Western Landscape, Mount Whitney, by Albert Bierstadt
Most enterprise software is incremental. It replaces a back-office workflow that's overly complex or helps capture, store, or analyze data more easily, and while helpful it doesn't tangibly make the world better. It makes the world run slightly more efficiently, but for many of us it's hard to get up in the morning and get super excited about optimizing a random enterprise workflow that will be obsolete in five years.
Arist is an incredibly misunderstood company. From the outside, Arist has seemed like a pretty dumb idea since we first started seven years ago, and for the first few years I had a hard time explaining to my friends and family members why I was dedicating all of my early twenties, and a quarter of my life so far, to sending text messages with short pieces of educational content.
Here’s what we actually do, why it matters now more than ever, and why Arist will be one of the most important enterprise software companies of the next decade.
Every day, billions of people go to work to make a living, to self-actualize, and to build important things for others. And every day, most of these people are bringing a knife to a gunfight because they aren't properly trained or equipped.
Think about all the lost wages, missed promotions, failed product launches, and broken laws because of training that either didn't happen or happened the wrong way. Think about all of the people who want to do their job really, really well, but are put through a 10-hour live session that's impossible to pay attention to whenever they have to sell a new product or attempt to get a promotion.
The reality is that the world's existing digital learning providers largely sell snake oil. They sell online courses or coaching experiences or PDF job aids (or the tools to make or host them) that a tiny percentage of people ever start, engage with, or complete. And they make slop: thousands of outdated experiences that aren't built around any behavioral science, designed using formats created in the 90s for compliance, and don’t even attempt to actually help people perform better or make their lives better. They're designed to check a box and extract profit for a private equity firm or conglomerate that couldn't care less.
A few examples: the average enterprise LMS has a 20-30% engagement rate at best. Companies pay millions for content libraries and CMS’ that nobody uses. L&D and Sales Enablement teams spend months building courses and workshops and job aids that employees click through while checking email, retain nothing, and forget by the next quarter.
Deep down, every human wants to learn, and every educator wants to help them do so. Every human wants to get better and help others get better. But learning is similar to going to the gym: it's really good for you, but starting and committing and taking action is the hard part.
The existing system makes the user experience of learning and enablement nearly impossible—and then blames the employee for low completion rates or a lack of performance.
Our top-secret master plan is guided by three beliefs.
First: comms, surveys, and learning are collapsing into one employee enablement category. It's all about getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right place at the right time, and pulling relevant information back. The artificial separation between these functions is a legacy of how enterprise software was sold and how HR and Sales teams used to budget and operate, not how work actually happens.
Second: messaging and voice will be the front door for employee enablement. There is no reason an employee should have to break their flow of work and go to a platform they rarely check. Enablement should come to them and should be interacted with in natural language.
Third: employee enablement will be entirely created and personalized by AI agents, from need identification to content creation to learner evaluation — and whoever creates the end-to-end agent in the space will win the majority of the enablement budget over the next decade.
AI agents are better at creating personalized content, better at verifying sources, better at using research to create effective experiences, and better at evaluating what someone needs in natural language. The L&D and Enablement team of the future isn't 50 instructional designers and facilitators building and delivering courses manually—it's a small team orchestrating AI agents for the majority of experiences while creating a small number of high-impact live experiences as a complement.
With that in mind, here’s the step-by-step plan:
Build a text message-based microlearning tool that everyone writes off as a gimmick. While everyone is chasing video course creation, spend a few years building the world's most robust messaging infrastructure—which is the single biggest barrier to bringing enablement into the flow of work—and the most research-driven and accessible course model. Prove that it works and lifts performance. Figure out how to deliver enablement at massive scale.
Start using AI effectively for creation and translation, initially with bite-size courses since AI is really good at creating text. Build longer experiences, surveys, and comms. Figure out accuracy, verification, and hallucinations.
Expand content modalities as AI gets better: video, podcasts, infographics, articles, coaching. Eliminate the need for content libraries, authoring tools, translation platforms, and eventually LXPs, LMSs, and CMSs.
Expand to use the same messaging front door for listening: AI voice and text interviews to surface knowledge gaps. Integrate with existing data systems to predict and remediate performance gaps before they happen. Fully orchestrate the enablement flow start-to-finish without the need for any external platforms, since everything from needs analysis to analytics happens under the hood in one platform.
And then reach the holy grail: become a full enablement team in your pocket and the primary driver of performance for every employee and enterprise.
At Arist, we believe and have seen first-hand that if you give companies better tools to enable their people—and give people enablement experiences that are truly built for them and meet them where they are—everything gets better. Companies are more productive, people are happier, and the world gets better.
We’re a team of 24 taking on some of the biggest companies in the world and building one of the first true end-to-end agents in the enterprise. We’re well-funded, cashflow-positive, growing exceptionally fast, work with some of the best clients in the world, and there’s still an enormous amount to figure out. You should join us.
Michael Ioffe
Cofounder and CEO, Arist
