Private Equity Investor at hauerX holdings + Founder Courageous Minds Only + Co-Founder The Garage Group

Enterprise growth used to compound over years. Now it compounds over weeks.

The companies winning see what's coming months earlier, validate in weeks instead of quarters, and get to revenue before the window closes. Most enterprises are still operating on the old timeline. The gap is widening.

Jason Hauer built and sold an Inc. 500 innovation consultancy. Now he's building HauerX Holdings: a portfolio of AI-native companies that close the velocity gap.

The mission is simple: make AI-native growth the standard for every enterprise.

Not through advice. Through companies that operate at AI-native speed.

Speed to see what's coming. Speed to validate. Speed to revenue. Systems that compound.

The HauerX portfolio delivers what enterprises need to move faster:

Board of Innovation builds AI innovation engines across the commercial stack. They built Walmart an AI product engine that compresses 12 months to minutes.

Nichefire delivers predictive culture intelligence. Nestlé used their signals to launch Vital Pursuit first-to-market, predicting the GLP-1 trend before it hit mainstream.

FifthRow turns consulting workflows into autonomous AI agents that run 24/7. A Fortune 500 auto company validated 5 B2C businesses in 10 months.

3D Color produces color-perfect product comps in days instead of weeks.

Serial Growth Engine helps B2B companies build repeatable growth systems that scale.

Serial Growth Lab is where Jason shares the roadmap to AI-native growth. How enterprises move from slow to fast. From reactive to predictive. From campaigns to compounding systems.

Jason partners in two ways: backing growth-stage companies building AI-native solutions, and deploying portfolio capabilities inside enterprises ready to move from strategy to installed systems.

The vision: $100M portfolio. Built from Ohio. Serving enterprises globally.

Speed to signal. Speed to market. Speed compounds.

Jason Hauer

A 22-year-old with AI fluency will outpace the executive who hesitates.

The gap widens daily.

This isn't about technology. It's about who's willing to learn.

The executives struggling most are the ones defending what they already know. The ones accelerating are the ones asking "what if?"

Relevance isn't about your title. It's about your learning velocity.

AI-Native Growth | Portfolio Builder | Inc. 500 Founder

Marcelo De Santis

Chief Digital Officer I Board Director I Executive Coach

Marcelo is a seasoned C-suite executive and Chief Digital & Information Officer with a dynamic career leading technology, data, and AI transformations across global organizations. His track record spans Fortune 500 companies (Mondelez, Kraft Foods, Pirelli), tech consulting firms (Thoughtworks) and high-growth startups (NextData), where he consistently drives innovation, growth, and competitive advantage. He advises C-suites and boards on technology strategy, AI and business transformation.

As Founder & CEO of The Ascent, Marcelo brings an entrepreneurial mindset to coaching senior leaders, helping them navigate technology disruption and lead with purpose.

Marcelo also serves on corporate and nonprofit boards. Author of Figure-Eight, he combines strategic insight, technical depth, and a human-centered leadership style to shape the future of business.

Chief Digital Officer

I remember when digital transformation in banking meant launching a mobile app and calling it innovation.

I enjoyed the interview with Leigh-Ann Russell , CTO at BNY Mellon.

Their 20,000+ “Empowered Builders,” human employees creating agents, collaborate with over 130 specialized “Digital Employees” that have their own credentials, email, and Microsoft Teams access to perform tasks autonomously.

These agents handle financial analysis, data reconciliation, compliance reporting. Humans focus on the strategic decisions that require judgment, context, and relationships.

BNY Mellon calls it “agent-first,” designed to raise the AI IQ of every employee, not replace them.

I’ve seen transformation programs work and I’ve seen them stall and collapse. 

The ones that worked always prioritized the people aspect of the transformation.

Keep this in mind for inspiration…BNY Mellon is the largest custodian bank in the world, operating in one of the most heavily regulated industries on the planet. And they did it.

