Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the Accelerated Degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is gonna be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the show, we have the CEO and co-founder with Huper, Michael Anton. Welcome.

Michael Anton: Hey, Lee. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Huper. How you serving folks?

Michael Anton: Yeah, absolutely. So we are rebuilding the knowledge fabric of the modern enterprise. We’re replacing all the inefficient layers that live inside of people’s heads and emails and meeting transcripts with a self-organizing AI brain and a chief of staff agent that knows who leaders are and can augment their focus with always up to date information so they don’t have to spend any more time status reporting.

Lee Kantor: So how is this being done now without an AI helper?

Michael Anton: Well, so let’s start from the beginning. When you are a startup company, there’s this superpower called founder mode where you as the founder, maybe you’re in a crew of five people, you know everything, you know everyone, you know, every problem that the business is facing. But the business grows, say to 50 people or 500 people or 5000 people. Founder mode becomes impossible. And so what you do instead is you replace founder mode with layers of management. And instead, now you have five people deep whose existence it is primarily to just aggregate information and push it up the flagpole. So what you end up with as a senior leader in an organization that’s solving the problem. And, you know, the current paradigm is every time you ask a question and you get an answer to that question, it’s gone through five layers of people, kind of like a game of telephone. It’s often hedged, filtered, and typically a couple of weeks late, if nothing else, not to mention all of the wasted time and effort from all these really valuable people who’ve had to spend all this time aggregating the information just to give you your status update.

Lee Kantor: So your thesis is that startups in some ways are kind of the model you’re aspiring to, to, to eliminate those layers and to get the information to go back and forth a lot more quickly and efficiently.

Michael Anton: That’s right. So our mission is to create superhuman leaders. And what we’ve realized is that organizations are only flattening out. And if we can give leaders access to better information faster, they’ll be able to spend their time doing the things that humans are innately good at. And we can kind of automate the rest with AI.

Lee Kantor: So now, is there a size in your mind of what the optimal kind of size organization is in order for this to really be noticeable?

Michael Anton: Yeah. I mean, I would say anything bigger than five people is where you start to have the complexity of communication start to be a drag on your organization’s performance. But in reality, we’re finding our sweet spot in companies of 200 to 2000 people, kind of that mid-market area where they’ve got lots of dysfunction, lots of challenges, but they also have the budgets to go invest in thinking differently and doing things new ways. So we think these mid market companies have the ability to really grow and move a lot faster if we can fix their information architecture.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there like in your mind a trigger that happens like, okay, if you hit this threshold, if you’ve hired an HR person or you hired an operations person, is there something that happens organizationally that you’re like, okay, now this is where Huper is really going to be able to help them?

Michael Anton: That’s right. I would say if you’ve hired an HR person, that’s a really good indicator that you’re big enough to probably need a solution like Huper, especially going forward. Um, but really communication or the complexity of communication scales exponentially. So, uh, the longer you wait to do something like this, the, the more damning it is for your business. Um, what we’re seeing now is if you have the luxury of growing a business from a time that’s small or from scratch, you’re much better served putting in AI infrastructure now and having it grow your business. Uh, to stay in a lean state rather than trying to retrofit an existing or mature business with AI after the fact and have to deal with all the change, management and cultural change that comes with it. So small businesses, if you’ve got the the opportunity to do it now, do it now.

Lee Kantor: So you want it to almost have an AI culture that is the streamlining of this information flow.

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think, uh, the writing on the wall is that AI enabled companies are clearly going to outperform non AI enabled companies. I think that’s probably the understatement of the century. Um, but to be an AI enabled company and actually see profit from it and actually see, see growth from it takes kind of a holistic, authentic effort. Uh, a lot of companies think that, you know, rolling out AI is just a matter of giving copilot to their employees and hoping they figure it out. Truth is, AI is a piece of the puzzle, but the culture that adopts AI, that that learns how to leverage it correctly, uh, is the one that really profits from it. Uh, to reference, uh, some, some numbers around this, McKinsey did a state of AI 2025 survey, and they found that 88% of organizations now are claiming to use AI in one business function or another. Uh, but only 6% of businesses are actually AI, AI performers, uh, basically seeing meaningful EBITDA impact. So what this is really saying is that while everyone thinks they’re, quote unquote, starting to do AI, very few people have been able to weave it into their fabric to the point where it’s actually creating a meaningful business impact.

