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Kogod School of Business
For Kogod School of Business alumnus Ben Hills, incorporating AI into his work is nothing new. His company, Iris, founded in 2023 with support from Kogod’s Veloric Center for Entrepreneurship, utilizes AI in every aspect of its operations, enabling its users to make informed business decisions.
As the AI boom continues, Kogod caught up with Hills to learn more about how AI powers Iris and why learning AI skills is the key to a successful career.
Kogod: To get started, could you give me the fifty-thousand-foot view of what Iris does and who’s using it?
Hills: Iris is used by over one hundred of the fastest-growing technology companies, law firms, consulting firms, and other B2B (business-to-business) entities to contextualize their most up-to-date institutional knowledge and utilize it to draft high-quality sales artifacts, proposals, and responses to RFP (request for proposal) security questionnaires. Today, two-thirds of enterprise deals require high-quality writing that demands a significant amount of institutional knowledge. Almost every company did that manually until Iris was born, and now they use our platform to use AI to get to a draft faster.
How did you come up with this as the venture you wanted to launch? What problem were you trying to solve, and how did you decide what role AI would play in solving that problem?
Before I started Iris, I was leading an educational technology company called Full Measure Education, based in Washington, DC. I was the Chief Operating Officer, and as such, I oversaw our sales team, customer success team, and engineering team. I was the sole person responsible for all of this work with our prospects. So, if a prospect required a proposal or another custom artifact, it was I who spent my time writing it. It was always a really big time challenge in how we could put our best foot forward for every prospect. Most of the time, we just had to resort to using some templated, off-the-shelf content.
You couldn’t have solved this challenge until AI was popularized a few years ago. I tell people that it’s a Jetsons-era solution to a Flintstones-era problem. The problem’s been around forever. In fact, my grandpa Paul used to respond to RFPs at Lockheed Martin. Iris is named after my grandma, his wife.
For a while, there was no way to learn from unstructured data, so there’s no good way to take everything about your business and turn that into a high-quality proposal. If you consider our platform, building it three years ago, before the AI and ChatGPT booms, would have cost millions of dollars per client installation just to deliver our software. But now we have access to technology that can understand unstructured knowledge, and that has made solving this problem something we can finally accomplish.
How has your focus on AI changed the way that your employees—the humans behind the technology—do their work?
I’m definitely proud of the AI-first culture that we have. Every part of our organization, from sales to marketing to engineering to customer success, relies on AI-native tools to accomplish its day-to-day job. As someone who’s run multiple companies and thinks about a company’s scaling precipices, there used to be a different structure. I envision Iris growing as we transition from our current state—approximately fifteen employees—to fifty, then one hundred employees, particularly in some of the mid-level management roles that traditionally involve spending the majority of their time interfacing between teams, obtaining status updates, and keeping things on track. That’s something that AI is actually really good at—understanding what each team’s working on and allowing anyone to learn from that. So, you know, whether it’s our engineers that can deliver features in two days instead of ten, our sales team that can automatically turn call transcripts from prospects into action items and drafted emails and next steps, our marketing team that can now create high-quality, Hollywood-level videos through prompting, or our customer success team that can now get back to clients with answers in seconds instead of hours. We love that we’re able to make our company better because of AI.
What’s next for Iris in this era of accelerated AI usage in business, both as a company and in how your product gets delivered to customers?
As a company, when we’re hiring now, we require candidates to either have experience using AI tools or to have the intellectual curiosity to want to learn how to use those tools.
When I speak to other leaders, candidates are even telling them that they’ll only work for them if they can use AI tools.”
Ben Hills
Founder and CEO, HeyIris.AI
If you think about twenty years ago, if someone graduated from Kogod with a degree in finance, and one employer says that they do everything by hand because they can’t trust Excel. The other employer says that on your first day you get a laptop with an Excel license, the best employees are going to go to the employers with the best tools. It’s similar here—our use of AI is part of our differentiation in the recruiting process. We have specific internal motions to continuously evaluate the latest breakthroughs in AI technologies and decide whether they’re worth incorporating within our team and organization. Our ultimate goal is to continue enabling individual contributors to deliver outsized productivity and execute on the creativity of any vision they have. That’s where AI is really good in scaling and building a company, as far as what we deliver for our customers, and as foundational models continue to make leaps forward in what they can accomplish.
Our product continues to get significantly better for end users. Two years ago, you could maybe use Iris to generate a few sentences of content at a time. Now you can generate pages and pages of content at a time, just as one example of the underlying tech continuing to push the bounds of what people can do with our product.
The biggest area of innovation that we will release in the coming weeks is utilizing everything we’ve learned about a company through Iris to generate truly unique insights for the company. So, we already know about the company’s marketing stories, case studies, blog posts, product roadmap, and features. We know from your sales tool whether you’ve won or lost certain deals. Now, we’re going to connect all those dots and create recommendations for a company based on those patterns. We can tell them that every time they’ve asked for a feature, they've lost a deal, or that they have had really good experiences selling to certain segments of an industry. We will be able to leverage everything we know about the companies we work with to create new recommendations and insights that companies have never had access to before, except through hiring high-dollar services to conduct the research manually. We’re super excited about it.
Let’s say you’re a Kogod student today. What would you want to be learning about AI in your classes?
I think information tech should be incorporating tools like Claude artifacts and Lovable—some of what people call the ‘vibe coding tools.’ You know, the information tech courses were transformative for me. They’re where I learned SQL (Structured Query Language). They’re where I understood how relational databases and software worked, even though I wasn’t learning engineering. I think prompt engineering is something that everyone should learn and understand. The way that you can yield the power of foundational models to do quite sophisticated work, whether it’s analyzing, researching, or creating, is compelling. And I think what’s most exciting is, you know, the ultimate goal of Kogod when I was a student was to empower students to be entrepreneurs.
You’ve never been more capable as an individual to become an entrepreneur than you are today.”
Ben Hills
Founder and CEO, HeyIris.AI
I often think about the courses I took in writing business plans and consider how to bring a business to life. I believe those courses are infinitely more relevant today than they were when I was a student, and they’ve become even more relevant due to the advent of AI technology.
In that same vein, for Kogod students interested in ensuring they’re ready to enter their careers with a strong understanding of AI, do you have any advice or guidance for them?
Embrace it and be excited about it. You know, many people I speak with tried AI once, and when it didn’t work for them, they dismissed it as a fad. It’s certainly not a fad. Many people rebuff AI because they’re concerned about it taking their jobs. It’s not going to take their job. We’ve never been in a more exciting and powerful time to witness technology transform our daily lives. I encourage everyone to run towards companies that are AI-native and utilize AI, and to find any role that allows them to work there. Because if you go interview for a role and they’re not using AI tools internally, they’re not going to survive. I encourage everyone to find an AI-native company, whether it’s an AI startup or a large company that’s truly embracing AI, and to ask those questions during the interview process. That’s where you want to learn.
It's also never been a better time to be an ‘intrapreneur’—that’s something that Kogod preaches quite a bit. Every company yearns for the people who are the most intellectually curious and excited about AI to learn, champion, and drive that change management internally. There are two facets to AI transformations. One asks, “Can I accomplish this use case?” Well, anyone could figure that out by playing around on their computer. However, the other, more challenging facet asks, “Can I drive adoption across my organization?” I learned so much from Kogod about change management and organizational change that it’s the harder part of being transformative with AI, rather than just using the tool. So, be that champion. Go be the person at your company who says, “guys, I found this use case and it’s awesome, and I want everyone to learn it,” and just watch people’s reactions when they have that first lightbulb moment and get why AI is so popular.