By Mary Beth Roach
Entrepreneur Jeff Nauss has launched Arcovo AI, a new business that will help customers integrate AI into businesses.
Jeff Knauss and his business partner Jake Tanner launched Arcovo AI in January.
As Knauss explained, he and his team are building AI-powered digital employees that companies can use to handle various office duties. Each “employee” is custom designed for the customer.
The Arcovo AI Group meets with future clients – learn what Knauss calls the “discovery process,” what they need and how digital employees can work together in the company's software and workflow.
Knauss is very familiar with the pushbacks that such AI applications get. They work from humans.
However, he noted that if business owners do not adapt to the technology, their competitors will.
“What does that mean? They have more overhead. They have more pay. They have all these costs that their competitors might not,” he explained. “Every company needs to have AI integrated into its business or it won't survive in the next five years.”
Along with digital employees, the company's human teams “build relationships with clients that humans are doing their best – they can focus on customer support, ultimate decisions, strategic high-level thinking, creative thinking, so these digital employees can therefore be expanded not as exchanges but as tools to help them do a higher level of work, and without adding more people.”
Arcovo AI is the latest in several businesses founded by Knauss. The name he described is to navigate something new. Combine the word Arc. This means movement and OVO, and is a variation of NOVO or NEW.
He joined Tanner in 2014 to Form Digital Hyve, a digital marketing and social media ad. By the time we sold our business in 2021, we had 56 employees, Syracuse and Rochester offices, clients across the country and eight-figure revenue.
Tanner has gone on to various projects, and Knauss is partnering with Adam Weitsman, a businessman known for six different ventures.
But then, urged by the emergence of ChatGpt in November 2022, Knauss said he realized that the AI was “to change everything.” ChatGpt is described as an AI chatbot where users are asked to respond to questions in a human-like way.
Knauss has always been interested in technology and “we've become obsessed with learning about AI and its applications and how it doesn't just change our lives, but also how it's doing.”
He approached Tanner. Tanner was independent and worked on other efforts, so he decided to start another company. There, as Knauss explained, “we focused on helping the SME community integrate AI into businesses.”
Five months after its launch, Arcovo AI, based at Inspyre Innovation Hub in downtown Syracuse, has seven full-time employees and 30 AI agents. Knauss predicts it will attract 85-100 customers from across the country by the end of the year.
Knauss is called a serial entrepreneur, but he said he has no guidance from entrepreneurs who grew up in the Phelps-Clifton Springs area. He graduated from Suny Oswego in 2007 and went on to sell television.
“I always think of business development as a real relationship and providing value to others. That's why I'm so excited to have great services and products behind me to share with others,” he said.
And what he shares is the future.
“I think AI will change the future more fundamentally than anything that has happened,” he said.