Lee Kantor: So now what is the genesis of the idea? How did you come up with this concept?

Michael Anton: So my co-founders and I have all been operators of businesses, big and small. And when we set out to launch this business, we set out to solve a problem that we felt firsthand as we were running our previous businesses and we think is only going to grow. And that is that the leader is stretched incredibly thin today, and that’s only going to become more and more clear as organizations flatten out and work speeds up. So when you’re the leader steering the ship, you’ve got infinite things that you could be focused on infinite priorities, infinite problems that you need, need to go attend to. And, um, at a certain point, you know, you can, you can work harder, you can work 50% harder, you can work 80%, you know, 80 hour weeks if you can. But the truth is you’re spending an enormous amount of your time sheerly just on information aggregation. Um, when you really need to be solving the hardest problems and moving the needle for your business, rather than just trying to figure out what’s happened in the past.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you, uh, lay the fears of organizations of having all this data kind of compiled and curated by AI in a way that maintains privacy and security and all that good stuff?

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think that this is a really pressing question and this is, uh, this is our sweet spot. So my co-founders and I all come out of cybersecurity. Uh, you know, a number of our teams and team members have been doing this, uh, at the government scale with, with very sensitive, top secret, privileged access issues for the better part of their careers. So we’ve got the team to go solve this. But specifically how we’re implementing this today is, uh, rigorous, um, uh, user access provisioning, uh, to data. And then also, uh, a holistic, bring your own key implementation. And what that means is, uh, our clients actually can have possession of their own cryptographic keys. And what that allows me to say is confidently, I, as the CEO of Huper, can at no point in any way, shape or form see anything in your organization’s information. I can’t see anything that’s come out of your email. I can’t see any insights that Huper’s generated. Um, it’s entirely encrypted to me and to everybody on my team and with, uh, the click of one button because of this, bring your own key encryption. Our customer can simply revoke, uh, the key and turn all of our data into dust so they control it entirely.

Lee Kantor: So the good news is they control it entirely. And the bad news is they control it entirely. Um, like how do you protect against some mistake or them screwing something up?

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think larger customers who are equipped to, to handle, bring your own key are going to choose to manage their own keys. And those that are mature enough to do that already have really robust processes in place for managing cryptographic secrets. Um, my hunch is probably only about 5 to 10% of the market is actually going to want to manage their own key. Uh, and the other 90 to 95% of the market is probably going to have us basically escrow their key for them and we can manage it for them without compromising the actual, uh, integrity of the privacy that that’s granted from the encryption. So none of our team members still will be able to see any of the information, but we can manage the cryptographic key for them if they’d like.

Lee Kantor: Now, have you, um, figured out a moment where this solution is, uh, needed to triage some situation? Is there kind of a, a moment where they’re like, okay, we better call the Huper folks. Um, have you is, does something happen like internally where they’re like, hey, this, we can’t keep doing this. This is not working.

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. If you speak to any senior leader, uh, just ask them how much time they’re spending on various information aggregation tasks. So one example would be a board deck. How much time do you spend every single month or every single quarter on your board deck? Uh, you know, and is that the most high leverage time for the CEO or for the COO? Not to mention all of the pain that that happens beneath you in the organization just to get you the answers that you need for that board deck. Well, you know, if leaders are spending 25 to 50% of their day doing things like building board decks, which don’t get me wrong, but you know, the governance is important, the visibility is important, but the information aggregation piece is not the highest use of their time. Uh, what could we do if we were to take these most valuable, most expensive people in your company and recycle that 25 to 50% of their day to going and solving harder problems, higher leverage uses. And instead, HUper could generate 90, 95% of the information that goes into your board deck for you, and you just spend maybe an hour polishing at the end.

Michael Anton: Um, that’s the beauty of having this self-organizing brain that we’re building for your company. So Huper knows everything that’s going on. Everyone in your company at any given moment, it’s always up to date. So, you know, getting an answer to a question is merely a matter of asking it. But what’s cool is our chief of staff is always on and sits on top of, uh, the self-organizing brain, so it knows who you are. As the user. Say you’re the CEO or say you’re the COO or CRACRO. Our Chief of staff agent knows what you’re interested in and what you’re focused on, what your priorities are. And then it keeps tabs on things as they happen across your organization. So that one, everything’s organized when when you’re ready to access it. And two, it can escalate things and bring them to your attention in a timely manner so that you can spot fires and start to fix problems before they really blow up.

