Knowing how meetings drain productivity, Fellow saw the chance to rebuild its core product to increase efficiency.Getty Images
When the first wave of AI-powered work software hit the market, entrepreneur Aydin Mirzaee realized the days were numbered for Fellow, his meeting management company.
“We told everybody that for the new Fellow to be born, the old Fellow must die,” says Mr. Mirzaee, CEO and co-founder of the Ottawa-based software company.
For Fellow, making a strategic pivot and redefining their value wasn’t optional. It was the foundation for continued relevance in response to shifting market demands.
The software was created as a “manager’s co-pilot,” says Mr. Mirzaee, and launched its first product in 2019 with $6.5 million in seed funding. It helped leaders run their teams more efficiently by co-ordinating meetings, preparing shared agendas, and capturing typed notes and action items in one collaborative digital space.
Shopify became its first customer; Fellow later secured $30-million in venture capital. “Things were going great,” Mr. Mirzaee says. “Then what happened was the ‘ChatGPT moment.’”
In 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an AI tool capable of generating human-like text in response to user prompts. While other AI tools had existed before, automatically summarizing meetings and generating notes, early versions of those tools weren’t perfect. They’d hallucinate and wouldn’t track all the action items, Mr. Mirzaee says.
Aydin Mirzaee, CEO and co-founder of Fellow.Supplied
ChatGPT marked a turning point, making it possible to deliver far more accurate meeting recaps, potentially disrupting Fellow’s product offering. So Mr. Mirzaee and his co-founders went back to the drawing board. “The smartest founders don’t obsess about the solution. They obsess about the problem,” he says.
For Fellow, that meant refocusing on what he calls the “meeting problem.” He says managers can spend up to half their time in meetings, cutting into productivity. Within two years, Fellow rebuilt its product with AI capabilities to boost the efficiency of meetings, including a focus on privacy and security that Mr. Mirzaee says was missing from other tools.
The platform can now suggest meeting agendas based on past conversations, generate summaries and track action items, and automatically update that information in the appropriate work systems. The software can also analyze information from meetings and answer questions about what’s happening inside an organization (drawing only on meetings the user has permission to access).
Karen Craft, president and CEO of Ottawa advisory firm CraftXecs, says organizations are under “extreme pressure” to transform. “They need to be faster, smarter and operate with more clarity than ever.”
She says many businesses struggle with a “reinvention gap,” chasing one-off projects or too many initiatives all at once. “They have a strategy on paper, and end up spreading themselves too thin. Decision-making discipline and priority-setting are not built into their internal governance.”
Mr. Mirzaee says Fellow was committed to its new path, even though it cost some business. Their platform’s new AI capabilities didn’t come cheap. While the company respected its legacy pricing for existing customers, and shared free credits, not everyone was on board.
“It’s a tough bet,” Mr. Mirzaee says. “Whenever there’s change, there’s going to be collateral damage. There always is.”
He adds that for business leaders it’s impossible to have all the information before taking action, and that if you wait for that you’re moving too late. “I generally find that if I’m 70 per cent sure that we should do something, we should do it,” Mr. Mirzaee says.
That 70 per cent certainty paid off. Within two years of pivoting into an AI tool, Fellow had eight figures in AI revenue. “It’s gangbusters growth,” Mr. Mirzaee says.
Mr. Mirzaee is his own test subject, finding ways to leverage the platform to free up more of his time. For example, when hiring candidates in the past, he would attend culture-fit interviews. Now, he can run an AI prompt through interview recordings to rank candidates. “It feels like I can be in multiple places at once. I can know all the most important things. I’ve become a decision-making machine.”
Ms. Craft notes that the companies able to navigate reinvention well treat it as a normal operating condition as opposed to a one-time playbook. “Transformation isn’t a project – it’s a capability, and it only succeeds or fails at the leadership table.”
At Fellow’s leadership table, “the transformation obviously never stops,” says Mr. Mirzaee. The company is now focusing on enterprise customers and emphasizing privacy and security, which is particularly important for organizations in sectors such as financial services, health care and legal services.
“It’s this constant treadmill. Every week, there’s something new,” Mr. Mirzaee says of AI. “We’re just constantly staying at the forefront of that.”