Section

There is a specific kind of corporate regret that shows up about six months after a company signs an enterprise AI contract. The licenses are bought. The all-hands has happened. Someone made a slide with the word "transformation" on it. And then, quietly, nothing changes. Most employees open the shiny new AI tool, type in a question the way they'd type into Google, get a mediocre answer, and go back to doing their jobs the way they always did. The invoice, meanwhile, arrives every month.

Section is a company built almost entirely around that gap - the distance between owning AI and using it. It has a name for the gap, too, which is the kind of thing companies do when they want to sell you the bridge: the "use case desert." The pitch is that your people are stranded out there, holding a very powerful tool and no idea what to do with it, and Section will walk them out.

What makes this interesting is who is doing the selling. Section was founded in 2019 by Scott Galloway, the NYU Stern marketing professor who is better known for viral takes about Big Tech, private equity and the general decline of everything. The original company wasn't about AI at all. It was called Section4, and it sold something more genteel: elite business education, unbundled from the $200,000 MBA. Sprints. A Mini-MBA. World-class professors, but online and affordable. By 2021 it had raised $30 million in a Series A led by General Catalyst and had taught more than 10,000 students from over 4,000 companies across 97 countries.

Then ChatGPT happened, and Galloway and CEO Greg Shove did the thing that is easy to say and hard to do: they changed the answer. Not a new course category bolted onto the old catalog - a pivot. In September 2023 the company announced it would build a sprawling "AI for business" curriculum, dropped the "4," and became Section. The teaching assistant it built, ProfAI, stopped being a nice feature and became the product.

The unsexy part is the point

Here is the slightly counterintuitive thing about Section's business. The whole AI industry is racing to build smarter models. Section is doing the opposite - it's building smarter users. That is a less glamorous position. Nobody writes a breathless thread about a certification program. But it may be the more durable one, because the models keep getting better on their own while the humans, stubbornly, do not.

The product today has two main pieces. Section HQ is a command center - a dashboard where a company can actually measure whether AI adoption is happening, team by team, rather than assuming it because the licenses were purchased. Section Coach, powered by ProfAI, is the personal trainer: it gives employees role-specific feedback and nudges them toward better ways of using AI on the work in front of them. In November 2025 the company added the Use Case Coach, an AI agent that recommends high-value use cases based on your job and then walks you through building them. It is coaching, certification and hand-holding, sold as software.

The customers suggest the anxiety is real and well-funded. Section says more than 150 enterprises are on the platform, and the logo wall reads like a list of companies that have all been asked the same board-level question about their AI strategy: Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Unilever, Okta, Mercer, Pernod Ricard, Publicis, Tapestry, Autodesk and Horizon Media. At Horizon Media, the company says, 85% of employees got certified as AI-proficient and are actively applying it - which is either a genuinely impressive number or a beautifully chosen one, and possibly both.

A CEO who has done this before

Greg Shove is, by his own count, a seven-time CEO. He worked at Apple, AOL and Sun Microsystems in an earlier era of technology, and he founded five companies before this one, three of which exited - two of them for more than $100 million (2Market went to AOL, SocialChorus to Sumeru Equity Partners). He says he has personally trained more than 10,000 knowledge workers on AI, and in 2025 Edelman put him on its list of "AI Creators to Know." The résumé matters here because Section's whole thesis is that technology doesn't transform organizations - the people using it do. It helps to be led by someone who has watched several technology waves wash over several companies and noticed which ones actually stuck.

None of this requires believing that AI will reshape every job, or that it won't. Section's bet is narrower and, in a way, safer: whatever AI turns out to be worth, companies will have spent real money to get there, and someone has to make sure that money buys behavior change instead of a monthly subscription to disappointment. That is a smaller idea than "we are building AGI." It is also a much easier thing to invoice for.

The risk, of course, is that the tools get so good and so intuitive that the training becomes unnecessary - that the Ferrari eventually learns to drive itself, and the driving school goes out of business. Section is betting that the gap between capability and competence is wider and stickier than that, and that it will keep needing a bridge for a good while yet. So far, 150-plus enterprises are paying to agree.