Episode
START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents”
- Podcast
- START
- Published
- Jul 8, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 578
- Processing state
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- https://share.transistor.fm/s/9696f19f
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Summary
Bao's job was automating other people's jobs. So he automated his own. His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch how the work actually got done, then build the automations by hand. Then they asked the obvious question: why are humans doing all of this? Now Hessian's AI agents construct a digital twin of your business, map your back-office workflows, and take the work over end-to-end — plugging into whatever you already use. Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce. No new dashboard. No workflow migration. No figure-it-out-yourself AI tooling. The thesis behind it is blunt: the future of enterprise AI isn't selling more SaaS. Businesses want to adopt AI. They don't know how. Another tool doesn't solve that problem — it adds to it. So the companies that win won't sell software. They'll sell outcomes. 🎙️ Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian on Fondo START pod 01:28 — Introducing Hessian's vision for forward deployed AI agents that automate business operations. 01:58 — Why conversations with customers revealed that AI adoption is still a major challenge for mid-market companies. 02:34 — How Hessian evolved from a workflow orchestration platform into an AI-first automation company. 03:15 — The insight that led the team to replace traditional forward deployed engineering with AI agents. 03:57 — Why Hessian integrates into existing workflows instead of requiring companies to adopt another SaaS product. 04:28 — Bao's perspective on why enterprise AI is shifting toward outcome-based implementations rather than software licenses. 05:02 — Early customer results, including significant time savings and eliminating the need for a dedicated AI engineer. 05:34 — Meeting his co-founders at university and getting accepted into Y Comb…