The most valuable information in most companies isn’t stored anywhere.
It doesn’t live in dashboards or systems of record. It lives in conversations. It lives in the accumulated experience of employees who understand how work actually gets done, where bottlenecks exist, what customers are really asking for, and why decisions get made.
Most major business decisions are made without access to that knowledge.
For decades, this was unavoidable. The only way to surface institutional knowledge was through interviews, surveys, and consulting engagements. Organizations spent months collecting information from a small sample of employees, then distilled it into a handful of recommendations. The process was slow and expensive, and it only ever captured a fraction of what people knew.
We believe that is about to change.
Just as large language models unlocked the ability to understand unstructured data such as emails, documents, and support tickets, voice AI is unlocking a new category of information that has historically been inaccessible: the knowledge that exists inside people’s heads.
Voice is the richest way humans share what they actually know. People are more nuanced, detailed, and honest in conversation than they are in forms or surveys. Until recently, capturing and synthesizing thousands of those conversations was economically impossible. Today it is not.
You can already see this pattern emerging across categories. Companies like Sierra and Decagon are transforming customer support. Others are reimagining recruiting and sales. In each case, AI is making information economically accessible that previously required large teams of humans to uncover.
We believe institutional knowledge is the next frontier.
Cadrian helps organizations surface that knowledge at scale. Through AI-powered voice interviews, companies can understand how work actually happens across teams, where opportunities exist, and what employees are seeing long before those insights appear in traditional systems.
The immediate application is helping companies identify where AI can create the most value. But the larger opportunity is much broader. Every organization has critical questions whose answers already exist somewhere within the business. The challenge has always been extracting them.
This is what makes the opportunity so compelling. As foundation models continue to improve, defensibility increasingly shifts toward proprietary data and unique sources of insight. Institutional knowledge is among the richest and least accessible datasets that companies own. Organizations that can systematically surface that knowledge and learn from it build an advantage that compounds.
Systems of record were built to capture transactions. The opportunity now is to capture the understanding behind them.
The Team
Getting institutional knowledge out of people’s heads at scale requires a rare combination of skills. It demands expertise in AI systems, deep understanding of how organizations operate, and the judgment to separate signal from noise.
Cadrian’s team has spent decades working at that intersection.
Prior to joining Ardent, Dan Preiss (co-founder/CEO) spent years helping large organizations diagnose operational challenges as a principal in BCG’s digital practice. Chris Young (co-founder/Chairman) has led some of the world’s largest technology organizations as CEO of McAfee, EVP at Microsoft, and now CEO of Vertex. Akash Gupta (co-founder) and Jonathan Betz bring deep experience building AI and enterprise software systems, with leadership roles spanning Google, Meta, Yext, Rent the Runway, and multiple startups.
Together, they have spent their careers uncovering how organizations work and building the systems that help them work better.
That combination is what makes them able to build this category.
The answers to many of an organization’s hardest questions already exist within the organization itself. Cadrian helps bring those answers to the surface.
If you’re interested in understanding where AI can create the greatest impact inside your business, book a demo.
