in five minutes, don't how did you
do that?
Speaker 6 (38:50):
So I have to be careful what I said that
on that one.
Speaker 4 (38:58):
Let's let me describe it from a non technical perspective. Good, right, So, well,
everyone's familiar with how a lie detector works. So you
have someone who's accused of something and you know, they
want want to maybe eliminate them as a as a suspect,
or they want to say, oh, well, this person's lying.
(39:18):
You know, this may not be completely accurate, right, A
lie detector is not always completely accurate, but we have
a better chance of knowing if the person's discepted. Right,
that's exactly what we build. That's exactly exactly what we build.
So could you say one hundred percent? You can't say
(39:39):
one hundred percent with a lie detector. The way a
lie detector works is that it looks for patterns in
the response. Right, That's exactly what we do. That's exactly
what our technology does. There are certain patterns that an
honest response from AI have, and there are certain patterns
(40:01):
that a hallucination had. In other words, something doesn't go
with the question. So when you compare the question or
the prompt in this case for those who use AI,
you compare prompt to the response like a lie detector
compares the question to the body signals, you can see
(40:22):
deception or you can sense it.
Speaker 6 (40:25):
That's exactly what we've built before.
Speaker 5 (40:28):
It provides unanswered response.
Speaker 6 (40:30):
Yes, accuracy response.
Speaker 4 (40:32):
An accuracy response is probably the biggest flaw.
Speaker 6 (40:37):
That AI has.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
Now, who's on your team? I mean this seems like
really forward thinking stuff. And I'm not saying that to
you know, stroke you or anything like that. I'm just
saying that it just does really seem advanced. Who are
the folks on your team? Not by name, but by
background that made this possible?
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Sure, you know, like myself, the team members are folks
that have worked together for and we have many years
of experience. You know, we're kind of like I like
to make the joke that we're the you know, we're
the non startup group. You know, the twenty two year
old kid who works one hundred hours a week and
never sleeps. We have none of those. We sleep because
(41:19):
we know sleep's important. With a twenty two year old kid,
he doesn't know yet got to sleep. But what we
do have is we have that pedigree and we have
it in the areas of hardware development and management, which
is our core. We have it in the area of
scaling with our Chief Scaling Advisor, so we have a CTO,
we have a CSO, a chief scaling advisor. Obviously, we
(41:42):
have a great finance person out of Canada.
Speaker 6 (41:45):
He joined the team. He's magnificent. He really knows his stuff.
Speaker 4 (41:50):
And then we have a chief scientist who is working
on you know, things that I can't talk about or
he'll get upset with me, but he's work working on
some cool stuff. We call him Uncle Fester because he's
good at testing and experimenting. You have to have one
of those on your team if you're going to innovate.
Speaker 6 (42:09):
She's great. And then we.
Speaker 4 (42:10):
Also have our Chief Marketing Officer and if you want
to visit the website you can see some of his
great great vision for our messaging and our marketing.
Speaker 6 (42:20):
And so that's the team. We have an experienced team.
We also have a new member of the team. She's
out of college.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
She is out of college and she was actually a
founder of her own AI legal company. And we went
and found her and she just said, she loves what
we're doing. She gets the problem, she wants to solve
the problem. Had nothing to do with her other company.
She just thought, your guys are solving it properly, and
I want.
Speaker 6 (42:47):
To be a part of that.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
So I guess you know, we've got six people now
on the core founding team.
Speaker 5 (42:53):
Remote pardon me disparate, Yes, we are.
Speaker 6 (42:58):
One hundred percent remote company.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (43:00):
And you know, I say, if some investor wants to
make us have an office, you know, it's if they
have a good reason to have an office, we'll have
an office. But right now we don't see good reason
to have an office. We'd rather save money and be efficient.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Yeah, our team for most well, same, What would you
say is a speed of adoption here of the of
law firms? And by the way, this is commercially.
Speaker 5 (43:23):
Available, correct, Yes, it's available.
Speaker 3 (43:26):
Yep, that was my understanding. Speed of adoption is it
getting better. Is it a hard uphill slog to get
law firms to adopt this? Is there a hunger and
a need?
