616. Sandor Marton, Chronos Insights, a Gen AI Tool for Market Assessments
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Release Date: 08/18/2025
630. Remco Visser, Introducing Saga, Legal AI Innovation
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Remco Visser talks about Saga, an AI product used by 150 law firms. Remco explains that Saga is a legal AI innovation company helping law firms and legal departments implement AI into their practice and daily workflows. AI Training and Integration The platform includes AI training and adoption sessions to help firms integrate AI into their daily practices. However, Remco highlights the importance of understanding the viability space where AI can be effectively used if the firm is not yet ready for full AI implementation. Saga helps firms understand when AI integration...
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629. Isa D’Eila, Co-founder of Goalbridge
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Isa D’Elia, co-founder of GoalBridge, an AI startup in stealth mode opens the conversation with a brief overview of her background, mentioning she was at Amazon for five years and her co-founder, Vedant, was a software engineer at a financial institution in India. The Origin Story of GoalBridge Isa met her business partner in Berkeley Haas Business school. Through many discussions, they identified a problem in the consulting industry where consultants spent too much time on admin and manual work. They saw an opportunity to use AI to automate these tasks, leading to the creation...
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628. Bruno Strunz, How to Sell Value in Professional Services
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Bruno Strunz, lawyer, keynote speaker, and author of How to Sell Value in the Legal Market, shares his background, including his career path as a lawyer, including making partner and working for Volkswagen, and his extensive experience working with various companies and firms in both the legal departments and sales departments. Business Development for Professional Services Firms Bruno discusses his focus on business development for professional services firms, by selling in a structured and data-driven manner. Since 2018, he has been helping firms with what they have called...
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627. Rod Neuenschwander, Author of From Crisis to Clarity and Co-founder of GIFT·OLOGY.
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Rod Neuenschwander, author of From Crisis to Clarity and co-founder of GIFT·OLOGY, recounts his early days with John Ruhlin, their initial plan to buy companies, and their first turnaround experience. He also talks about the formation of Ruhlin Group and their transition to GIFT·OLOGY, focusing on corporate gifting. The Transition of Ruhlin Partners Rod talks about the development of Ruhlin Partners, a firm that helped companies through crises, and how it was the foundation for a new book project. He discusses John Ruhlin's sudden death and his immediate need to reconstitute the...
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626. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, Author of HBR's Powered by Projects: Leading Your Organization in the Transformation Age
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, a leading expert on project management, talks about his upcoming HBR book. Antonio shares his career path, including his time at PwC, banking, and pharma, and his early realization of the importance of project management. Changing the Perception of Project Management He discusses his mission to change the perception of project management from a tactical to a strategic role, including his work with the Project Management Institute (PMI) and his goal to publish in Harvard Business Review (HBR). Antonio highlights the challenges he faced in gaining...
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625. Samora P. Z. Wolokolie, How to Hire a Consultant in Liberia
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Samora Wolokolie talks about his dual roles as a CPA, CA and attorney in Monrovia, Liberia. Samora lists his credentials: chartered accountant, certified public accountant, certified forensic investigation professional, certified fraud examiner, certified tax practitioner, and lawyer, and details his academic background. He is also an assistant professor at the University of Liberia where he teaches all levels of accounting. Samora also teaches at other universities and holds graduate and post graduate degrees from Cuttington University, and Charisma University. He talks about his...
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624. David Nour, Author of Relationship Economics
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: David Nour, author of Relationship Economics, discusses the six phases of strategic relationships. He emphasizes intentionality and a portfolio approach to relationship investing. The six phases he uses throughout the episode are: mapping, relating, nurturing, sustaining, requesting, and capitalizing. Different Levels of Relationship Management Nour explains that when a challenge arises, the first questions should be: Who do I need? Who do I know? How do I connect the dots? He contrasts haphazard outreach, simple lists, and CRM-driven discipline, underscoring the importance...
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623. Kartik Sundar, TeamSlide, A Free AI Tool for Generating Consulting-style PPT Slides
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Kartik Sundar, founder of TeamSlide, a tool that uses AI to create PowerPoint slides, explains that TeamSlide is available through a web browser and a PowerPoint add-in, with users starting in the web browser and eventually using the add-in for more seamless access. A Demonstration of TeamSlide Kartik demonstrates how TeamSlide converts notes into consulting-style slides using AI for visual design and text layout. He explains the chat interface-like layout and the ability to generate multiple slide layouts from the same content. TeamSlide identifies the best layout for the...