Lee Kantor: Now, is it just capturing information that is being created by those individuals, or is it kind of a fly on the wall absorbing information that may not be written down, but it might be spoken amongst people in a meeting or a, you know, phone conversation?

Michael Anton: This is enterprise wide, and that’s what really makes Huper pretty unique among other AI solutions. This isn’t just a productivity tool or a note taker or something that’s going to organize your inbox or something like that. Um, Huper is plugged into basically every application in your enterprise. Wherever work happens, wherever progress happens. It’s email inboxes. It’s it’s meeting transcripts, it’s your CRM, it’s your ERP, it’s whatever your systems are. And it processes the live work as it happens and then saves it into a self-organizing knowledge graph so that we have basically an AI brain that just knows everything that’s happened in the company.

Lee Kantor: And then is there some coaching on your part for the clients to, um, you know, prompt it properly or create, um, the reports or the information they need when they need it? Or is it something that it just happens organically?

Michael Anton: Without a doubt. So, uh, there’s, there’s two answers to this question. The first one is actually our design philosophy. We’ve realized with our users primarily being senior business leaders, if we expect them to remember our product exists, learn how to use it, or have to think too critically to see value from it. We think we’re going to lose. So we’ve designed our solution to push value to the user in really elegant, uh, unintrusive ways. So for example, at 6 a.m. every single day, you wake up to a perfectly personally curated email with everything that’s gone on in your organization in the last 24 hours, according to your view within the organization, from where you sit, here’s everything that’s happened. Here’s everything that you need to know about and kind of like getting the Wall Street Journal delivered or whatever your newspaper is, you can see the static version one time a day delivered to your doorstep, or you can go to our web app and you can see a continuously updated version of that same report throughout the day. And that’s pushed to you. You haven’t had to write a prompt. You haven’t had to click a button. You haven’t had to do anything. Um, the next piece of this though is the, how do we go deeper? So okay, I actually want to dive in into the tool. I’ve got a specific question. Well, we’ve all used ChatGPT or cloud at this point. And so we’re somewhat familiar with this agentic experience. We’re doing things that, uh, wherever we can to simplify it so that we don’t just put people in front of a blank chat box and hope they figure it out. But the final piece of this, and I think that this is going to be the ongoing journey between us and all of our users is we really want to guide users to focus on the most important things at any given time, rather than expecting them to pull it out of us. And so our chief of staff is going to basically assist the users as they go through and use the product so that they can get value out of it.

Lee Kantor: So now is, uh, access granted only to like the C-suite, or can you, can this be disseminated all the way through, you know, to the frontline workers so that everybody has some version of this to help them in whatever they’re trying to accomplish?

Michael Anton: I think the answer is that it depends on how the company wants to implement it. I think that there are probably going to be some companies that just want to provide this to their C levels, or maybe VP’s and above, but I think, uh, the value is actually massive to tap everyone in the organization into the centralized brain. Imagine if every single person in your company was rowing in the same direction, because every piece of work that they did was basically bumped up against a brain that said, yes, this is going in the right direction or no, this isn’t. Um, redundancy goes away. Siloed work goes away. You know, if John is working on a project in one part of the organization and Sally’s working on something similar, uh, maybe a month earlier, Huper’s going to know that and it’s going to be able to connect them if needed, but also just help share insights across their work so that they can just work faster and work not in a vacuum.

Lee Kantor: So now when you’re rolling this out and your clients are adopting this, are there kind of unintended consequences that bubble up when you’re deploying something like this? Like, for example, like you just said, oh, we worked, you know, one siloed area says, hey, what a great idea. And then another siloed area. Done this six months ago. Is it something where, like all of a sudden you realize there’s maybe some more redundancy in your organization that you didn’t realize?

Michael Anton: Yeah. I mean, I, uh, I think the opportunity for identifying redundancies and inefficiencies in the business are humongous because there’s a disgusting amount of waste that happens merely because of the inefficiencies in communication, uh, in companies and like this archaic data model for how data flows today. Right? There’s just, I mean.

Lee Kantor: Well, that’s just a flaw of being a human. I mean, that’s, that seems like a limiting factor is human brain is not able to, you know, comprehend all the minutia and especially amongst different layers of the organization. So this solves that problem. There’s now somebody watching the back of the human to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks.