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Well, the rate of adoption in general in this market
has fluctuated, and the reason is fluctuated has nothing really
to do with technology. It's fluctuated having to do with
organizational change. Right. So certain organizations are very entrenched in
(43:59):
their current legal processes like you do have other large
legal organizations that are in more repetitive markets, such as
accident litigation, right, right, like Morgan and Morgan. Morgan and
Morgan was a plug for them. They were one of
the early AI adopters with something called x AI that
(44:25):
was in late twenty twenty three or early twenty twenty four.
They released it and started using it, and they lost
a major lawsuit to Walmart due to hallucinations, and then
they kind of backed off. So when I say fits
and starts, it's like they backed off and they said, Okay, wait,
we've got to we've got to make sure we're doing
this you know better.
Speaker 6 (44:46):
And since then.
Speaker 4 (44:47):
They've they've actually launched a new startup which is focused
clearly on features and functions of that space. Right, So
you're going to have a niche down effect over time
where more and more companies can niche down. We're going
to do that with modules, right, Different kinds of law
(45:10):
require different kinds.
Speaker 6 (45:11):
Of feature sets.
Speaker 4 (45:13):
An example is for Morgan and Morgan, who does accident litigation.
A big thing is hospital records right when you would think.
Speaker 6 (45:23):
A hospital records, because hospital.
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Records show costs and hospital records show damage. And so
they've built a whole part of that solution just around
hospital records. Yeah, so other companies are more afraid of AI.
I've talked to some companies that are They literally said
the word afraid.
Speaker 6 (45:45):
You know, so, well, we're afraid of AI.
Speaker 4 (45:47):
We hear all these cases that we hear about sanctions
in the courts, We hear about judges throwing cases out
where you know, we want to do it the old
fashioned way because we don't want to be in that group.
Speaker 6 (45:58):
Right.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
So, and then you have the ones who want to adopt,
but they don't know how to adjust their processes to
maximize AI, if that makes any sense. Their processes are old,
so their processes need to change to maximize AI, or
else they're spending a bunch of money for something and
(46:20):
they're not really getting a lot out of it, and
that is happening often.
Speaker 3 (46:25):
All right, there's also a term and you know, my
guess is, well, before this discussion, my assumption was, uh,
there are people using AI at law firms already. They're
just using it on their own, their own chat, GPT,
their own Gemini, their own whatever.
Speaker 6 (46:39):
And shadow AI.
Speaker 5 (46:42):
Yeah, talk about it. Yeah, very risky, yeah.
Speaker 4 (46:46):
Shadow AI and also operating without an AI company policy governance,
a governance policy to let the to let the employees
know that, hey, when you come to work, it's not
okay to just use AI to speed up your work
or make your work more accurate and use anything you want. Now,
(47:10):
the challenge then becomes, let's say you have a governance policy,
and let's say you know you have good training. They
can still do it on their own, and in general,
human nature dictates that they will. Human nature dictates that
unless you give them a better tool, they will do
(47:32):
the thing that makes them do their job faster because
that gets praised.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Sure, and they will do.
Speaker 4 (47:38):
The thing that helps them do their job better than
the other person in their same position because that gets praise.
And if you do your job better, and you do
your job faster. It also equals performance reviews. So now
you're telling someone, well, you know, don't do the thing
that's going to make you look great, do this other
thing that we bought, even though it's not quite good good. Right,
(48:01):
that's a that's a tough one. That's a that's a
tough one to solve. So you have to give them
a better tool and every The problem with human nature
also is that I know it from managing technology for
many different companies, is everyone has their favorite tool, right,
You have your favorite tools for sure, yep, I have
(48:22):
my favorite tools. Everyone has their favorite tool. So when
they go to work and they get a tool that's
not as good as their favorite, which many of them aren't,
they say, why would I use this, you know, inferior
tool when my tool that I use at home for
AI is so much.
Speaker 5 (48:41):
Better and I'm used to it, I'm comfortable with it, right.
Speaker 6 (48:45):
So so that's it.
Speaker 4 (48:46):
Those are the those are the real Uh what do
you call cultural challenges that any company adopting AI has?
Speaker 5 (48:55):
Yeah, you refer to it as behavior change?
Speaker 4 (48:58):
Yes, I human nature. Human nature is very hard to manage.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
All right, we are on we're almost out of time.