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622. Brian Potter, Author of The Origins of Efficiency
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Show Notes: Brian Potter, author of The Origins of Efficiency, explains his core model of efficiency, which includes five levers: production method, increasing production rate, lowering input costs, removing steps, and reducing variability. The Work behind the Book Brian discusses his background in the construction industry and his initial struggles in writing the book, including difficulties in explaining his thesis simply and coherently and the inspiration behind writing the book. He describes his process of iterating and refining his ideas, eventually classifying various strategies for...
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621. Vadim Rogovskiy, Founder of EVE
Unleashed - How to Thrive as an Independent Professional
Introducing EVE This episode kicks off with an introduction to EVE, an AI operator that turns email inboxes into lead generation. Founder Vadim Rogovskiy explains that EVE helps small businesses organize their inboxes to find leads and follow-ups. EVE saves time by drafting personalized emails and flagging upsell or churn signals. He mentions the special pricing: $250 per month for an individual plan and $500 per month for a team plan. EVE offers a seven-day trial, a refund for the first month, and a risk-free first month. Vadim also provides information on how to find more information about...
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Sandor Marton, a McKinsey alum and co-founder of Chronos Insights introduces the AI research companion tool and explains its features. Sandor shares his background in growth strategy, commercial strategy, and due diligence work. He identifies the problems faced by small firms and independent practitioners who don’t have large teams in place to assign people to do the massive amount of necessary foundational research, which limits the size of projects they can take on.
An Overview of Chronos Insights
Sandor discusses partnering with Matt Jones and Dustin Chrysler to develop an AI-powered solution for market and competitive landscape research. He talks about the background of the team and the issues they initially tackled. The team aimed to create a specialized prompt leveraging ChatGPT's large language model while moving away from ChatGPT’s programming “to make people happy” and to deliver more accurate results. They developed their tool, Chronos, with a different approach. The tool uses neural search and keyword search to provide more accurate and sourced research solutions. Sandor talks about how they tested the agents. He found it saved 75% of research time using the platform and emphasizes the need for review and revision of AI-generated outputs.
Chronos Research Capabilities
The conversation turns to access to proprietary databases, and Sandor explains the current use of the alpha version sources publicly available information. He also talks about their engineering resources and can build a version that taps into proprietary, private, or licensed resources, and that the user can direct the agent to source from specific sources. Sandor refers to a large Fortune 100 company that has hired them to build an agent to work with their internal research team. Sandor discusses potential future features like an interview finder tool and a composite self-referencing insights feature. The discussion touches on the flexibility of the tool in handling different types of research problems.
User Interface Explained
Sandor explains the simple UI of the tool, which includes five landing pages: Project Overview, Research Statement of Work, Research Plan, Research Tab, and Research Summary.
The tool creates a research plan based on the user's research statement of work, breaking it down into discrete task prompts. Sandor demonstrates how to use the tool by copying and pasting a Word document into the Research Statement of Work tab. The tool generates a detailed research plan, including market landscape, competitor landscape, and key trends and developments.
Project Overview
Research Plan Generation
Sandor explains the process of generating a research plan, including organizing research tasks by major research categories and subsections. He shares an example of the various categories to be researched within the statement of work. The tool creates task prompts for each topic within the research statement of work. Users can edit tasks and change the language model used for research. Sandor highlights the efficiency of running multiple tasks concurrently using the platform and demonstrates how it works and the various categories of research that can be explored, analyzed, and summarized.
How Chronos Summarizes Prompts
Sections Identified and Tasks to Complete
Subsections Explained
Reviewing and Exporting
Sandor demonstrates how to review and export the research outputs generated by the tool. The tool provides citations for each task, allowing users to verify the sources. Users can rerun tasks and edit them as needed. The tool offers a research summary feature, which condenses the research outputs into a concise format.
Research Task Overview
Market Landscape Research
Use Cases and Future Developments
Sandor talks about use cases and future developments. He explains that it can handle various research topics and how they have programmed the agent to eliminate errors. Sandor mentions a project which included researching sales cycles and client selection criteria. The tool has potential for developing primary research, valuation and diligence work, and incorporating proprietary or licensed material.
Timestamps:
02:44: Development of the AI Research Companion
05:42: Current and Future Features of the Tool
08:55: Walkthrough of the AI Research Companion Tool
18:54: Detailed Explanation of the Research Plan
25:22: Running and Reviewing the Research Plan
33:20: Future Developments and Use Cases
37:20: Conclusion and Contact Information
Links:
Website: https://www.chronosinsights.com/
Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which has a mission of connecting independent management consultants with one another, creating opportunities for members to meet, build relationships, and share lessons learned. Learn more at www.umbrex.com.