Founder's Thoughts with Doug Burman

For decades, countless human-centric companies have missed out on the major tech innovations that fuel transformation.

Too often, these businesses overlook the possibilities tech solutions bring. Plus, they are almost always ignored by tech brands that cater to highly tech-savvy audiences. Now, BrightAI is changing all that.

We talked to Doug Burman, one of BrightAI’s founders, about his long-time dream of bringing tech solutions to non-tech brands. From solving problems that stump top executives to transforming the way field technicians operate, Doug and his team at BrightAI are helping transform non-tech businesses so they can become leaders in their industries. 

How is BrightAI’s focus on innovative solutions different from most other tech companies?

Right now there’s this large gap between non-tech brands and tech brands. BrightAI is really good at helping hands-on, personal touch companies discover how tech can work for them.

Some of our partners are in long-running industries that have existed for a hundred years or more. They’re experts at squeezing the last drop of profit from their current model, but they have some blind spots around what is actually possible with the right tech solutions.

Since we understand how technological challenges play out in businesses quite well, it’s easy for us to envision solutions these companies can’t even imagine yet. So we can spot how non-tech companies can pivot to a better, simpler approach that increases profitability.

Why is it important for non-tech companies to embrace tech solutions?

Because if they don’t, their competitors will. We saw it happen recently with the huge success of Peloton. Stationary bikes used to be low-tech, but now Peloton has completely disrupted their industry.

We help prevent our partners from getting run over by technology by making sure they are running with it.

What kind of challenges come up when you bring tech solutions to non-tech companies, and how have you overcome them?

Whenever you bring tech solutions to a non-tech business, there’s a lot of learning on both sides. There’s a lot of interpersonal exchanges, site visits, and field work. We literally take a walk in someone else’s shoes to see how they view the world. And that’s been super helpful.

For example, we have partners who employ expert hands-on mechanics. These are master tradesmen, but they may not have much experience installing tech. We’ve taken learnings from how they approach problems, and we share our knowledge on how tech tools can make their lives easier.

BrightAI brings this human touch to every level of every project. The problems an executive faces are very different from the problems the technicians in the field face. So to find innovative solutions for the whole business, we engage across the entire scope of each company—from high-level execs to branch managers to field techs.

How would you describe BrightAI’s company culture?

Our company dynamic is one where we push enablement. We hire really good people. We trust their opinions, and we value their voice. We want them to be able to push forward and make really interesting decisions in their space.

BrightAI is very cross-disciplined. We have leading experts on mobile apps, website front-ends, cloud scaling, the edge people, hardware development, and more. We purposely structure our teams to cross disciplines, so there's no hard line between any of our experts. For example, people who work in cloud and people who work in edge work together side-by-side.

Everyone on our team is so qualified and so established in their own area. But since they work so closely with experts from other departments, they get to constantly learn new things. Everybody is stretching their brain, and they are so excited to get paid to learn. Our engineers enjoy figuring out how the pieces come together to achieve higher level intelligence, and this seems to really light up everyone on our team.

How will BrightAI scale?

One of BrightAI’s main goals is to uplift society to new levels of capability—and not just the tech portion of society. I spent most of my career helping the Uber nerds. A lot of technology exists to serve the tech savvy. Now I’m really excited to help everybody. A question we ask ourselves a lot at BrightAI is “how do we uplift the bulk of people to have a better existence on the planet?”

So this year specifically, we are working on a platform that serves multiple needs across multiple industries. We want to create value for the individual doing their wash in a laundry room. We want to help an installer work through the different problems they face in the field. We want to help business owners streamline their operations.

BrightAI understands how tech innovations make all this possible, and it’s our goal to enlighten others. By providing the right tools, we help businesses become more profitable—not by adding more customers or locations, but simply by making their existing systems more efficient. In turn, these solutions help both their employees and their customers. Our company ethos is that we all want to do things that help out humanity as a whole.

Interested in hearing more from BrightAI’s thought leaders? Discover how our other founders are helping transform multiple industries through next generation AI. If you have any questions, or if you’d like to schedule an interview with any one of our founders, email us at info@bright.ai.