A couple questions. Is there a size law firm that's
a sweet spot? Is somebody too small too big? Tell
the audience that, and then what's the best way or
excuse me, I won't even say that question yet. You
answer that one first.
Speaker 4 (49:18):
Yeah, Well, we're steering away from the lower end of
the market. If you look at the total addressable market,
it's about a nine billion dollar a year market.
Speaker 6 (49:26):
Right for law in general law, and you've got three stratas.
Speaker 4 (49:30):
You've got your larger enterprise corporations, then you've got your
smaller you know, five and ten and fifteen person shops,
or I'll also put in that your legal departments for
larger companies.
Speaker 5 (49:42):
Oh okay, right, you know.
Speaker 6 (49:44):
Fewer seats, fewer seats.
Speaker 4 (49:46):
We're targeting the middle, the middle of the middle to
the middle of the upper if that makes any sense, No,
it does. Yeah, So we're targeting the upper half of
the of the middle strata and the low or half
of the enterprise strata. And the reason why we were
doing that is because we believe that that's the place where
(50:07):
you can succeed best when you get into enterprise of
you know, law offices that have you know, you know,
hundreds of thousands employees, you know which they are offices
all over the world. You're in a whole new it's
a different operation and there and there are competitors who
are going after that market and they've raised a lot
of money.
Speaker 6 (50:28):
We've decided, you know, not to do that.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
All right, here's the last question. Who in the viewing,
viewing and listening audiences should reach out to you and why?
Speaker 4 (50:39):
I think I think anyone who's looking for a great
investment should should reach out to us.
Speaker 6 (50:45):
We're we're right now.
Speaker 4 (50:47):
Just you know, began our fundraising campaign and there's no
other opportunity like this in the market. We're one of
a kind solution with a great management team. We're we're
targeting on mart that's ripe for AI. In fact, any
any law firm that doesn't adopt AI will will go
(51:07):
out of business.
Speaker 6 (51:08):
So you have to adopt it.
Speaker 4 (51:09):
It's not a it's not an if, right, and then
it's a when, Well, when is when is now? So
the timing couldn't be better, and our technology is well
thought out and we've got an experienced management team. So
those are the people that should contact me. The second
people that should contact me is anyone who's looking for
something that does the things that I've described. You know,
(51:32):
any law firm that's looking you know, any law firm
that has say, fifty attorneys, thirty attorneys, twenty five attorneys,
up to one hundred attorneys. That's kind of our sweet spot.
And they're saying, hey, you know, maybe we are afraid
of AI. You know, give us a call. We can
help you with that.
Speaker 3 (51:50):
And your email address one more time. The website is
icognio dot com.
Speaker 6 (51:54):
It's Icognio.
Speaker 4 (51:56):
I see O g n Io, not Incognio.
Speaker 5 (52:00):
But hi I Cognio. Yeah, and my.
Speaker 4 (52:03):
Email address is CRAIGT. Brenner at icognio dot com.
Speaker 5 (52:07):
Perfect.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
Well, thank you so much for the time. We really
appreciate you being here. I enjoyed it, and.
Speaker 6 (52:11):
Yeah, I enjoyed it too as well.
Speaker 3 (52:12):
Thank you very cool, You're very welcome, and thanks everybody
for watching and listening. This is a show about business
and business challenges.
Speaker 5 (52:20):
Right.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
If you've got concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company,
whether your sales team is you or very small or
it's very large, feel free to reach out to me
on Facebook or LinkedIn. One of my easy email addresses
is Kevin at Winning Business Radio dot com. We are
Winning Incorporated, part of Sandler Training. We develop salespeople and
sales teams at the high achievers and sales leaders into
(52:42):
true coaches and mentors. We're not a fit for everybody,
but hey, maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you
one for another job well done. Our producer and engineer
join us again next Monday, April sixth. We'll do it
all over again with a great guest. Until then, this
is Kevin Hallinan.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host,
Kevin Helenan. If you missed any part of this episode,
The podcast is available on top for podcasting and iHeartRadio.
For more information and questions, go to Winning Business Radio
dot com or check us out on social media. Tune
in again next week and every Monday at four pm
Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on
(53:22):
W four CY Radio W four cy dot com. Until then,
let's succeed where others have failed and win in business
with Kevin Helenan and Winning Business Radio
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