change-management
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Most Leadership Training Fails. Droste Group Bet Its Business on the Fix.
A woman-owned firm in the shadow of Detroit's auto plants built its business on a blunt premise: most leadership training doesn't stick. Here is how Droste Group tries to make it stick anyway.
Dima Syrotkin Is Teaching Companies to Hear What Change Sounds Like
At Pandatron, Dima Syrotkin is turning a founder’s long interest in self-awareness into an AI system for the awkward human work between corporate strategy and execution.
Wavestone
Wavestone grew from a French telecom consultancy into a €954 million transformation firm by joining strategy to implementation. Its next test is whether a founder-controlled European challenger can turn enterprise AI from experiments into working systems.
Userlane
The intelligence to see the impact of your software and AI. The assistance to help your people get work done.
Whatfix
The company nobody notices - because if Whatfix is doing its job, you never read the manual. Inside the Bengaluru-and-San Jose startup teaching a billion-dollar software stack to explain itself.
Alignment Theatre Is Expensive
Alignment theatre is the term Hanadi Usman, a PMO director with more than 15 years in enterprise transformation, uses for the gap between what teams say in the steering committee and what they admit in the corridor afterward. The dashboards are green, the sponsors nod, the minutes record consensus, and the program bleeds quietly for six more weeks. Her argument: the fix is not a better reporting framework but psychological safety built into governance design, so surfacing the real picture is safer than protecting the performed one.
Apty
Apty is an AI-powered Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that layers on top of enterprise applications like Salesforce, Workday, Oracle and ServiceNow to guide users through complex workflows, validate their inputs in real time, automate repetitive steps and surface where people get stuck. Founded in 2018 by Krishna Dunthoori as letzNav and later renamed Apty, the Austin-based company helps large organizations - including customers such as Delta Air Lines and Boeing - turn expensive software purchases into actual, measurable adoption and ROI. Apty has raised roughly $12.9M and serves over a thousand enterprise customers and millions of end users.
Pandatron
Pandatron is an AI change-activation platform that helps large enterprises turn strategy into execution. Its conversational AI runs private, role-tailored coaching conversations with thousands of employees at once, then feeds leaders real-time behavioral intelligence on readiness, resistance and risk. Founded in Helsinki and now with a San Francisco presence, Pandatron works with Fortune 500 companies including SAP, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Merck and Skanska to make coaching-driven change dramatically cheaper and more measurable.
Prodly
Prodly is a Palo Alto-based software company that builds DevOps automation for Salesforce, focused on the parts of the platform that most deployment tools ignore: configuration data. Its AppOps suite handles release management, sandbox seeding, automated regression testing, data migration and compliance reporting so admins and developers can move CPQ, Revenue Cloud and other low-code changes between environments without hand-copying records or breaking production. Founded in 2014 by Max Rudman - who previously founded SteelBrick, the product Salesforce acquired and rebranded as Salesforce CPQ - Prodly raised a $10M Series A in 2021 and positions itself as the tool teams add when relational data deployment is the gap other DevOps platforms leave open.
Swantide
Swantide is a San Francisco-based AI company that puts a Salesforce admin in your keyboard. Founded in 2020 by Taylor Lint, the platform connects to a company's Salesforce instance to automate configuration changes, debug issues, document processes automatically, and answer team questions in plain language. Backed by $7M in seed funding from Menlo Ventures and others, Swantide helps ops, sales, and revenue teams cut Salesforce go-live times from weeks and months down to hours and days.
The $2.5 Trillion Question: Why 95% of Enterprise AI Pilots Fail (and How Supply Chains Beat the Odds)
Sushanth Raman, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based supply chain AI company Pallet, delivers a conference keynote tackling the central paradox of the enterprise AI boom: despite a projected $2.5 trillion in AI spending in 2026, an MIT study finds 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. Raman argues the failures stem not from weak frontier models but from messy real-world deployments, uncaptured tribal knowledge, legacy integrations, and poor change management. He offers a three-part framework for evaluating AI vendors, explains why building in-house is harder than it looks, and presents three case studies (Lineage, Prism Logistics, and Mallory Alexander) where Pallet drove millions in savings and 99%+ accuracy on tasks like customs filing.
Andrew Higashi
Andrew Higashi is the Co-founder and CEO of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco-based AI-powered employee experience platform that helps companies communicate with and engage their people the way the best brands engage customers. A three-time company builder, he spent a decade honing enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy at Gigya, WorkSpan, and Sendoso before founding ChangeEngine in 2021 with the same co-founding team he has worked alongside for ten years. ChangeEngine has raised $15.5 million in total funding, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures in 2024, and serves 310+ employees globally with operations in the US, UK, and Latin America.
Nellie Wartoft
Nellie Wartoft is a Swedish technology entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Tigerhall, a Change Activation Platform that helps Fortune 500 companies drive organizational transformation at scale using AI and social learning. She moved from a small Swedish village to Singapore at 18 with a one-way ticket, spent 4.5 years as a top billing recruiter at Michael Page, then built Tigerhall from scratch into a platform operating across 32 countries, backed by Sequoia Capital and Monk's Hill Ventures with over $10 million in venture capital. Before her tech career she was a Swedish national champion in skeet shooting and air rifle.
Tigerhall
Tigerhall is an AI-powered Change Activation Platform that helps Fortune 1000 transformation leaders communicate, train and measure organizational change at speed. Founded by Nellie Wartoft in 2018, it serves enterprise customers in 32+ countries.