Sree Pillai and Steve Alston, co-founders of Vertikals, will lead a masterclass on artificial intelligence at the 365 Leadership Summit on Monday, Oct. 19, at the Center for Black Excellence and Culture. The two are also slated to take part in a panel discussion; details on both sessions are still being finalized. Registration is open now at https://www.365leadershipsummit.org/registration.
Vertikals is a Madison-based company that calls itself an “AI production team,” pairing human expertise with AI tools to speed up software development, design and business consulting work.
Pillai, the company’s chief engineer, has worked for himself for more than 10 years, starting with a custom software shop in Madison called Flow Enterprises that focused on training underrepresented minorities for careers in tech alongside serving clients. He began experimenting with AI coding tools in 2023.
Alston, Vertikals’ chief design officer, worked with Pillai at Flow Enterprises and on other business ventures over the last five years or so. Vertikals formally launched under its current name about three months ago, after roughly a year of the team working together in an earlier form.
The company’s other co-founders are Gerardo “Jerry” Ledesma, chief information security officer, and Ilirijan Resivovski, chief product officer.
“We’re basically giving them four people that could all be in the C-suite of a company in different areas,” Pillai said of what clients get when they hire Vertikals.
The company’s work spans software, code, applications and websites, as well as broader business consulting. For example, Vertikals has worked with Madison-based company Tascet in conjunction with IBM. Pillai said one of the team’s biggest successes was building something for Tascet in four weeks that IBM had not been able to build in two years, an effort that led IBM to invest further in Tascet. He described the project as work on Tascet’s QIS, or quantum infrastructure security, architecture.
Pillai said the company measures its output at “14x” — producing in a single day what conventional software development would normally take two weeks to produce.
“We take our talents and use the AI to amplify and multiply what we can produce,” he said.
Alston said AI also plays a role on the consulting side, helping the team build presentations, refine language and, in some cases, build quick prototypes for client meetings. For a presentation to Tasset’s board, for example, the team built a tool that let board members visualize how the company’s security system was functioning.
Both founders pushed back on the idea that AI tools alone account for their results.
“It matters a lot how you use them, and also what type of expertise you pump into them. They’re kind of garbage-in, garbage-out systems,” Pillai said. “The human expertise is still the most important thing.”
Asked about AI critics who argue the technology costs jobs, undercuts creativity or harms the environment, Pillai said Vertikals’ goal is to amplify human workers rather than replace them, and that none of the company’s systems run without a human operator.
“Our end goal is to make people able to produce more results, and if anything, get pay raises where they’re at,” he said.
On the environmental question, Pillai acknowledged there’s no simple answer, but said AI can also reduce electricity use elsewhere if it’s deployed efficiently. Vertikals runs much of its work on its own machines rather than the cloud, for security reasons, which he said also lowers electricity use per result compared with less efficient uses of AI tools. Alston added that he expects AI to accelerate the development of new energy sources over time.
For people outside the AI industry looking for useful tools beyond ChatGPT, the founders pointed to Higgs Field for content and image generation, Perplexity for research, and Google’s Gemini. They hope to provide some useful advice on using those tools in day-to-day business at the 365 Leadership Summit.
