After more than twenty years running the company he helped start, Gerry Szatvanyi gave himself a different job. In January 2025, OSF Digital announced that David Northington would become CEO and its founder would become Chief AI Officer. The change placed Szatvanyi closer to the technology the company was asking its customers to adopt. It also made an unusually direct question part of his own working life: what needs to change when the tools change?
Founders spend years becoming identified with a business. Their names attach themselves to its history, its ambitions and, occasionally, its every awkward decision. Moving to a new role within that business requires a different sort of authorship. The person remains; the assignment changes. In Szatvanyi’s case, the next assignment arrived with a familiar subject hiding beneath a fashionable title.
Long before AI became a boardroom staple, he was studying how digital images could help explain what was happening inside an industrial process. His path has since passed through Quebec, international commerce, acquisitions and two books. Taken together, those chapters suggest a recurring interest in the connections between information and action. A clever system earns its keep when somebody can use it.
A beginning with actual flames
Szatvanyi came from Romania to Quebec in 2003 to pursue graduate study at Université Laval. OSF began that same year. For a period, building a company and studying complex processes occupied the same stretch of his life. His master’s thesis, dated 2006, concerned improving quality and combustion control in pyrometallurgical processes through multivariate image analysis of flames.
The associated research investigated digital colour images as a way to quantify changes in combustion and predict product quality in rotary kilns. This was a very physical problem for someone whose later business would be associated with cloud software. The flame mattered because it contained information about a process that operators needed to understand.
There is something pleasingly unfashionable about that starting point. A kiln offers little opportunity for a software demonstration to distract everyone from the result. What matters is whether the analysis helps explain the process. That is a useful standard to carry into other fields, although a graduate thesis cannot tell us how a founder will make every subsequent decision.
Quebec became more than a temporary study destination. Szatvanyi stayed for fifteen years and later spoke affectionately about its natural surroundings. He recalled the convenient distances to ski areas, a detail that gives his attachment a little texture. The city was a place to build a life as well as a company. OSF’s headquarters remained in Quebec as its work spread internationally.
The customer sees the seams
OSF’s early work included websites and moving tasks from paper into digital systems. Over time, Szatvanyi’s argument grew broader. Putting an existing process onto a screen could leave its underlying problems intact. A retailer might have a modern website and still organize the rest of the business in ways that made shopping needlessly difficult.
His commerce work concentrated on joining those pieces. In a 2019 interview, he described an approach connecting online and physical stores with customer records, orders, content and service. The customer’s relationship with a business continued after the purchase. Returns, questions and subsequent visits belonged in the same picture. A storefront was one point of contact within a longer relationship.
Consider the ordinary irritation of explaining a purchase twice. A shopper has already supplied information to one part of a business, then discovers another part cannot see it. From the customer’s position, the distinction between departments offers little consolation. The company has one name over the door. Its systems have somehow acquired separate memories.
That everyday experience helps explain the attraction of connected commerce. It is also a reminder that integration work can be important without being theatrical. The useful achievement may be a question answered promptly or an order handled with less effort. Nobody throws a parade because a return went smoothly. They may, however, shop there again.
Expansion has a working-capital problem
OSF expanded into the United States in 2008 and developed a wider international presence. Szatvanyi moved to Hong Kong in 2018 to help build its Asian business. The geography of his career followed the company’s markets. International expansion required people close enough to understand the work and customers close enough to buy it.
The financial story has a less glamorous but revealing detail. In a public customer testimonial, the Business Development Bank of Canada described financing that helped OSF hire, invest in training, pursue research and development, and meet working-capital needs. It reported revenue growth from $5 million to $200 million over fourteen years of partnership. Those figures describe that historical period rather than a current annual revenue estimate.
Growth creates expenses before it produces all of the cash needed to cover them. A company has to prepare teams, build capabilities and continue delivering existing work while pursuing the next opportunity. The financing account gives expansion some substance. Behind a larger footprint sit payments, recruitment decisions and the practical business of keeping projects moving.
Investment led by Sunstone Partners, with Delta-v Capital and Salesforce Ventures participating.