Michael Anton: That’s exactly right. Well, and then think about now, all of these people with all of this intuition and all of this training and knowledge of your market and knowledge of your problems, what if you could take all of that time that had been wasted on status reports and communication and rowing in the wrong direction, and instead you can harness that to get the team going on the most impactful things all of the time. Uh, it’s like the capacity to, to grow value within your organization is humongous. Uh, and then the next piece of this, and this is kind of the crazy futuristic thing that’s got me really excited is, you know, in the next 18 months, companies are going to have autonomous AI agents running around their, their organizations. And these agents are going to be working so incredibly fast, producing so much work product. It’s going to become almost impossible for humans to keep up with what’s going on at any given moment. But something like Huper is perfectly positioned to, one, disseminate information to those agents so they actually have the right Write information carefully provisioned to them so that they can get their job done. But then two is see these autonomous agents, wrap up their work, see what was accomplished, and fold any learnings back into the centralized brain. So it’s like, not only is this a humongous catalyst to accelerate human productivity, but now all of a sudden it starts to get exponential as you bring in these autonomous agents, and they can start feeding off of each other’s learnings really, really quickly.

Lee Kantor: So now what are some of the unintended consequences that you see in the future when you deploy something like this?

Michael Anton: I mean, I think a huge unintended consequence is probably a culture of transparency and change is always a little bit uncomfortable. And I think how you manage that change as a leader is super important. That’s, that’s your job. That’s, that’s why you’re there, right? Um, this could absolutely be rolled out in the wrong way to make people feel like Big Brother spying on them at any given moment. But the reality is if you expose people throughout the company to the value of this tool, if you give everybody access to the centralized brain and let it change their workflows and augment the way that they work, uh, it’s going to be really, really hard to have a problem with, um, the visibility and the culture of transparency that this creates.

Lee Kantor: And that’s why your first move or instinct, I believe, was, you know, the smaller organizations that just build it in as part of the DNA of the organization. If you plug this into kind of an enterprise level organization, there’s plenty of people whose jobs, people, they don’t want people to know what they do or don’t do. There’s a lot of, you know, kind of bureaucracy just built into larger organizations. And there’s a bunch of people like you mentioned that are, you know, they’re just running out the clock. They don’t care one way or another what happens.

Michael Anton: That’s exactly right. I, uh, that that cultural change is going to be difficult. But the reality is this is the existential issue now facing modern enterprises, because those companies with 2000 people or 2000 people who are bloated and slow moving and full of human protectionism and bureaucracy are going to be.

Lee Kantor: Exposed.

Michael Anton: Completely.

Lee Kantor: Outperformed. They’re going to be exposed. I mean.

Michael Anton: The problem is they’re going to be be beat by a company of like 12 guys in a garage with a $200 a month clawed license, right? Like, you know, the we’re talking orders of magnitude here, uh, more efficient. And, um, you know, it’ll fly for a little while, but I think everybody, all of these business leaders understand that like a holistic AI transformation has to happen for businesses to be successful in the future. And how we get there can be painful or it could be not painful. And I really think that that’s up to the leaders to, to navigate. And it’s a hard problem. There’s no easy solution. But solutions like Huper, if rolled out, uh, correctly, can at least help because everybody is going to be so much more liberated to focus on high value tasks, uh, while they’re still there.

Lee Kantor: Now, I know it’s still the early stages of Huper, but is there any, uh, stories you can share about clients or people using, uh, Huper to, um, you know, have some success or some big wins? Is there a, you know, don’t name the organization, but maybe share what they challenge they were trying to solve with it and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. Well, so to just be completely transparent, we’re using this tool internally right now, but we’re actually about to hit production with our first design partners here in the next couple of weeks. Uh, and so my anecdotes just come internally, but, uh, just from running our business with Huper over the last eight months, it’s been incredible how it’s helped me keep tabs on our engineering organization and understand, hey, we’ve started to go down the wrong road on a product decision that I didn’t know was being made and be able to, uh, to, to jump into the conversation quickly to get things corrected rather than finding out a week or two weeks or four weeks later that we moved in the wrong direction. Uh, it’s helped with the small kind of simple things, just like, uh, for example, and I think any business leaders is, is gonna, um, resonate here. But, uh, when, when you’re running a company, everyone and their mother feels the need to cc you on everything. Your inbox becomes a war zone. I know mine is. I know mine has been in previous companies, all my co-founders.

