AI in Business: Before you buy AI, buy clarity.

Daniel Faggella wanted to spend his working life thinking about artificial intelligence. To pay for that ambition, he built an ecommerce business. The plan was tidy: grow it, sell it, fund the research. The timing was less cooperative. His account describes a sale that took years longer than expected. The detour eventually supplied more than a million dollars for the company that became Emerj.

That origin helps explain a company whose product is often a conversation. Emerj sits between people trying to understand AI and people trying to sell it. The gap between those groups can be expensive. A compelling demonstration tells a buyer what a system can do. It may say very little about whether the buyer’s organization can use it.

01 / The buyer needs a translator

The AI in Business podcast addresses nontechnical business and government leaders. Its territory is adoption, strategy and return on investment. Guests have come from organizations including Amazon, IBM, Accenture and Google DeepMind. The questions concern applications and decisions, rather than teaching listeners to train a model.

Consider the executive choosing an AI initiative. Before comparing vendors, that person needs to identify the workflow worth changing, the evidence required to justify spending and the people whose cooperation will determine whether anything happens. Emerj’s interviews offer examples to think with. They make someone else’s experience available before the listener commits their own budget.

The company’s About page describes hundreds of one-to-one conversations each year with Fortune 500 AI leaders. That access is its central asset. In a market crowded with product announcements, an operator explaining a constraint can be more useful than another list of capabilities. The advantage depends on the specificity of the conversation.

02 / Two audiences. One conversation.

Emerj serves two groups with different intentions. Enterprise leaders, consultants and AI champions consume the research. AI vendors and service providers pay to reach relevant buyers through media and demand-generation programs. Emerj names Google Cloud, Microsoft and NVIDIA among brands using its reach. Those relationships belong to its commercial media business.

Its Thought Leadership Series makes the arrangement concrete. Emerj and a sponsor define the audience, develop interview questions and identify executive guests who can discuss the relevant business pain. Conversations become podcasts and articles. Distribution and lead generation extend the program beyond the interview itself.

This places Emerj across several familiar markets: analyst research, trade publishing and B2B marketing. An analyst subscription is an alternative for a buyer seeking advice. A specialist publication or demand-generation agency is an alternative for a vendor seeking attention. Emerj’s particular combination is executive access, AI-specific coverage and content that can travel into a sales conversation.

03 / Florida expertise, a wider audience

NLP Logix supplies a useful example. The Florida AI services firm had established regional relationships but wanted national visibility. Emerj’s August 2026 case study describes interviewing its founders and senior data scientists, turning episodes into articles and distributing the work to enterprise audiences. The aim was to make existing expertise visible beyond an existing network.

Emerj reports more than 20,000 podcast downloads in 90 days, followed by speaking invitations, media opportunities and new buyer conversations. The partnership began in 2021 and remained active when the case study appeared. These are company-reported campaign outcomes. They support a distribution story; they do not establish how much revenue the campaign produced.

A second case, SambaNova, addresses a different communication problem. Its compute offering needed an explanation that banking and healthcare executives could use. Emerj describes interviews focused on business outcomes and reusable reports for business-development teams. It reports more than 40,000 downloads over 150 days. The interesting move was turning a hardware discussion into a purchasing discussion.

04 / The bill, and the detour

There is also a paid research layer. Emerj Plus offers white papers, use-case exploration and best-practice guides for advisors and innovation leaders. Its public offer displays $13 per week billed monthly, $7.60 per week billed annually and a $1,197 lifetime package. Organization site licenses are available through an inquiry. The pricing makes clear that free listening and deeper paid access coexist.

“Had I known it would have taken four years instead of 12-18 months, I probably never would have started an eCommerce business.”Daniel Faggella, reflecting in 2017

The founder’s earlier financing plan failed first at the calendar. Funding one venture by selling another bought control, but delayed his full attention to Emerj. His original interest was largely AI’s ethical and transhuman implications. He subsequently explained the shift toward business coverage through a belief that businesses would shape AI’s early development. The practical audience became a route into the larger conversation.

05 / Borrow the questions

The copyable part is modest enough to use tomorrow. Choose one workflow. Find an experienced operator. Ask what changed, what data was necessary and what made the project difficult. Translate the answers into a business decision. Emerj’s 2019 Getting Started with AI report used lessons from 50 interviews; the underlying discipline is to compare experience before committing to a solution.

For a listener, the most useful next step is a short internal memo: the problem, the proposed change, the evidence and the unanswered questions. For a vendor, it is a conversation with sales about what buyers actually ask. Either exercise forces a broad AI claim into a decision someone can examine.

The same approach has limits. A sponsor needs an audience that overlaps its buyers and a problem those buyers recognize. A reader still needs to test advice against their own data, operations and governance. Sponsored conversations deserve that scrutiny too. Emerj identifies sponsorship in its coverage, and its terms say campaign outcomes are not guaranteed. Attention can start the discussion. The buyer still has to decide.