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.
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.
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.
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.
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.