Michael Anton: It’s the same problem. You know, you get 200, 300 emails a day and you’re cc’d on stuff and there’s no way you can keep up with it. Well, your Huper chief of staff and my Huper chief of staff, first of all, knows what’s important to me and what’s important strategically within the organization, and then is keeping tabs on everything that I’m cc’d on so that it can say, finally, you know, 16 messages into this, this email thread that I haven’t been able to read it says, hey, Michael, you know, this thing that you’re cc’d on is actually going off the rails right now, and it’s gonna probably require your focus. So here’s all of the background information you need. You don’t have to spend your time reading 16 messages deep in this thread. And then feel free to just chat with me about it as you get up to speed, but you should probably go reach out to Jenny or whatever. She’s, she’s your best point of contact to get plugged into this really quickly.

Lee Kantor: Now, what’s it like to be onboarded into Huper? Like what are what? Cause like you said, it has to know. Huper has to know what my priorities are, what outcome I desire. It has to know certain things in order to help me, you know, kind of sift through all the data. How do you help the client kind of work through that without feeling, like you said, here’s a blank, uh, chat box box. Go figure it out.

Michael Anton: Without a doubt, our onboarding is actually already pretty well refined. And I want to give a huge shout out to our team for, for doing such a good job on building this out early, but we can get users up and running and seeing value from Huper in about 15 minutes today. It’s a matter of turning it on. Chatting with Huper for a minute just to tell. Tell it who you are and what’s important to you, and then getting it connected to your data sources. It’s going to go ahead and configure a lot of different aspects of the AI brain, so that it can start to parse information and insights to the correct place. And then from my personal experience, just having it on and seeing your emails and attending your meetings with you and seeing, you know, updates through the various systems, you start to see really good, good value from this within 3 to 5 days. Like it’s incredible how intimately, intimately this thing already starts to know you just after a few days of it running passively in the background.

Lee Kantor: So what are some examples of those moments early on that a client or a tester or somebody on your team noticed like, oh man, that was great. This this happened.

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think that the board board deck example is a huge one. Uh, you know, every single, uh, investor reporting session that we’ve had or board deck that we’ve created has been created with Huper’s help. And the whole thing can be done in, I don’t know, 15 to 20 minutes with a little bit of review. Um, and what’s amazing about that and what’s really impressed our investors so far and our board members and everybody else that we’ve exposed to the tool is how little it’s had to inconvenience anybody to get this information because I haven’t had to go, you know, knock on all the doors of the engineering team and our go to market team to figure out, hey, what’s the latest status on everything? I haven’t had to beat people into updating a CRM because, you know, God knows no one’s updating the CRM, right? Uh, our Huper brain and chief of staff just has known everything. And so it’s ability to give us access to the information just for creating board decks is humongous.

Lee Kantor: So, um, who is that ideal client profile right now? Have you determined, uh, who you’re going after first.

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think mid market technology enabled companies, uh, you know, if you are primarily doing work on computers, if you have Zoom or teams, if you have Slack, you know, if you’re doing work on email, uh, this solution is for you. I’d say if you’re operating, you know, an all in-person business all on paper and maybe it’s a factory. Huper’s probably not a great solution today because it lives in the digital world, but mid-market tech enabled companies, I think, uh, can see humongous value from rolling a solution out like this.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help? I know you just got a little funding. Is this something you need more of? You need more clients. You’re ready for beta people. What do you what do you need?

Michael Anton: Yeah, without a doubt. So a little bit of background. You know, we raised a million and a half dollars pre-seed round that was led by Nadia Partners and Link Ventures. Um, and that’s gotten us up and running. It’s gotten our engineering team assembled and our product largely built. Like I said, we’re going into production here in the next couple of weeks. Uh, we’ve got some early adopter design partners, uh, you know, bunch of signed contracts and people ready to board the thing. But we’re always open to getting a, you know, a handful of more clients to give more feedback early on, particularly those who are interested in being involved on the ground floor, having a lot of influence on the roadmap, stuff like that. But down the road, we’ll be moving into more fundraising, continuing to build out the team, and then eventually going to market on a broader scale. So, um, any, any access to, to interested people or people with ideas, we’d be really grateful.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today, doing such important work. And we appreciate you.

Michael Anton: Yeah. Lee, thank you so much. Uh, definitely appreciate your time. And I look forward to being in touch.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.