On April 13, 2022, OSF announced a $100 million Series C investment. Its stated plans included expanding capabilities, sales and marketing, and pursuing acquisitions. By the January 2025 leadership handover, the company credited Szatvanyi’s tenure with more than fifteen acquisitions and over $160 million in funding. The numbers mark a change in scale; they also enlarge the responsibilities of the person coordinating it.
When coordination meant a border crossing
In February 2022, those responsibilities became immediate. Szatvanyi was in Las Vegas when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. He and operations chief Alin Dorobantu traveled to Romania and worked from Suceava, near the Ukrainian border, to coordinate departures for employees who wanted to leave. Thirty employees and twenty-two relatives crossed at Siret; the company rented accommodation in Romania.
Szatvanyi described the work in French with striking restraint: “On n’a pas fait d’actes d’héroïsme, on a juste fait de la coordination logistique.” In translation, he said they had performed no acts of heroism, simply logistical coordination. The word “simply” carries considerable weight when the task involves getting colleagues and families across a border during a war.
The episode gives a concrete meaning to an otherwise abstract phrase, global company. Employees in another country remain colleagues when ordinary operations break down. The practical details matter: travel, a crossing point, people waiting on the other side, somewhere to stay. Corporate reach becomes a set of obligations that cannot be fulfilled by an org chart alone.
People have to learn the next thing
Another part of OSF’s growth story concerns preparing people to do the work. In November 2022, the company reported that it had trained more than two hundred people in Romania that year in development and software testing. It announced plans for three hundred free training places in 2023 through OSF Academy, alongside further recruitment.
The same announcement described university partnerships, scholarships and a €40,000 contribution to renovate and equip a laboratory at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași. These were company initiatives, rather than a reason to assign every outcome to its founder. They nevertheless belong in a profile of the business he led because they show what expansion required beyond securing the next contract.
Training makes an interesting companion to a technology strategy. New software creates demand for skills before those skills become widely available. A business can recruit from the existing pool, help enlarge it, or attempt some mixture of both. The choice affects who gets access to the work and how quickly a team can take on a different kind of project.
Two books, and a conversation that keeps moving
In 2023, Szatvanyi published two books. The Great Digital Transformation, released in April, focused on reimagining customer interactions. Workforce 4.0, published in October, examined AI, working from home and the gig economy. The pair moved between the people buying from a business and the people working inside it.
His first book encouraged readers to begin with possibilities for the business and its customers, then consider how technology could support them. That order is useful. A shopping list of software products can become expensive before anyone agrees on the problem. Asking what an organization hopes to make possible gives the discussion a destination.
Workforce 4.0 extended the inquiry to offices, hiring, skills and human judgment. Its argument kept people involved in supervising AI and making decisions as automation changed tasks. Those are predictions and proposals, rather than settled outcomes. Their value lies partly in making the organizational questions visible while everyone is still fascinated by the equipment.
He also hosted The Great Digital Transformation podcast. Its published episodes included conversations about luxury jewelry, digital hesitation, customer experience and why transformations fail; guests included McKinsey’s Rodney Zemmel. A conversation permits a useful interruption to the author’s argument. Another person can bring a different industry, a contrary experience or a question the host would not have asked himself.
“Passing the baton to David is one of the most important decisions in my career.”
GERRY SZATVANYI · JANUARY 2025
The founder’s next experiment
Northington, who had already served as OSF’s chairman, took over the CEO role in 2025. Szatvanyi’s new brief included advancing AllAI and the company’s work with Salesforce’s Agentforce. The announcement gave AI a named executive responsibility and left the founder working inside the company he had built.
By July 2026, his published argument had become more specific about adoption. He described three stages: using AI for search and summaries; more sophisticated use by individuals; and operations redesigned around AI, supported by consistent tools, governance and data management. He also wrote that OSF had begun integrating generative AI before ChatGPT’s public release in 2022.
The distinction between using a tool and changing the work is central to that argument. He urged software teams to examine performance, efficiency and maintainability rather than treating the volume of generated code as proof of value. A larger pile of output creates its own chores if someone must spend the afternoon checking it.
That brings his present assignment back to a question recognizable from the earlier chapters. What does the information help somebody do? In a kiln, in a shopping journey or inside a development team, the setting changes the answer. Szatvanyi’s career has changed settings repeatedly. His next chapter will be judged in the working day, where ambitious ideas acquire consequences and somebody has to make the pieces fit.