In June, Lydia gave this talk on OpenAI's main stage. It is the clearest account of how Verso actually runs, so I am writing it down here rather than leaving it in a video.
Most companies today are products powered by AI. Verso is a company designed around agents. The difference is not marketing: it decides what you build first, and it shows up in your headcount.
What we sell is context. Our clients get the right consumer context to make decisions that carry real financial weight — near real-time access to what their users think, how they decide, and why. The product orchestrates the whole research process end to end: designing the study, recruiting respondents, running the interviews with an AI moderator, and analysing everything into a report. Clients reach consumers ten times faster, at half the cost.
That is the product. The more interesting part is the company.
Everything at Verso is organised around what we call the Verso brain. For a system to be autonomous it has to do three things: listen, think and act.
Listen. The brain pulls in everything happening around it — internal data from email, calendars, Slack and Notion, plus external sources. Codex automations orchestrate the collection.
Think. Two components. Intelligence is a knowledge agent that indexes content and retrieves the right context for a given use case. Memory is a database that same agent owns and protects, holding everything the company knows.
Act. The most important one, and the one people skip. The brain can act on the world through tools, MCPs and CLIs, and it runs execution workflows itself.
Delivering a consumer study the traditional way takes one week of scoping, three weeks of fieldwork and three weeks of analysis. At our current volume, a normal company would need ten to fifteen customer success managers to handle it. We have zero.
Here is a real one.
Six weeks became seventy-two hours. Nobody worked the weekend.
Two things made it possible, and only one of them is the brain.
The first is that the brain is well structured and properly equipped — which, honestly, is far from the hardest part of this.
The second is that we designed the product from day one to be fully accessible and manipulable by agents. That is the decision people underestimate. If your own product is only usable by a human clicking through a UI, no amount of company brain will save you: your agents will sit outside the thing you actually sell.
The same principle applies to engineering. An engineer at a typical tech company spends about 20% of their time on support and bug fixing. At Verso every bug is automatically identified, triaged by agents, and around 90% of them are fixed automatically. Our engineers spend nearly all their time on the product.
We launched not long ago. Around thirty clients, more than fifty studies delivered, in a lot of different languages — with a team of four people. That simply was not possible in the old world.
There is more we did not have time to cover: 80% of our recruitment process is automated, and every morning a digest lands on my WhatsApp that I read over breakfast. Another time.