After meeting the client in real life, the first job for an Athena Intelligence client-facing leader is to “build a carbon copy of themselves in the product for the customer”…If that doesn’t capture your undivided attention, go to the 19 min and 12 second mark and listen to Brendon unpack this concept in 175 seconds. For laughs, watch my reaction…AI with Alec Episode #16 is with Brendon Geils, founder + CEO of Athena Intelligence.While everyone is now talking about enterprise AI Agents, my man has been doing it in highly regulated environments because “we want our brand to reflect the security and sensitivity of some of the most important institutions” (i.e.) Financial Services. “We're building an enterprise analyst, or as we like to say, an AI employee for regulated industries.”Gnarly.Top 3 takeaways:1: Athena is a horizontal play focused on enabling clients to solve the hardest problems, the ones they don’t see coming but need to read and react to, fast“I think we shine best when there's some brand new thing that hits someone's desk and there's not an off the shelf solution for it.”2: Brendon believes it’s “better to be small in this business” because you can “scale in other ways by building agents to do the job that maybe historically you would have to hire people for”“Because for this thing to work well, it's gotta live in less people's heads. The more heads you live in, the more it becomes a Google PM’d project, a Microsoft PM’d project. So I think for us, we have to stay small as long as we can.”3: Technology, no matter how powerful, is only one leg of the stool.“What I found was most of the time the technology wasn't the rate limiter for a successful pilot, either at Scale or at Palantir. It was your ability to introduce change management to an organization.”