What else is possible for other businesses and industries?

Are we lacking #leadership courage?

BNY 
The Tech Series 
Amerant Bank 
Angeles Investors

Helping Boards & C-Suite Turn AI Strategy Into Organizational Performance | Author, Figure Eight | Host, The Tech Series | Former Fortune 500 CIO/CDO

Vinod Khosla just said IT services will cease to exist by 2030.

Mark Minevich wrote a sharp piece building on this. The argument: AI agents are dismantling the $600 billion IT services and consulting industry. The billable hour is dying.

But we are missing and important aspect.

We are debating whether this is true for the sellers. The big consultancies. The IT services firms. The outsourcing giants.

We are not asking what this means for the buyers.

If you sit on a board or run a company, this shift changes three things at once.

How you buy. The pricing model is broken. If an AI agent can do in 4 hours what a team of 12 consultants did in 4 weeks, why are you still paying by the hour? Billable hours incentivize the wrong behavior in an agentic world. The companies that move to outcome-based engagements first will have a structural cost advantage over everyone else.

What you buy. Execution is getting commoditized fast. The research, the decks, the models, the benchmarking. Agents can do all of that now. The premium shifts to strategy. Context. The ability to walk into a boardroom and ask the question nobody else is asking. Your advisory spend should reflect that reallocation. Less execution. More wisdom.

How you govern it. Your board needs visibility into which service providers are actually deploying AI to deliver better results and which ones are just charging the same rates with fewer people doing the work. That is a new oversight gap. And right now, almost no board is asking the question.

Khosla is right that the old model is dying. But the real disruption is not what happens to Accenture or Infosys. It is what happens when boards realize they need to rethink how they buy, what they buy, and how they oversee every dollar of external expertise.

I think the next 24 months will make this unavoidable…

Will outcome-based pricing redefine the consulting industry?

The Tech Series 
The HITEC Foundation 
HITEC 
Angeles Investors

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This headline is everywhere. And it is the wrong conversation for every executive reading it.

Every time I see a discussion on AGI, consciousness of AI, or anything about “reaching human-level AI” I wonder three things.

Who defined that level.
Who decided it was the right goal.
How did they prove it was reached.

Be conscious of the race to get to that “next level” across AI labs. It is exciting. It is also not your race.

Your race is about your personal and company capability to partner with AI within your organization. 

That is the race you control. That is the one you must win.

“AI models are rented. Capability is built.”

I think the companies that win will not be the ones chasing the latest model announcement. 

They will be the ones building the muscle to use whatever model comes next.

What race are you running?

The HITEC Foundation 
HITEC

Most AI conversations stay at the surface: Chatbots. Copilots. Pilots everywhere.

Last week, I spent three hours with an HRO and a cross-functional executive team mapping one core process end to end: Hire to Retire.

A simple process map on the wall.

We forced three decisions at every step:

Autonomous AI.
AI-Augmented.
Human Only.

What emerged was not an AI roadmap, far for achieving that.
But, it was operating model clarity.

Three major outcomes:

1. Entire activities eliminated, not automated
2. Clear separation between judgment work and structured work
3. A credible path to grow without proportional headcount growth

And one more insight that, to me, mattered most. The CEO said at the beginning of the session,
 
“I want our HR team spending 3x more time with our people. This is not about workforce reduction.”

Do not underestimate that level of leadership clarity. 

When the objective is capability expansion, not cost cutting, the entire AI conversation changes.

The full article walks through the exercise step by step.

If you are serious about augmenting any core process with AI, this is practical. 

It may feel like a small step, but it can unlock a significant mindset shift.

Read it. Run it. Share it.

We are stronger when we learn together.

The Tech Series
The CEO Series
Executive House

Last week I was working with and HRO and a cross-functional executive team. HR. IT. Finance. Operations. The question on the table was familiar. Where

Open article: Rethinking HR with AI, in Three Hours by Marcelo De Santis • 5 min read

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