Test 01
Data Readiness Panel
Can an agent do useful work against your data today? If not, the three highest-leverage cleanup projects to get there in 90–180 days.
An Outsider Labs advisory · 2026
Your company needs an AI process, not a chatbot.
We run the 8-test diagnostic that tells executive teams exactly where they stand on AI — and what to build next.
A short conversation we keep having with business owners and executives.
Names changed. The pattern doesn't.
Outsider Labs
So what AI process are you running?
Business Owner
What are you talking about?
Outsider Labs
How are your teams set up — do you have a real AI process? A repeatable system that spans the company, reinforces your SOPs, plugs into your customer software, and gives the whole team deep AI leverage. The kind of thing that 10x's how they work.
You're doing this, right?
Business Owner
Sort of. We've got ChatGPT. The team's chatting with it.
Outsider Labs
That's not a process. An AI process takes your existing knowledge — your best people's judgment — and turns it into a repeatable system the whole company works from, then builds on it from there. So your operators' reflexes scale instead of bottleneck.
It might take three years to reach its apex. Start now and you're already partway up. Wait, and it's a BlackBerry moment.
Business Owner
Huh. Maybe we should talk.
Outsider Labs
We can. We only work with a handful of companies at a time — but we can run a high-level audit and get you started.
The Outsider Labs AI Audit
The 8 tests you need an outsider to run.
An 8-test diagnostic for operating businesses in services, software, media, distribution, and regulated retail. Two to four weeks, from onboarding to final report. A written report, overseen by both partners. Built to be read by a board in 60 minutes.
— Foundation
Can this company actually run agents against its own work?
Test 02
Agent Governance Panel
The seven control questions every agent deployment must answer before anything goes to production.
Test 03
Role + Agent Ownership Map
Which human roles are most exposed to displacement — and who is the named owner for every agent the company runs.
— Defense
What does AI take from this business if you do nothing?
Test 04
Customer Disruption Map
How exposed your revenue book is to AI disrupting your customers' industries — and which accounts to de-risk now.
Test 05
Pricing Power Audit
What your revenue looks like in 24 months when customers' willingness-to-pay compresses 40–70% — and which product lines survive, at what price.
Test 06
Sellability Marker
Where you'd trade on the AI-readiness premium-to-discount spectrum in a 24–36 month transaction — and the three moves to migrate up before exit.
— Offense
Where does AI give you margin and throughput, right now?
Test 07
Margin Expansion Map
Function by function, counterparty by counterparty: where AI cuts cost or expands throughput in the next 12 months — and which vendor checks are no longer worth writing.
Test 08
Workforce Architecture
The next 12 months of hiring through the AI lens — what to hire, what to pause, and the new role nobody else is creating yet.
II · The Deliverable
What the audit produces.
One document: the Outsider Labs AI Audit Report. The findings from all eight tests, and a concrete, sequenced set of steps to take your company from where it is today to AI-enabled.
We are diagnosticians, not an implementation team. We write the prescription — what to do, in what order, and why. When the work calls for hands on keyboards, we point you to specialists we trust: the forward-deployed engineers everyone's hearing about. We've done that build work ourselves, and can — but it isn't what you should expect from us.
But we don't disappear at handoff. Once implementation is underway and the systems go operational, we stay connected — a standing strategic advisor on the transformation. We build the product-management advisory roles that keep the work pointed the right way: sequencing what comes next, and course-correcting as the technology and your business keep moving.
The clarity is the product.
Two partners. One financial lens, one technical. Every audit overseen by both.
Partner · Financial & Transaction Lens
Harry DeMott
Thirty years across equity research, hedge funds, and venture capital. Nine years at First Boston (now Credit Suisse) covering media and technology. General Partner at Raptor Ventures. Board member at Pandora from its earliest days through 2011. Co-founder and CEO of Proper. Princeton, BA Economics. NYU, MBA Finance.
Harry leads the financial and transaction lens — customer disruption, pricing power, and sellability.
Partner · Technical & Operational Lens
Anthony Batt
Entrepreneur and executive with deep roots in digital media, SaaS, and operational technology. Built and scaled venture-backed companies: Buzzmedia, Greenplum, Wevr, and Katalys. CTO-for-hire across multiple businesses. Founded and led teams at BuzzMedia, Metapa (Greenplum), Wevr, and Proper. Knows what a functioning data and AI stack looks like from the inside.
Anthony leads the technical and operational lens — data readiness, agent architecture, and business automation processes.
We build on the frontier systems — Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. We work with a handful of companies at a time. You can see how we think every day at CO/AI.
The audit is the work.
You get the report and the plan — and you're never sold a project you didn't ask for. The audit is the front door. Three sentences about your business is enough to start.
- Fit
- We take a handful of companies at a time.
- Frame
- Two to four weeks. One report. Overseen by both partners.
- Built for
- Operating businesses, $5M–$250M in revenue.
- Stack
- Anthropic Claude · Google Gemini. Frontier only.