Arist Launches AI Performance Consultant to Challenge Management Consulting Bloat

Fortune 500 companies see sales team readiness, post-merger integration, and AI transformation as top use cases for Arist’s new Diagnostic product

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Arist today announced Arist Diagnostic, a new platform release that lets customers make and execute critical business decisions faster through agents that do the slowest work of management consultants in a fraction of the time. Leaders of large workforces will be able to rapidly determine a company’s strategic readiness and prepare its people for new initiatives by deploying a performance consultant that interviews and up-levels each employee accountable for business-wide change.

“The average Fortune 500 company spends over $100 million a year on consulting engagements, and most of that work is listening to a fraction of a workforce and diagnosing problems that leaders already know they have,” said Michael Ioffe, co-founder and CEO of Arist and a Thiel Fellow. “We’ve spent eight years helping global companies assess and enable their employees, and we’ve applied that learning to agentic capabilities that make the diagnostic phase of management consulting seem glacially slow and outrageously expensive in comparison.”

Given the exponential pace of change in business and staggering investments in AI, companies are beginning to question the value of spending millions on long consulting engagements that interview a small number of employees, don’t share raw data, and end in static presentations. Arist solves these problems by letting customers ask a question, like “why are sales down in North America and how do we fix it?” The platform talks with every employee through an AI voice agent, gathers business context through enterprise system integrations and terabytes of content, and maps employee feedback to their roles and responsibilities. Arist synthesizes findings from interviews into a consulting-grade report within minutes, lets users query the raw data, and provides recommendations paired with personalized employee activations.

“We began as a product that integrated microlearning into work streams, and we realized that all of the data and experience we generated from hundreds of millions of interactions with our customers’ front-line employees could be channeled into a much more powerful capability for making business decisions and executing big moves, like AI enablement, M&A and product launches,” said Maxine Anderson, Arist co-founder and Head of Product. “As big of a leap this is for our product, it’s still rooted in our core mission of improving people. Most cutting-edge technology companies are using people to make AI better—we’re using AI to make people better.”

“Most of our customers have tens of thousands of employees who don't sit at desks, which makes it nearly impossible for leaders to know what's happening and make rapid shifts,” said Ryan Laverty, Arist co-founder and President. “Their options before Arist Diagnostic were to pay millions to consultants or bet even more on hunches. We're giving our customers answers and insights into what's happening in the entire workforce in days, not months, and the results have been astounding.”

After launching out of Y Combinator in 2019, Arist distinguished itself as the leading enablement software platform for people-intensive industries, such as life sciences, manufacturing, and hospitality, the foundation for its move into agentic performance consulting. Arist counts among its customers Novartis, S&P Global, Moderna, ExxonMobil, and the US Department of Labor. Arist recently appointed veteran software executives Adam Devine to lead marketing and Mike Procknal to lead sales.

About Arist

The smartest leaders of large, people-centric companies use Arist to make brilliant business moves faster. Arist’s agentic platform helps customers answer complex questions and execute challenging strategies by building business context through app and content integrations, diagnosing problems and opportunities through massive-scale employee interviews, and recommending and deploying personalized interventions that propel new initiatives. By solving the common problem of great strategies that stall in execution Arist helps companies move with speed, confidence and precision in unknown terrain. Arist is headquartered in New York City with a global presence and is backed by PeakSpan, Acadian Ventures, Rainfall Ventures, Craft Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Y Combinator and other leading technology investors. Learn more at Arist.com.