AI ambition: Nick Beaugeard looks to harness AI agents to provide tech services

Technology partners looking at the usefulness of AI agents might find it worthwhile to watch Nick Beaugeard’s progress with his consulting firm Released.

The technologist and entrepreneur announced his return to Released, the company he founded in 2018, after stepping down from automation specialist World of Workflows (WOW). He also provides advisory services as a member of the Channel Guru team.

Released’s offerings range from architecting, leading and scaling software teams, to agentic AI software development, workflow automation and integration, and AI strategy, workshops and webinars.

Beaugeard is talking-up his use of AI throughout the Released business, with the team consisting of “two humans and about 40 agentic AI”.

“We have a team of architects, project managers, developers, testers and research engineers, who are all agentic bots,” he told techpartner.news.

“They'll create work items, they'll run triage meetings, they'll fix work items, and then it gets reviewed by different AI on a different platform.”

Beaugeard wants the majority of the company’s forthcoming products to be architected by humans, but built, developed, tested and released by AI.

An AI-powered development team backed by human oversight could be embedded into customer projects.

With this approach, he sees an opportunity for the business to “scale hugely”.

“I've always had a vision of ‘can I run a multi-million-dollar business with almost no employees?’” he said.

“I've always got frustrated when the first question somebody asks about your business is ‘how many people do you have?’. I actually think the question should be, what's your revenue, what's your profitability, how many satisfied customers do you have?

“I think we're in the very nascent stages of being able to build enterprises without humans doing drudgery. Humans should be being creative, coming up with ideas and concepts and new things.”

The firm in the process of launching several “ventures” that are currently in stealth mode.

It has rolled out a notifiable data breach manager, a tool that uses AI and is designed for organisations who may or may not have a notifiable data breach.

“If something's happened - like I lose a USB key, for example - instead of having to go through the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) workflow, it asks you questions like a chat bot, takes you through the scenario and works out if the breach is notifiable or not, and then builds a report in the format that the OAIC needs to use,” Beaugeard said.

Asked about highlights during his time at WOW, Beaugeard said what people do with a product you build is always a highlight.

“It shows you things you didn't think your product was capable of,” he said.

He mentioned steel construction, design solutions and mining services company IMF, which adopted WOW’s workflow automation platform to solve long-standing issues tracking time and with payroll integration. The project resulted in an Innovation Award for WOW at the 2024 Impact Awards.

“That was all about creating a clock in, clock out system that integrated with Xero, but where it's gone from then is them using the entire thing as a full ERP - it does everything for them,” he explained.

“It's their core platform in the whole of the business and that extension, going from ‘we do something really simple to solve a small process’ to now ‘we're doing everything, out of the box with one consultant delivering to their business’, I think is just amazing.”